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Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

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Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a different perspective that you could use (and I’m not necessarily advocating for it; hear me out): Human driven cars are dangerous to the tune of ~36,000 deaths per year. Every year without the implementation of full self driving we pay some large percentage of that number in lives. Self driving cars won’t make it out of the lab without real driving on real roads in real scenarios. Taking appropriate preca…

What about the nerf-golf-cart idea?

Most of these companies run closed-circuit tests (aka nerf-golf-carts) and 1000's of hours of simulation. In the end, the only test that matters is the real-test. Real speed (sensor/computation latency et al.), real sensor feeds (lighting et al.) and real car size (momentum et al.). Source: Am Controls engineer.

There WILL be bugs and un-modellable sources of error. The real hedging in these situations is the safety driver. The death of Elaine Herzberg is very regrettable, but the fault ultimately lies with the safety driver and the training that was offered to her. She was on her phone, like 1000's of drivers are now.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#112
post #24
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's already the problem. Don't enter the intersection if you can not speedily finish your turn. There is also already another ped on collision course the moment they start moving forward.

While technically right, you'll never be able to get anywhere in a big city if you drive like that.

Immaterial. I don't want self driving cars driving like Bostonians or worse, New yorkers. Self driving cars need to follow the law, drive defensively, and be conservative. If that means that they take 10 additional minutes to get to their destination so what? The alternative is that the car kills someone because of impatience, that is to say an improperly weighted time value function, which I would think no one wants.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#113
Interesting. Watch at 1/3 speed or so to see it in real time. (Self-driving car videos tend to be published sped up, so you don't see the mistakes.)

The key part of this is, how well does it box everything in the environment? That's the first level of data reduction and the one that determines whether the vehicle hits things. It's doing OK. It's not perfect; it often misses short objects, such as dogs, backpacks on the sidewalk, and once a small child in a group about to cross a street. Fireplugs seem to be misclassified as people frequently. Fixed obstacles are represented as many rectangular blocks, which is fine, and it doesn't seem to be missing important ones. No potholes seen; not clear how well it profiles the pavement. This part of the system is mostly LIDAR and geometry, with a bit of classifier. Again, this is the part of the system essential to not hitting stuff.

This is a reasonable approach. Looks like Google's video from 2017. It's way better than the "dump the video into a neural net and get out steering commands" approach, or the "lane following plus anti-rear-ending, and pretend it's self driving" approach, or the 2D view plane boxing seen from some of the early systems.

Predicting what other road users are going to do is the next step. Once you have the world boxed, you're working with a manageable amount of data. A lot of what happens is still determined by geometry. Can a bike fit in that space? Can the car that's backing up get into the parking space without being obstructed by our vehicle? Those are geometry questions.

Only after that does guessing about human intent really become an issue.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#114

It really really bothers me that these folks are using a live city with real, non-volunteer test subjects of all ages (little kids and old folks use public streets) as a test bed for their massive car-shaped robots. It's bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we've fought put together. I'm one of those people who say, "Self-driving cars…

I think you're missing the narrative that the self-driving industry is pushing here. They "solved the problem" and their fleets driving around "autonomously" is being done in order to demonstrate this to the public. A golf cart is obviously unsuitable for that purpose. I think this narrative has run out of steam at this point, by the way. Waymo's valuation has gone from $175B to $105B to $30B since 2018. Zoox specifi…

Wait, Zoox was valued at 175B at one point? Is this true? Can you point me to any resources on this?

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#115
post #33

Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather, perfect road surfaces. Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to deal with an imperfect world.

They're probably not even detecting the lane markings or road surfaces as they're baked into the HD map.

Yes. As they're leaving the Broadway tunnel, the map shows crosswalks and lane markings on the side that belong to a street above the tunnel.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the narrative that the self-driving industry is pushing here. They "solved the problem" and their fleets driving around "autonomously" is being done in order to demonstrate this to the public. A golf cart is obviously unsuitable for that purpose. I think this narrative has run out of steam at this point, by the way. Waymo's valuation has gone from $175B to $105B to $30B since 2018. Zoox specifi…

Wait, Zoox was valued at 175B at one point? Is this true? Can you point me to any resources on this?

GP said:

> Waymo's valuation has gone from $175B to $105B to $30B since 2018. Zoox specifically is now laying off engineers.

Waymo.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the narrative that the self-driving industry is pushing here. They "solved the problem" and their fleets driving around "autonomously" is being done in order to demonstrate this to the public. A golf cart is obviously unsuitable for that purpose. I think this narrative has run out of steam at this point, by the way. Waymo's valuation has gone from $175B to $105B to $30B since 2018. Zoox specifi…

Wait, Zoox was valued at 175B at one point? Is this true? Can you point me to any resources on this?

They said Waymo had that valuation.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#118

It really really bothers me that these folks are using a live city with real, non-volunteer test subjects of all ages (little kids and old folks use public streets) as a test bed for their massive car-shaped robots. It's bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we've fought put together. I'm one of those people who say, "Self-driving cars…

I agree.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#119

It really really bothers me that these folks are using a live city with real, non-volunteer test subjects of all ages (little kids and old folks use public streets) as a test bed for their massive car-shaped robots. It's bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we've fought put together. I'm one of those people who say, "Self-driving cars…

Those were already made years ago at the start of SDC innovation. A few companies are way beyond the worst human drivers now, there's already a massive amount of motor vehicle death caused by intoxication that we should worry about. Not fantasy robodeaths that we can count on one hand.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#120
This is super cool! I'm wondering how the car would react if:

* someone parked on the side opens their door too quickly and collide with the zoox car.

* there is a car not moving in front, and the zoox car cannot see what's in the other lane without backing to get more insight

I'm also super impressed at how it can understand where the lane is in this 5 lane intersection that crosses a tram line. Even I couldn't understand where I would have had to drive!

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