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Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

waymo.com

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Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#371

Post by WarmWash »

small_model wrote: post #325
WarmWash wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unsupervised area is a tiny subset of the supervised area.

Any evidence of this?, even it its true right now, and they are being ultra cautious, (they are hardly going to just dump 100k unsupervised teslas in one week), it won't stay that way for long. They will overtake Waymo in a few months, then kill them by the end of the year.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1qvf7hu/te...

It's unsurprising someone so out of the loop on its true status is so hyped on it's future...

If robotaxi was doing legit rides, Elon would be posting about it 20 times a day.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#372

Post by mandeepj »

mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#373

Post by [deleted] »

UltraSane wrote: post #359
red75prime wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to find a single ablation study of a sensor suite. Waymo is in a good position to do such a study and the corporation would have benefited from showing that vision-only systems aren't viable (by demonstrating the corporation's good will to maintain public safety and by making it harder for vision-only competitors), but no such study from them. I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target a…

FSD and Robotaxi are plenty of evidence vision only aren't viable.

[deleted]

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#374

Post by red75prime »

UltraSane wrote: post #359
red75prime wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to find a single ablation study of a sensor suite. Waymo is in a good position to do such a study and the corporation would have benefited from showing that vision-only systems aren't viable (by demonstrating the corporation's good will to maintain public safety and by making it harder for vision-only competitors), but no such study from them. I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target a…

FSD and Robotaxi are plenty of evidence vision only aren't viable.

Read Electrek articles with a mouthful of salt. Fred Lambert’s “robotaxi is 10x worse than a human” estimate is based on his personal statistical reasoning, which somehow arrived at 200,000 miles per accident for humans. Minor accidents that Tesla reports for robotaxis (such as low-speed collisions with stationary objects) do not make it into publicly available statistics, so his estimate might be significantly off.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#375

Post by cortesoft »

torton wrote: post #163
cortesoft wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior) He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.

That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.

Sure, but he test drove with them until they shut down, and they never improved (according to him)

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#376

Post by guywithahat »

mandeepj wrote: post #372
mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.

When Tesla engineers/Elon talk about it it's usually pitched as a safety thing, by standardizing on one sensor they reduce "sensor contention". Famously Karpathy once described radar as a source of noise that held their vision sensors back.

I don't know who will end up being right in the long term, however I don't think this was a form choice, I think they believe a pure camera system will be more functional.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#377

Post by mikepurvis »

seanhunter wrote: post #357
badc0ffee wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly, DLR trains still have an attendant onboard. A better example of a fully centrally operated train would be something like the SkyTrain lines in Vancouver.

The attendant is a legacy of a union settlement as I understand it. It's not actually required for the ooperation of the system.

The book The Box discusses similar compromises that were made with the longshoremen unions during the transition from conventional hull-packing to containers. There's a certain fairness to it at least for a time, but the technology existing to make the role truly unnecessary does prime things for the next round of discussions when it can be fully eliminated or moved to an off-board overseer remotely monitoring multiple trains at once.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#378

Post by testing22321 »

UltraSane wrote: post #363
testing22321 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology is moving fast. When do you think it will be reliable enough?

Not for a very long time. Just think about how big of an advantage lidar and radar are at night or radar is in snow and rain? If Tesla had been smart they would have used regular cameras and event based cameras where the pixels send a signal whenever their brightness changes enough. These can have microsecond latency. And multi spectral cameras. Combined this data would provide very rich data for neural networks.

Sounds like you’re an expert. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space? In what capacity?

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#379

Post by shimman »

ewuhic wrote: post #262

There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".

This forum is baked by a VC firm that relies on gambling with pension funds to make a billion dollars, are you honestly expecting real tech discussions here and not a bunch of smoke + mirrors?

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#380

Post by Rover222 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #353
Rover222 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah millions of miles per day in autonomous driving for Tesla. Yes it's still supervised (somewhat, you don't have to pay much attention anymore) but the technology is absolutely there and just being refined at this point. Waymos are geofenced, restricted to certain roads, and have remote humans in the loop at lot more than most people assume.

Not actually autonomous until it can be more or less trusted to handle itself, without constant human supervision. Until then, it's just prototype or testing miles. Tesla's current robotaxi deployment is also geofenced and monitored by humans -- moreso than Waymo, even -- but of course Tesla superfans always conveniently leave that out of the narrative.

I don't think you understand that the level of autonomy that anyone with FSD currently has. It drives itself for hours with 0 interventions. Someone did a coast-to-coast drive with no interventions. Yet yeah somehow I'm just a confused fan and you're not biased by politics?

They will turn of the supervision requirements soon, and suddenly there will be hundreds of thousands of teslas that can drive themselves.

The skepticism is hard to get.

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