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After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

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Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#171

Post by erobbins »

Joe-Z wrote: post #147
erobbins wrote: post #138

I think Tesla eventually has a catastrophic accident and is sued and/or criminally prosecuted into oblivion. I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. This trope that humans are bad drivers is, in general, crap. Humans are very good drivers. The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This means if you drive 50km a day, every day, you are (essentially) guaranteed to die... after 75…

Cars have gotten so safe though. There's all this measures put in place to ensure your survival _in case of a crash_. Wouldn't it be more relevant to calculate the chances of getting injured / end up in a crash at all? I mean just being caught up in a traffic accident and have no bodily harm done to you can be a traumatic event.

You're not wrong. There are plenty of accidents caused by inattention and poor driving that aren't fatal, but that do result in injuries... a quick search didn't give me much information but crashes with injuries appear to be about 100x more common than fatal crashes. This doesn't take into account how serious the injuries are, however.

So if we assume that serious injuries are 10x more common than fatalities, that raises the odds to one incident per 750 years, or 1 incident per 75 years of any accident at all. You're still talking about things that happen to people once or twice in their entire lives. Of course there will be outliers (I've been in 5 accidents myself, only 1 with injuries) but the odds of being in a crash don't seem to be worth the risk of trying to automate mousetraps... we should concentrate on replacing car-based transportation instead of trying to use magical black boxes to make it theoretically safer.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#172

Post by skwb »

bsaul wrote: post #16

I wonder how do unit tests work with NN (or if they're even a relevant concept at all). You could replay some testing video frames and make sure the objects are correctly identified, but i suppose that's already what training is about... If an issue like that resurface, does it mean that the original frames leading to the 2018 accident aren't part of the training (or at least frames from someone driving in this kind…

You don't unit test a NN. You can unit test certain functions, but fundamentally this is an integration test.

This is why serious scientific training is needed to understand these complex systems when health and safety are on the line.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#173

Post by slg »

rayiner wrote: post #153
slg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to dismiss your whole point, because it is certainly valid, but that isn't really the issue here. It is entirely possible for bugs like this to exist in the self driving tech and for Tesla to be correct in their claims that Autopilot is on average safer than a human driver. It is obviously troubling to see self driving cars run into solid and stationary objects, but human drivers do that all the time too…

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. We're not even at the point where we're comparing safety rates. Can a Model Y drive through DC? Can it ignore traffic signals in favor of following hand signals from a uniformed traffic officer, or follow the directions of a construction worker having traffic in turns through a road that they've decided to turn into one lane? Can it deal with an unannounced presidentia…

As far as I'm aware, Tesla has never claimed their cars will be able to handle all those situations. "Self driving car" is a vague term that has different definitions depending on who you ask. You are considering "self driving" as level 5 autonomy and Tesla probably considers it somewhere between 3-4 autonomy. I don't think it makes sense to get angry because their definition of the phrase is not the same as your definition of the phrase.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#174

Post by FireBeyond »

slg wrote: post #137
tptacek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't Teslas fare significantly worse than cars in similar class in terms of driver fatalities?

Are you asking about Teslas or Teslas being driven by Autopilot? Autopilot so far has a fatality rate of roughly 0.25 per 100 million miles. Just for information's sake the overall rate in the US in 2017 was 1.16 per 100 million miles. Although there are plenty of caveats that should prevent you from comparing those numbers directly. The national number is for all cars, all drivers, all conditions, etc while those dr…

Tesla drivers have the luxury of turning autopilot off in suboptimal conditions. Human drivers don't.

Like you say, this number is really valuable only for Tesla marketing.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#175

Post by FireBeyond »

tim333 wrote: post #164
tbabb wrote: post #60

I have been yelling about this for a long time: Tesla is not going to be able to deliver full self-driving as promised. They don't have the hardware, for one (ranging is terrible; they need stereo cameras), and second, their software strategy seems to be a dead end. They need sensor fusion. The system needs to make maximum use of all the information available to it: Where is the road striping? Where are the other car…

Musk is more optimistic than you - says late 2020 for sleep while the car drives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo&t=10m25s Also quite interestingly he says there will be a big jump forward in quality when they switch to their own computing hardware (18m40 or so)

He's also said 2016. And 2018.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#176

Post by [deleted] »

slg wrote: post #169
rayiner wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are setting up a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose between Autopilot and paying attention. The video above is an obvious example. It didn't result in an accident because the driver was paying attention and intervened. If you have to pay attention, then you might as well be driving.

This is just a silly argument to me. Would anyone suggest that cruise control is worthless because you still have to steer the car?

[deleted]

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#177

Post by FireBeyond »

jstanley wrote: post #77
lambda_lover wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that you're willing to die for Tesla's profit, but you realize that autonomous vehicle-induced crashes affect everyone on the road? Even someone who doesn't consent to Tesla's TOS is still sharing the road with potentially dangerous software. Granted, individual drivers are awful enough that it probably doesn't make that huge a difference in danger. But would you still feel the way if a family member was k…

I don't think he said he's willing to die. He said he's willing to test it, and presumably he'll continue concentrating and will manually take over if the car does something dangerous.

He came fairly close, honestly. "I'm going to do my best not to die, but I'm excited about this tech" is recognizing, and accepting that death is a possibility as a result of Tesla's self driving process.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#178

Post by macintux »

slg wrote: post #169
rayiner wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are setting up a false dichotomy. You don't have to choose between Autopilot and paying attention. The video above is an obvious example. It didn't result in an accident because the driver was paying attention and intervened. If you have to pay attention, then you might as well be driving.

This is just a silly argument to me. Would anyone suggest that cruise control is worthless because you still have to steer the car?

The more the car drives for you, the harder it is to pay attention and the slower the context switch when suddenly the situation demands it.

This is basic human nature.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#179

Post by FireBeyond »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #148
txcwpalpha wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elevators and medical devices go through extensive testing and certification processes before they ever go near being put into service. And when they are updated, they again go through extensive testing and certification. Teslas, on the other hand, apparently change their handling and driving profile overnight at the whim of the software engineers at Tesla, without even telling the drivers , and introducing bugs like…

> apparently change their handling and driving profile overnight at the whim of the software engineers at Tesla, without even telling the drivers OTA updates only happen after confirmed by the users. Where did you hear that it happens without user intervention?

What part of this behavior do you think is covered by:

* Improved DOG MODE

* Improved SENTRY MODE

Which were the release notes for the update?

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#180

Post by tbabb »

eclipxe wrote: post #145
tbabb wrote: post #60

I have been yelling about this for a long time: Tesla is not going to be able to deliver full self-driving as promised. They don't have the hardware, for one (ranging is terrible; they need stereo cameras), and second, their software strategy seems to be a dead end. They need sensor fusion. The system needs to make maximum use of all the information available to it: Where is the road striping? Where are the other car…

They do have stereo cameras and sensor fusing, as well as detecting more than just the lines in the road. Here is what the camera sees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rACZACXgreQ

What in that video suggests sensor and/or stereo fusion to you?

I notice that the temporal coherence is pretty bad-- Pedestrians pop out of recognition when they go behind trees; lane/exit boundaries wiggle all over the place and occasionally frame-pop into different configurations. A kalman filter, for example, is a state estimator which maintains temporal coherence, and makes heavy use of previous estimates/sensor inference when computing the most updated estimate. It doesn't look to me like that kind of strategy is being used to maintain the vehicle's world model. IMO a good estimator wouldn't treat "a pedestrian popping out of existence" as the most likely estimate for any circumstance, let alone one where they were clearly present in the previous 50 frames. I don't doubt they're using KF on the vehicle's inertial movement, but based on the failures and this video, it sure doesn't look like it's using a fusion technique for the world model.

There are left and right-looking cameras, but the FOV overlap between them is not very substantial, and there can't be stereopsis where there is no overlap. Per the Tesla website, there are three forward-looking cameras, and they each have a different FOV. The parallax baseline between them is only a few centimeters, too, so the depth sensitivity isn't going to be spectacular. It's certainly possible that there could be some narrow-baseline stereo fusion, but it could only really happen inside the narrowest field of view, where the coverage overlaps with more than one camera. That's the circumstance where having a narrow baseline would hurt the most. Based on that it doesn't really seem like the system is well set-up for stereopsis; if it's there it seems like an afterthought.

I could certainly be wrong, as I don't have access to the code. Are you going by some other secondary source/information?

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