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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

#141

Post by reitzensteinm »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #110
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…

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…

Waymo has had a single round with outside money, and that valued it at $30bn.

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

#142

Post by wutbrodo »

renewiltord wrote: post #125
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 ent…

> door-to-door small-group spikable public transit!),

What does spikable mean here?

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

#143

Post by dmitriid »

stefan_ wrote: post #21
dmitriid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casually starting a turn and correctly identifying that the person on the right slowed down, stopped and turned to face the other crosswalk. You can see it on the top right camera.

I take it the ped at 12:22 also "turned"?

This one looks like a regular situation handled like a regular driver would handle it: the person was a reasonably long distance away from the intersection and by the time the car got to the crosswalk it was probably going at a high enough speed when suddenly braking would cause problems.

But yeah, it does look as something to re-analyse.

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

#144

Post by wutbrodo »

gambiting wrote: post #71
chrisseaton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine. I don't understand why you'd have that opinion. If it's no riskier and relieves people from having to drive then that seems like a net benefit to me.

For the same reason why when a human pilot makes a mistake it's a mistake, but when an autopilot malfunctions every single plane of that type is grounded until the issue can be found and fixed. Machines cannot be just as good as humans, they have to close to perfect when human life is involved. As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, bu…

Your original comment asserted that a machine _shouldn't_ be allowed on the market until its performance is significantly superhuman, but your responses in this thread just repeat the assertion. What's the actual rationale for claiming that we should leave a net benefit on the table (eg if human-level driving performance improves transit efficiency)?

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

#145

Post by wutbrodo »

baby wrote: post #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 unde…

>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!

This is actually one of those things that's easier for an AV than a human since they have localization and full lane maps of the city.

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

#146

Post by Talanes »

stale2002 wrote: post #102
ghaff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. It can also be hard to predict weather in much of the US. And as soon as you place too many restrictions, you no longer have a reliable transportation option. Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?

> And as soon as you place too many restrictions, you no longer have a reliable transportation option. yes you do. There is a whole lot of driving that happens in perfect conditions. Think "Truck driving, on long highways". Replacing half of all truck drivers is still a trillion dollar industry. And for your robo taxi situation, you can simply only allow the robotaxis to run half of the time. Human drivers, can simpl…

Where are you going to get all these truck drivers and taxi drivers to work on call when the robots can't?

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

#147

Post by wtvanhest »

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…

I used to live in north beach on grant and Union, and these cars were driving by constantly. I knew right away that they would show it there.

I forgot how annoying it was.

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

#148

Post by renewiltord »

wutbrodo wrote: post #142
renewiltord wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ent…

> door-to-door small-group spikable public transit!), What does spikable mean here?

Sorry, couldn't think of a good word. Rapid increase in supply to meet demand. Because the units are smaller they are more fluid. Because they are autonomous storage doesn't have to be centralized and they aren't subject to human scheduling constraints.

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

#149

Post by pj_mukh »

carapace wrote: post #139
pj_mukh wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the top speed is five miles per hour, so be it." You are not really testing though. The whole point is to build a machine that can go the speed limit. You can test all you want at 5mph, but let me assure you, most of the real issues will show up when you go 45 in the real world.

> The whole point is to build a machine that can go the speed limit. Sure, eventually, when the machines and sensors and algorithms and so on are good enough. When the infrastructure can be rebuilt to accommodate them (e.g. Boring company tunnels for auto-trucking, sensors and comms in the roads and signage, &c.) The rush to market is the whole problem. Not the ultimate concept. I want a machine that can take my moth…

Sorry you’re asking for a completely different concept. Asking for the infrastructure to change to adopt AV’s is a pipe dream. Never going to happen.

“ I want a machine that can take my mother to her doctors appointment now that the dementia has gotten to the point where she shouldn't take the bus on her own anymore.“

This meanwhile is already happening[1]. We’ve been testing on toy cars for 15 years. We’re not ready to remove the safety driver but we are ready for the road.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16874410/voyage-self-driv...

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

#150

Post by lolc »

yellowapple wrote: post #49

The two turns (one left and one right-on-red) leading up to getting to Market Street in the latter half of the video struck me as odd; the left turn looked like a bit of a lane sweep, and the right-on-red looked dubious (is it legal to turn right on red if you're not in the far-right lane?). SF intersections are hard, though, and the computer seemed to handle them about as well as I would've.

One thing they only mentioned casually towards the end is that they mapped the city beforehand. So the car is starting from a position where it knows all the intersections.
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