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

venturebeat.com

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

#121

Post by baby »

carapace wrote: post #89

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…

> 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.

Do you want this to stop? Then we're going to have this people test their self-driving cars in a real environment. The more we delay this, the more people are dying because of car accidents.

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

#122

Post by baby »

vardump wrote: 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.

> Good lane markings

did you see that 5 lane intersection going over a tram lane? I myself had no idea where I would have driven there.

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

#123

Post by beams_of_light »

vardump wrote: 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.

Road infrastructure is going to change, by necessity. It seems like self-driving technology is as good as it can be, given current circumstances. There's no way to get self-driving cars to airplane safety numbers without on/near road devices/reflectors/computer-readable signage/etc, edge compute, better pedestrian understanding of what the cars are seeing and are capable of reacting to, and probably much more. It's time to give it the infrastructural boost it needs to become an everyday reality. We need to put sensors in the road when they're re-paved, transmitters in signs with solar chargers when they're replaced, LIDAR reflectors on the road sides and in medians, start offering clothing/accessories with transmitters or reflectors that clearly identify people as pedestrians...

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

#124

Post by carapace »

pj_mukh wrote: post #111
carapace wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Most of these companies run closed-circuit tests (aka nerf-golf-carts) and 1000's of hours of simulation.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing.

I mean build a machine that, in the real world, can't hurt people.

Make it light.

Make it soft.

Program it to limit its speed such that it can always stop before colliding with whatever (whoever) might leap out in front of it.

If the top speed is five miles per hour, so be it.

The safety driver is wrong too. But she was there because Uber wanted to put car-shaped robots onto public streets.

Really the insane thing is that we mix car and pedestrian traffic at all in the first place. Oddly enough, it's the result of a deliberate campaign of propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s "Adam Ruins Everything - Why Jaywalking Is a Crime"

> Adam reveals the derogatory origins of jaywalking and explains how the auto industry made it illegal.

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

#125

Post by renewiltord »

vardump wrote: 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.

Well, universality is not necessarily a useful end goal. Lyft is a successful company that doesn't operate even in Canada. A solution that works only in coastal California may well be sufficient.

Lots of things come to the Bay Area and Los Angeles before anywhere else. Partly that's because coastal California is an innovation hotbed. Partly because it's a single large rich market. Since one of these that succeeds entirely in the safe parts of California would be an incredible game-changer on its own (door-to-door small-group spikable public transit!), it's still amazingly exciting.

And while lots of Americans view many things as unchangeable, that's not the case in many other places. In China, if you were to talk to public planners about how autonomous vehicles will handle detours, they'll just say, "Oh, we'll use transmitters to tell you. We can sign the transmitters so you know they're trustworthy." Everything about the universe is mutable.

Yep, no ice road truckers will be autonomous in the next year, and that's okay.

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

#126

Post by rrdharan »

beams_of_light wrote: post #123
vardump wrote: 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.

Road infrastructure is going to change, by necessity. It seems like self-driving technology is as good as it can be, given current circumstances. There's no way to get self-driving cars to airplane safety numbers without on/near road devices/reflectors/computer-readable signage/etc, edge compute, better pedestrian understanding of what the cars are seeing and are capable of reacting to, and probably much more. It's t…

Is the reason all of this makes more sense than just building tracks and trains just the fact that there’s an evolutionary path to get there with incremental releases along the way?

Because every time I hear this kind of thing I keep finding myself asking why/whether mass transit systems aren’t just the same end state?

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

#127

Post by rrdharan »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #88

> Handling yellow lights properly, involves us having to predict how long they will remain yellow for No. That isn't how yellow lights work in the US. If the light turns yellow and you have enough space/time to make a safe stop you do it. There's no need to predict the remaining time on yellow phase. We don't need robot cars bending these rules.

In Delaware on Route 1 if you follow this advice you are likely to get rear ended. They have traffic lights on a 50mph route that stay in yellow for a long time.

I often find myself slowing down to a stop then awkwardly realizing I’m stopped with multiple seconds of yellow remaining and drivers honking behind me.

Maybe my brakes (or reflexes) are just too good?

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

#128

Post by fratlas »

taneq wrote: post #107
TheSmiddy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia there are no uncontrolled intersections (that I am aware of). Every single junction clearly marks who must give way and we don't have any 4-way stops, instead using roundabouts in these situations. It's possible that for self driving to work road systems will have to be more formalised to remove the ambiguous situations you've described. I can't imagine it working well in China or Indonesia where traffic…

There are definitely uncontrolled intersections once you get out of the cities. My understanding is that if unmarked, there’s an implied give-way at the side road in a T-junction and all roads in a four-way junction.

I imagine self driving cars won't be outside of cities for years and years.

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

#129

Post by dnautics »

phkahler wrote: post #30
dehrmann wrote: post #6

Watching this, it's so frustrating that we're 95-99% there on autonomous driving.

Remember that we've been at that level with voice recognition since the end of the last millennium.

No, voice recognition got markedly better in 2015-2016. Now, I regularly to tasks with vr, which was not really a thing in 1999.

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

#130

Post by chriswphoto »

rrdharan wrote: post #126
beams_of_light wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Road infrastructure is going to change, by necessity. It seems like self-driving technology is as good as it can be, given current circumstances. There's no way to get self-driving cars to airplane safety numbers without on/near road devices/reflectors/computer-readable signage/etc, edge compute, better pedestrian understanding of what the cars are seeing and are capable of reacting to, and probably much more. It's t…

Is the reason all of this makes more sense than just building tracks and trains just the fact that there’s an evolutionary path to get there with incremental releases along the way? Because every time I hear this kind of thing I keep finding myself asking why/whether mass transit systems aren’t just the same end state?

I used to believe that self driving cars were a panacea for mobility. Then I moved to Boston, sold my car, bought a bike and realized that in dense urban cities, cars are the enemy, doesn’t matter if the are Electric and autonomous. They generally don’t fit in cities. Cities should be built for people not for single occupancy high speed, deadly cars.
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