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Tesla Autopilot

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Re: Tesla Autopilot

#311
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, human "machine vision" has graceful failure modes. You don't switch from seeing cars to seeing nothing to seeing an elephant just because the input got a little noisy. The same cannot be said about current ML demonstrations - because they operate on just vision. Humans continuously reconcile visual input with their model of the world and with other inputs, to the point of overriding visual data if neede…

That's just Bayesian priors. Easy peasy for ML.

Haven't seen much Bayes in current deep learning trends though.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, humans are horrible drivers with miserably slow reaction times.

Some humans are horrible drivers. Some humans are good drivers. The biggest difference is often how proactive the driver is. It's true that a careful, experienced driver will typically recognise a rapidly emerging hazard as much as several tenths of a second faster than a novice, giving them significantly more time and space to react. However, a careful, experienced driver will also anticipate places where there are…

a) Most humans aren't aware of these things, either, so they're really non sequiturs at best. b) Even if you accept them as valid premises, it's much easier to disperse this kind of info to every car on the road than it is to disperse it to humans (every tourist in a city needs to know where every bar / park is? Or watch the local news?)

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#313
post #64

Watch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what's going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance. Sometimes it can't quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference. The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition…

> .25x speed? That's a bit of an overkill. Regardless, there was two points in the video ~48 sec, and ~1.40 min/sec mark. The car stopped AFTER turning... I thought that was really strange behavior. Then when it passes the pedestrians, it almost went to a complete stop, instead of going slightly to the left and mildly slowly down. Overall, it's a great case study. I think your criticism is technical snobbery instead…

The future is here, just not from Tesla. Waymo and Volvo have systems which actually work. Waymo has real situational awareness, watching other road users and predicting what they might do next. Tesla is mostly following the lines on the road and stopping for interfering traffic.

Here's Tesla's "Autopilot" killing someone.[1] This is the Mobileye "does not recognize obstacles protruding into left edge of lane" bug.

Here's another crash from that defect.[2]

Here's Tesla's "Autopilot" hitting a traffic barrier.[3] Again, it's an obstacle at the left edge of a lane.

This is what happens when you take Level 2 lane-keeping and automatic cruise control and hype it into automatic driving. Other carmakers have offered comparable systems, but with much stronger driver-must-have-hands-on-wheel enforcement. Tesla didn't do that, encouraging drivers to relax and let the computers drive.

Waymo and Volvo take the position that when the automatic system is in control, the manufacturer is responsible. Tesla tries to blame the driver.

(Been there, done that. Ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team 2003-2005. Too old now to work on this.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQkx-4pFjus [3] http://video.dailymail.co.uk/video/mol/2017/03/02/5177969943...

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#314
post #64

Watch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what's going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance. Sometimes it can't quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference. The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition…

One day some joker with two pots of paint (one white, one gray) is going to have a field day causing cars to run off the road.

Something like that happened to a Tesla, here.[1] The Tesla is the car in front in the left lane, not the one taking the pictures with a dashcam. There's a construction barrier that's inconsistent with the lane lines. The Tesla plowed into the barrier.

This shows why the Tesla approach isn't good enough. The vehicle is on a freeway, an supported environment for the old "Autopilot". Everything is going just fine. Until there's something unexpected the system can't handle, appearing fast enough that the driver couldn't take over in time.

Tesla is somewhere between Level 2 and Level 3. Good enough that the driver is tempted to tune out, not good enough that they can.

[1] http://video.dailymail.co.uk/video/mol/2017/03/02/5177969943...

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One day some joker with two pots of paint (one white, one gray) is going to have a field day causing cars to run off the road.

Something like that happened to a Tesla, here.[1] The Tesla is the car in front in the left lane, not the one taking the pictures with a dashcam. There's a construction barrier that's inconsistent with the lane lines. The Tesla plowed into the barrier. This shows why the Tesla approach isn't good enough. The vehicle is on a freeway, an supported environment for the old "Autopilot". Everything is going just fine. Unti…

Holy crap that looks like a very basic failure. This is exactly the sort of thing that keeps me up, getting into an accident because of some stupid software bug. Fortunately the car didn't spin or he'd have side swiped the vehicle in the next lane.

If you look across the roof of the Tesla it totally failed to imitate the car in front of it too, that's a double fault, it had more than one indication the lane was changing direction.

Here is an article with a bit more info about that crash:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/tesla-driver-error-autopi...

There's more like these:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/21/tesla-aut...

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#316
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious where you get the number "38 petaflops" from.

IBM researchers: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/computers-hav... You can find other figures, but many are in the petaflop range, well above what could be realistically installed in a vehicle.

How about 60 bits/s:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/415041/new-measure-of-hum... I don't think we know enough about how the human brain works yet to give a precise value, but just on caloric arguments I would say that the mean processing power of the brain is not significantly above what we have now in general purpose computing devices.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some humans are horrible drivers. Some humans are good drivers. The biggest difference is often how proactive the driver is. It's true that a careful, experienced driver will typically recognise a rapidly emerging hazard as much as several tenths of a second faster than a novice, giving them significantly more time and space to react. However, a careful, experienced driver will also anticipate places where there are…

a) Most humans aren't aware of these things, either, so they're really non sequiturs at best. b) Even if you accept them as valid premises, it's much easier to disperse this kind of info to every car on the road than it is to disperse it to humans (every tourist in a city needs to know where every bar / park is? Or watch the local news?)

Those were all real examples. These kinds of things happen in my area every day, and drivers are actively taught to look for signs like these before they are allowed to qualify and drive independently. Obviously not everyone gets the message, and the best anticipation skills only develop with more experience, but nothing I described was unusual or exceptional (other than the last one, which was quite a specific example of a more general idea).

On your second point, the important thing here is that you don't need to disperse much of this information to humans. Humans automatically recognise situations based on all of their experience, not just their driving experience. Of course sometimes external information sources like the news might be helpful, but much of it is just down to understanding context. See fresh horse crap on a country road? Someone's probably riding horses nearby. Horses scare easily. So, slow down and try to avoid anything noisy that could startle the animals. How many of today's self-driving algorithms take into account this kind of implied knowledge?

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#318
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA are there not rules about which lanes you use? Various dash cam videos from the US seem to show drivers choosing any lane, though I could viewing then wrong. In the UK you use the outside lane if you are a slower vehicle and use the inside lane(s) as overtaking lanes, with the inside for the fastest speeds (within the limit) . If you are using one of the inside lane and are travelling slower that traffic i…

The dash cam videos would be correct, outside of high-occupancy lane (2+ people) there are no lane speed restrictions, and if someone feels like getting into the left-most lane and driving 5 miles below the speed limit, they most certainly act on that impulse. As you can imagine, anybody intending to use the left-most lane for high-speed driving is now forced to use the brakes, execute a [rarely safe] lane merge to t…

My driving instructor and parents all told me that driving in the left lane when not passing is illegal and that people who do it are dickheads. I see signs reminding people to stay in the right lane when not passing on a regular basis.

Is it just the state I live in (WA) or is the rule not as solid as I thought?

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#319
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they are only using two of the eight cameras in AP2 at the moment. There is more capacity in AP2 hardware to tap into. https://electrek.co/2017/03/30/tesla-autopilot-2-0-camera-8-...

There are rumors they might want to use Lidar. People have seen Tesla's equipped with Lidar, but it could be a 3rd party testing it or even Tesla doing some comparison research. Since newer sensors are become more cost effective I could imagine them incorporating them into future hardware revisions.

Could be using the LIDAR for ground truth for training a depth-from-stereo system?

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't switch from seeing cars to seeing nothing to seeing an elephant just because the input got a little noisy yeah, instead you get hallucinations, muscle twitches, seizures, mental breaks and many more ways a brain can fail to do it's job.

Sure, but a) we have thousands of years of experience with those, and b) none of those are caused by little random noise in the visual input. Brains are incredibly robust against noisy data.

Some adversarial methods work on black-box networks - has any work been done on applying those to human vision? We know there are a wide range of simple inputs that produce unexpected results (eg. optical illusions​).
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