Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare • Hacker News Board

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#211

Post by kelnos » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:31 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #69

Yes trucks slow down slower than cars but that's just physics. You've got the exact same problem with humans driving under say rainy or foggy conditions. If anything driverless helps dramatically on this front. If you can run trucks 24/7 without stopping then you can cut their speed say 33% or whatever and still come out on top. You can also adjust the cargo to reduce stopping distance - use autonomous truckers for t…

> If you can run trucks 24/7 without stopping then you can cut their speed say 33% or whatever and still come out on top.

Well, they should still be driving no slower than the rest of the traffic in the slow lane (modulo what is safe for a larger vehicle under whatever the prevailing road/weather conditions are).

I think a bigger benefit to not needing drivers that need to rest/sleep is that you can allow for self-driving software that can't handle all the weather and road conditions that humans can handle. The self-driving software can pull the truck over for a few hours in a snowstorm that a human driver would be able to handle, and still be ahead of a similar human-driver schedule.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#212

Post by TapWaterBandit » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:34 PM UTC

bwestergard wrote: post #146

chmod600 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That might be more a result of capitalist motivations" People wanting to get more stuff faster is a universal motivation not limited (in theory or in practice) to capitalism. To the extent that anyone is exploited, that's just selfishness, again a universal motivation.

Can you provide a few examples of people expressing a general desire for "more stuff faster" before 1500 and outside Western Europe?

This is a bizarre framing to support the argument people don't like faster delivery of goods.

But in the spirit of good faith I will give some:

- Movement of fish/meat to markets before it spoils

- Delivery of military messages around the battlefield. Also supply trains for military expeditions

- Projects like the Grand Canal in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)). Pretty much anywhere in history where people opted for using water transport of goods over land transport was done for speed/cost reasons.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#213

Post by awongh » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:37 PM UTC

Edman274 wrote: post #106

jdewerd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's OK to have more deaths so long as we can punish someone with no expectation that doing so will fix the problem? I suspect you are right, but I don't think it reflects well on us.

I think a way to think about it is that we (at a societal level) wouldn't accept a desk calculator to be sold as a consumer product if it did correct arithmetic almost all of the time but then would spit out a close but wrong answer 1 time out of 1000, even if that would be significantly better than the average person doing arithmetic. Our expectation would be that it could (and should) perform flawlessly. If our tec…

The rest of gen AI tools might prove that wrong- Need help with your homework? We have software that will only sometimes give you facts that are incorrect. The res of the time it does great!

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#214

Post by kortilla » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:49 PM UTC

sleepybrett wrote: post #65

michaelgiba wrote: post #12

I think there are some good points here but IMHO this is overly focused on flawless 100% of the time L5 autonomy. Many autonomous trucking companies can become economically viable without perfection because 1. They aren’t dealing with consumers directly 2. Can control or focus on specific well understood shipping lanes 3. Can provide more human in the loop assistance for tricky situations. In this way trucking is eas…

you are describing trains. you've just reinvented the freight train.

Without the tracks and restrictions tracks impose

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#215

Post by ars » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:50 PM UTC

lpapez wrote: post #195

ars wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then pressure (force) on each tire is lower now, so the friction is also lower. Effective friction is a function of weight and coefficient of friction between the materials. Interestingly the surface area of the contact is not part of the equation. On a flat surface a truck and a car using the same tire compound should have identical stopping distances. The issue comes when you are going downhill.

That equation works for friction between idealized solids. Tires are not even close to an idealized solid, they deform as more weight is added to them, so the contact surface area increases as more pressure is added. That is why you see racing cars with big fat tires, because it's more grip and the relationship is not linear.

The equation still holds. As the tire deforms to have more area the pressure on any particular part of the tire is lower. The total friction is unchanged.

> That is why you see racing cars with big fat tires

If you mean drag racers those tires are glued to the ground, and do not work off of friction. Other than that, what race cars have big fat tires?

Tires are usually sized so that the ground pressure of the tire is in the 40 to 100 psi range (which is also the tire inflation pressure). That's simply to keep the ground from deforming and the tire from popping. It does not affect friction.

This is also why off-road tires have lower pressure - the sand and mud they work on is not strong enough for a higher pressure. It is NOT for increased friction, it's because the surface they drive on can't handle it, so you spread out the weight, and reduce the pressure.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#216

Post by 8note » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:50 PM UTC

ivalm wrote: post #185

kevinchen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dunno. If you got all the duo drivers to automatically kick in self driving, then a ton of the most dangerous drivers would be much less dangerous

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#217

Post by jeffparsons » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:52 PM UTC

jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote: post #193

jeffparsons wrote: post #189

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…

> semi-autonomous many-trailer trucks/convoys Prepare to have your mind blown: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train

Yes, I like trains, too.

Largely copied from my reply to a similar comment:

Trains requires long-term planning and alignment of a lot more people and organisations, all of whom have their own messy incentives. They're a political quagmire that you might never emerge from.

I'm trying to think of solutions that can be mostly built by the private sector and deployed with only modest legislative changes.

For the same reasons, a friend who works in mass transit talked me around to favouring better "smart bus" infrastructure over lobbying for more rail — at least in most cases where actually getting more rail is an unrealistic outcome.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#218

Post by ChuckMcM » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:53 PM UTC

sdeframond wrote: post #130

ChuckMcM wrote: post #122

Great post with good details. I wonder whether a "truck only" roadway might be a reasonable simplifier here (yes building a 1000 miles of road for trucks only is billions of $ but there are perhaps segments between say ports and warehouses where that might make sense. And as someone who has been fooling around with robotics since the 80's the whole "sensors have to see far enough ahead to respond" is well known. The…

You must mean a railway then ? Edit: by the way, why don't we have autonomous freight trains?

Caught that did you? :-) The one interesting disruptive thing might be paved roads vs rail infrastructure. It is easier to have a steerable vehicle turn on different paths than doing railroad switches. So the underlying physical plant of building things might allow for rapid deployment vs rails.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#219

Post by paganel » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:56 PM UTC

oatmeal1 wrote: post #117

jampekka wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a lot safer transportation systems than private cars but don't deploy them. Is this basically killing people too? Driving is murder?

It's not murder. Relying excessively on a dangerous mode of transportation is killing people.

The same way as getting out of the house during a pandemic was similar to "killing people" for a big chunk of the educated Western electorate.

You can see how that viewpoint might be received in a lot of places nowadays, especially blue-collar places that rely on that type of work to still be available and not farmed out to some AI bots that will manage to also kill some of us in the process (but in smaller numbers compared to what our fellow humans would have registered, that's a relief).

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#220

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:56 PM UTC

jdewerd wrote: post #36

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…

So it's OK to have more deaths so long as we can punish someone with no expectation that doing so will fix the problem? I suspect you are right, but I don't think it reflects well on us.

[deleted]