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The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

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Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#331

Post by genericone »

15characterlimi wrote: post #250
ForHackernews wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"

Probably not a great idea to stop on the highway.

In a driver-less future, all cars communicate their intents to other nearby cars, stopping on a highway will be as safe as pulling over on a shoulder is today. It will feel dangerous, and it will be unsettling knowing cars are passing you by at speed, but the driver-less aspect of all cars ensures a high degree of safety.

That would be the result in the long term. But in this transition period TO driverless cars, I agree that stopping on the highway in your driver-less car is a big no-no.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#332

Post by dclowd9901 »

ignostic wrote: post #209

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) th…

I don't understand why we're so hung up on trying to proactively create legislation around this. Why don't we let someone get maimed/killed first, and then go from there?

In the world of things, you can't foresee every possible outcome, and it's silly to draw up legislation, which has a nasty habit of becoming rather sticky, for something so potentially earth shattering.

Let it fail, turn it off remotely, and then we'll figure out who to blame and what to do next. For now, this tech is so beyond us, we don't even have a frame of reference for how to properly legislate it.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#333

Post by melling »

voicereasonish wrote: post #302
tokenadult wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement is factually incorrect according to official statistics,[1] which I found through a very easy Google search after reading your comment. (Note that the statistic shown is for all accidental falls, not just falls on stairways, and even in the aggregate all falls cause fewer deaths than car crashes.) [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm

Pretty comparable - 26,000 accidental falls, 30,000 car deaths.

You said "fall down the stairs", which I addressed hours ago. Also, you aren't accounting for the hundreds of thousands of people injured and the millions of dollars of damage.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#334

Post by dclowd9901 »

ignostic wrote: post #314
untog wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges. Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.

I hear people fretting about liability as a "problem to overcome," but it's actually much simpler than the technical challenges. People have to drive the same distance regardless. Whether it's human or computer error leading to the accident is irrelevant to your premium. To a car insurance company it's all about rates and risks. Assuming driverless cars are shown to be safer than humans - and they'll have to be in or…

The problem is your insurance company. If you get in an accident, they're not going to want to pay for it, and they're going to go after Google for the damages. Now we're right back where we started.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#335

Post by pyre »

andrewfong wrote: post #252
scarmig wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question." Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrat…

I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways: * NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB do…

UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#336

Post by dclowd9901 »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #4

This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces. - What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that k…

My guess is that the car would fare much better in reaction time than any human, not just with reacting to the biker, but also with surrounding conditions (e.g., not flying into an opposing lane and hitting a car or something similar).

People have a very hard time grasping the speed of computers. Imagine you saw the world in 1/1000 speed, and how quickly you'd be able to react to occurrences.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#337

Post by Schwolop »

fancyketchup wrote: post #283
chillingeffect wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I. You shift the goalposts a lot. E.g. in the same sentence you mix statements about the future and the present, e.g. "we will" and "today's technology". > I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. II. Also, in yo…

> It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received si…

No, snow scatters the emitted light and scarcely any is returned at all. A wall covered in ice looks like an air gap.

(I know this because my very expensive 800kg autonomous vehicle almost drove into a lake under my software control due to this effect...)

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#338

Post by Schwolop »

Qworg wrote: post #285
davedx wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you use some kind of LIDAR stereo configuration to tell the difference between a dry spot and a solid object?

Well, LIDAR doesn't have that differentiation problem - it has a resolution problem for small (sub half meter) things at range. Stereo LIDAR would just add more points - you can correlate the two, but you'll still have resolution issues.

Well there are "Flash Lidar" sensors, that are effectively instantaneous depth cameras firing a lidar beam for every pixel - but a) they're hugely expensive, and b) they don't seem to have taken off (possibly because academia can't afford them to do the interesting research that'll help them take off)

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#339

Post by Schwolop »

ForHackernews wrote: post #193
pkulak wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.

As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"

Or they invest in a mechanical turk "supervisory remote driver" system.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#340

Post by bsder »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #241
rictic wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any studies that back up your claims that small cars would reduce the death toll? I follow the intuition, but China has over twice as many deaths per car on the road as the United States: (36 per 100k vs 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around drivin…

I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving. The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup…

A self-driving car doesn't need a steering column.

The steering column is one of the biggest problems to engineer around for impact safety.

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