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Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

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Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#271

Post by gtCameron »

bkirkby wrote: post #238
seibelj wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not an expert in self driving car engineering. I have some experience with ML but not in a significant professional way. What I have is a decade of professional experience building all kinds of software and a skeptical eye. You have a problem that is unconstrained, with infinite variables, where even a simple mistake can have catastrophic outcomes. Society itself may object to self driving cars for a ton of reaso…

But it doesn't have to be perfect, just has better than human drivers. That doesn't seem too difficult.

That may be true logically, but I don't think it is workable politically.

People are conditioned to accept that we will kill each other with cars every once and a while. I'm skeptical we will get to the point any time soon where the general public hears about a family killed by a self driving car and just shrugs it off. There will be intense pressure to get them off the road.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#272

Post by wenc »

seibelj wrote: post #116
jryle70 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you have read the article, but it's actually about a company called WaveSense who claims to have developed ground-penetrating radar that can greatly improve all weather autonomous driving. So yes, it's a daunting task but lot of people are working on it and progress is being made. I'd be interested to hear your counterargument.

I’m not an expert in self driving car engineering. I have some experience with ML but not in a significant professional way. What I have is a decade of professional experience building all kinds of software and a skeptical eye. You have a problem that is unconstrained, with infinite variables, where even a simple mistake can have catastrophic outcomes. Society itself may object to self driving cars for a ton of reaso…

> You have a problem that is unconstrained, with infinite variables

I'm not sure this is correct. I come from the optimal control world. The problem is not unconstrained and definitely does not have infinite variables (if you think in state-space, consider the state-space equation x' = f(x, u, theta). The x-space (state) is large but finite, and the u-space is fairly small -- steering, gear, brake, etc.). The x-space is also stochastic, and there are many observability issues.

That said, we've been designing control systems against the real world for a number of years now, and the key is not to model all the unknowns (because there will always be something you can never anticipate), but to model the known and safe path that the system can fall back to.

The problem is a complicated one, and it will take more than several attacks to make it work, but it is not by any means an impossible one if you break it down into the fundamentals.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#275

Post by skywhopper »

"robots sophisticated enough to [...] improve on lackluster human perception"

This underlying misapprehension is at the root of the self-driving car hubris. Humans have remarkable perception of physical environments. The fact that electronic systems can beat humans handily on a few metrics has led to an entire industry built on the misconception that those few metrics are all that matter. But those were just the trivial bits.

The more sophisticated perceptual tasks--even the basic ones involved in the simplest self-driving task of traveling down a restricted access freeway--like correctly interpreting the behavior of other cars; interpreting whether the debris in the road constitutes a dangerous obstacle or something easily driven over; or even knowing which objects speeding toward you are moving and which are stationary--require more than just raw sensory input. There's a mountain of implicit cultural awareness embedded into all of those perceptual tasks that we haven't begun to form an idea how to represent in a software system. And again, this is the easy stuff!

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#277

Post by EthanHeilman »

chooseaname wrote: post #265
Quanttek wrote: post #231

> The cluster of sensors, bolted underneath a chassis like a skid plate, can scan 10 feet beneath the ground to reveal soil, water, roots, and rocks. Once WaveSense has scanned an entire roadway, it creates a map of the subsurface strata that can determine the location of a vehicle within a few centimeters. nononono! Even assuming you can create sufficient map data as soon as there is any kind of roadworks - or even…

> I'll never understand companies that focus so much on maps as priamry source of data. Maybe they don't really care about the product. Maybe the execs only care about making money, so they'll find funding for anything - whether it will pan out or not. Self-driving cars are hot and for now there's a lot of money available. I think things will cool down when the hard part starts - like when they really do have to figu…

Depending on how good that data is, this might be a data play where the data collected in a single repository is extremely valuable. Sell it to the military for operating when GPS is jammed. Sell it to mining companies, insurance companies for a detailed very large map of what lies below.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#278

Post by seibelj »

wenc wrote: post #272
seibelj wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not an expert in self driving car engineering. I have some experience with ML but not in a significant professional way. What I have is a decade of professional experience building all kinds of software and a skeptical eye. You have a problem that is unconstrained, with infinite variables, where even a simple mistake can have catastrophic outcomes. Society itself may object to self driving cars for a ton of reaso…

> You have a problem that is unconstrained, with infinite variables I'm not sure this is correct. I come from the optimal control world. The problem is not unconstrained and definitely does not have infinite variables (if you think in state-space, consider the state-space equation x' = f(x, u, theta). The x-space (state) is large but finite, and the u-space is fairly small -- steering, gear, brake, etc.). The x-space…

I could not disagree more. The input to an AV’s sensors, not just the data but what it represents and must be determined, is infinite. If your solution is to stop the car, you must also determine if that’s safe to do. It’s extraordinarily complex. This isn’t a factory.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#279

Post by rootusrootus »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #208
rootusrootus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why. I can't imagine any programmer or self-driving car company having any interest whatsoever in going down that particular rabbit hole. The answer is simple -- we don't expect humans to do realtime analysis of who is worth killing when an accident is happening, so we will not expect that of computers either. It's an unsolvable problem. So we just tell the computer that in the event that an acc…

It's a thought experiment ; do not expect a literal trolley (or even literal corpses!) any more than Schrödinger's cat deals with actual felines. Here's a restatement without all those corpses: In the event that an accident appears unavoidable, the computer should do everything within it's power to stop the car immediately. (This is already a given: safety first.) "If there are multiple ways of doing the above, what…

Well, that's where crumple zones come into play. Trying to have a computer calculate whether or not it is feasible to stop slower to avoid or reduce an imminent rear collision gets very complex in a hurry. What if the guy behind you is much smaller, or much bigger, what if his car has better crumple zones, or none, what kind of energy is he going to impart to you when he hits and where will that send you, who is at that location, etc. These are the kind of questions that can't be answered with certainty even when you give a supercomputer a few days to work it all out. So I think the only reasonable solution is to not expect self-driving cars to make any kind of moral decision. As a bonus it is much easier to explain in court and saves us endless pontificating on whether or not the computer made the right choice and who is actually responsible if it did not.

We tell humans not to swerve for squirrels, because it's a great way to end up dead, so the computer should get the same instruction. Slow down as you can, the prime directive is to maintain control.

Re: Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

#280

Post by dirkgently »

dasil003 wrote: post #89
romed wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Waymo has not solved left turning is not really a conclusion supported by that article. A supportable conclusion is that the impatient meatbags are angry that the Waymo van won't dangerously veer out into oncoming traffic.

LOL, yes, the meatbags. Waymo exists to serve Waymo's purpose, it is a higher entity beholden only to its funding source not to petty meatbag concerns.

YN is so full of Google FUD. How is this comment not voted down to oblivion is beyond me.
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