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Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

kevinchen.co

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Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#181

Post by sneak »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #108
hinkley wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bar for commercial driving should definitely be higher than for “civilian”. But I think the bar for civilian is also woefully out of date now. Giant trucks should require a commercial license. Make it easier to get than a delivery truck license, but weed out the soccer moms and bring back the station wagon. If you’re a professional tree trimmer, general contractor, or a forester, renewing your license is on the c…

This is a great idea and the first I've heard of it. Set a maximum weight of 5,000 lbs for an ordinary license. Minivans will come in just under the line. Small SUVs like the CRV or RAV4 will be allowed, as will small trucks like the Ford Maverick. Indeed, most of those vehicles are under 4,000 lbs. Even some larger SUVs like the Honda Pilot or (just barely) the Toyota 4runner get under the bar. Even a low-specced F-…

A distracted driver can kill pedestrians just as easily in a 3999lb vehicle.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#182

Post by wongarsu »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #176
silvestrov wrote: post #10

If he thinks driving cars in cities is the easiest problem, he does not have experience driving a car in a European city with lots of cyclists and pedestrians. Driving a car in inner Copenhagen is a stressful situation due to the insane number of cyclist you have to watch out for, see https://youtu.be/FaySp9i2zMA?t=113

Seems like it should be more stressful for the cyclists especially if they aren’t following the rules of the road.

In my (European) experience the rules cyclist break most often involve using pedestrian infrastructure because they don't feel safe on car infrastructure (or because provided bicycle infrastructure is poorly thought out). Which is understandable, but makes being a pedestrian somewhat more stressful.

They also occasionally run red lights, but less that pedestrians crossing on red.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#183

Post by [deleted] »

Edman274 wrote: post #26

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…

[deleted]

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#184

Post by bluGill »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #171
bluGill wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There are a lot of people who are driving for things that a good public transit system could handle. Sure you can have your SUV for towing the boat to the lake - but you only do that on weekends (and no every weekend) - why are you driving to work, to church, get groceries - for most people those are tasks that that a good transit system could handle. Note that by good transit system I mean one where you never c…

Yeah I’d totally take transit so long as it will pick me up in my driveway, is ready within a minute of me deciding I need to leave, and is a ride for only me and my family/friends.

This attitude is why we can't have nice things. You have probably never experienced a system like I outlined and you won't even consider it without adding other requirements that drive up the cost until we cannot get it.

If instead you would accept that you can wait up to five minutes, and "other people" are nice enough and so you can share a space with them - we could have a nice transit system.

The five minute time I used above is not arbitrary. While there is some debate on the exact number, 5 minutes allows for a lot operational things that are really nice.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#185

Post by ivalm »

kevinchen wrote: post #40
Edman274 wrote: post #26

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…

I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable. That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor... (Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study.…

But issue is that human safety is kind of long tailed. Eg more than a third of all fatal crashes are DUI. I’m guessing if you take out high risk behaviours then the rate will be an order of magnitude lower. What we care about is not being better then an average driver (which basically is bad due to high risk individuals), but better than median driver.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#186

Post by sojournerc »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #163
tomrod wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensing tech has to improve to get through the noise. As far as I'm aware, you can't see a yellow line or white line on a highway if it's covered in dirty snow. We could also rework our roadways to include better sensing design and tech (passive or active!), but we are a ways out still from willingness to pay for that.

Do what humans do and drive without lines while trying to stay to one side of the road. This doesn’t seem like a major problem to self driving snow cars. More like, how do you deal with other drivers who are RWD with summer tires and are fish tailing all over the place.

If the sensors are up for it... Mountain roads covered in snow pack are a white blur, especially in certain light. Best bets for actually knowing where the road is might be previous tracks. I've dipped a wheel in a ditch more than once, not from carelessness, but snow drift obscuring the road... A road that I drive 500 times a year

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#187

Post by ivalm »

fallingknife wrote: post #75
Edman274 wrote: post #26

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…

The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.

Many people are safer than average driver, since most deaths are associated with high risk driving (more than a third are dui alone). So forcing everyone to use autonomous vehicles essentially kills safe drivers.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#188

Post by OkayPhysicist »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #18
bradley13 wrote: post #16

Another issue will be piracy. Stop the truck using a couple of vehicles, cut open the lock on the rear doors, and loot. Pick an isolated stretch of toad, and the pirates will be gone before anyone can respond.

Why isn’t this an issue today? It’s not like the driver is going to challenge you if you show up with firearms

There's a pretty big jump in perceived criminality between violent crime and property crime; humans are social creatures, after all. Far more people are willing to steal a car that's parked on the street than to hijack one, far more people are willing to commit burglary than home invasion, etc.

Even for the people willing to use violence, having a human involved opens up unpredictablity and risk. You can't know what's going on in the head of a random trucker, whether they're armed, whether they fancy themselves a cowboy, whatever. It's a high-risk, moderate reward scenario.

In contrast, if you have a system for consistently hitting autonomous trucks, it's a (relatively) low risk, moderate reward crime.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#189

Post by jeffparsons »

I didn't expect fully autonomous trucking to be here yet. What I did expect, however, is semi-autonomous many-trailer trucks/convoys, because it's a much simpler technical problem that still offers enormous efficiency gains.

Let's get a little bit crazy and imagine something very different from what we have today, but still only requiring a single driver. One truck cab at the front. Individual trailers have their own wheel motors, their own steering, and a small battery for short range manoeuvring (e.g. at a loading dock/port or). Trailers follow each other at a distance that allows for emergency braking, but close enough that they can be connected by high voltage cables for receiving power from a "battery car". Both the cab and individual trailers constantly communicate, and the moment any participant suspects that all is not right, the whole train tries to slow down and pull over.

If one trailer has a blowout or other issue, it can be left behind to be picked up by another convoy.

At a port or loading dock, the convoy disassembles and individual trailers are driven by remote control, either directly by a human or eventually by the "site AI", so that large articulated vehicles never have to enter the area.

I'm imagining ~12 trailer convoys to balance efficiency gains with disruption to local traffic.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#190

Post by stefan_ »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #89
mschuster91 wrote: post #47

> The trucks could also be commercially viable with only freeway driving capability, or freeways plus a short segment of surface streets needed to reach a transfer hub. The question is... isn't the problem being approached from an entirely bad premise in the first place? Why would it even make sense to develop autonomous trucks for that part of any freight's journey? Laying train tracks might incur a large initial ex…

To a pretty good approximation, everything that feasibly can get shipped by rail already is. Railroad companies operate fairly close to capacity, and they have no desire to reduce their massive profit margins building new rails en masse and handling the maintenance burden. That leaves only the shippers themselves, who are often much smaller companies that couldn't reasonably build a new rail line or buy cars for ever…

That's a good summary: someone else has paid for the roads, but won't for the rail.
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