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Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

venturebeat.com

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Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#41

Post by chrisseaton »

vladislav wrote: post #28
anonymous_car wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This demo is not informative as to the readiness for scalable L4 deployment does anyone make that claim?

Presenting a subset of the information to let the uninformed jump to favorable conclusions for the presenter is not a new marketing strategy. If there's no indication about the true level of progress, what is the purpose of the demo?

> to let the uninformed

The uniformed don't know what 'scalable L4 deployment' is, so they can't jump to that conclusion.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#42

Post by Fricken »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #25
Fricken wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been keeping abreast. The co-founder, Tim Kentley Klay was somehow able to get Jesse Levinson on board, and Jesse Levinson had no problem getting infinite street cred on board. So they were able to attract a lot of key, original robotics talent before the hype got out of control. For a long time though, they were low on funds, so they did lots of closed course testing, and it wasn't until they closed a large…

Multi-agent refers to behavior of pedestrians/cyclists, and other cars on the road. This is especially tough in "ambigous" junctions such as roundabouts, and unprotected left turns. There the strategy to negotiate the junctor is highly context dependent, and the information needed to find a strategy is not in the current scene. Drivers in these moments draw on "cultural awareness" of what "should" be done. Observing…

I have faith in robotaxis abilities to handle safety critical things. The lizard brain stuff is under control. They are still just too stupid to navigate complex traffic efficiently, without regularly hesitating and getting tripped up.

Robotaxis are Rube Goldberg machines, there are so many moving parts. The running joke at Waymo for a while was "How many engineers does it take to operate a self driving car?"

Everybody was convinced deep learning would give us all the magically brilliant AI we needed to make this work. With perception and classification problems the robotics industry was able to go from "impossibru" to "holy shit it works" over the space of a couple years, it was really exciting. In hindsight it's easy to see that the exciting and game changing breakthroughs were in fact a long time coming, and that the real rate of progress in open world robotics is in fact excrutiatingly slow and bespoke. Nobody has an ace up their sleeve.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#43

Post by Jasper_ »

chrisseaton wrote: post #36
vardump wrote: post #33

Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather, perfect road surfaces. Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to deal with an imperfect world.

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

I lived in Boston for 10 years. People drive on snow-covered roads just fine.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#44

Post by yellowapple »

chrisseaton wrote: post #36
vardump wrote: post #33

Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather, perfect road surfaces. Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to deal with an imperfect world.

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars.

And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year. It's not unreasonable to hold self-driving cars to the same standard.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#45

Post by chrisseaton »

Jasper_ wrote: post #43
chrisseaton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

I lived in Boston for 10 years. People drive on snow-covered roads just fine.

People in San Francisco struggle to drive in the rain let alone the snow.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#46

Post by chrisseaton »

yellowapple wrote: post #44
chrisseaton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars. And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year. It's not unreasonable t…

> Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars.

I don't think so. 'As good as humans can do' would be useful.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#47

Post by rossjudson »

draugadrotten wrote: post #40
chrisseaton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me. As a human, I knew I could drive safely where the bus had been driving seconds ago. A self-driving car would have... tell me.

Pulled over, like you should have done.

I've been exactly where you were, driving the Coq highway in British Columbia at night in a blizzard, following two red dots in front of me. I had (mandatory) snow tires on a rear wheel drive BMW. I also had my family in the car.

It was probably the single stupidest thing I've ever done driving a car.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#48

Post by candu »

yellowapple wrote: post #44
chrisseaton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars. And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year. It's not unreasonable t…

Exactly.

If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D, time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the public transit and/or active mobility solutions of the near-future.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#49

Post by yellowapple »

The two turns (one left and one right-on-red) leading up to getting to Market Street in the latter half of the video struck me as odd; the left turn looked like a bit of a lane sweep, and the right-on-red looked dubious (is it legal to turn right on red if you're not in the far-right lane?).

SF intersections are hard, though, and the computer seemed to handle them about as well as I would've.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#50

Post by chrisseaton »

draugadrotten wrote: post #40
chrisseaton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?

I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me. As a human, I knew I could drive safely where the bus had been driving seconds ago. A self-driving car would have... tell me.

> I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me.

Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe that's what an autonomous car would do.

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