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Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

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Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#411

Post by lisper »

leetbulb wrote: post #391
lisper wrote: post #122

Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in fro…

> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed. Wouldn't the system doing the checking be considered an autonomous system...that could also fail?

No, because the monitoring system doesn't interact with an environment, so its job is much simpler. This is actually the reason that cognizant failure works.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#412

Post by lisper »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #248
lisper wrote: post #122

Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in fro…

I dubbed this property "cognizant failure" I like that term. When I was involved in the medical instrumentation field, we had a similar concern: it was possible for an instrument to produce a measurement, e.g., the concentration of HIV in blood serum, that was completely incorrect, but plausible since it's within the expected clinical range. This is the worst-case scenario: a result that is wrong, but looks OK. This…

> I like that term.

Thanks!

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#413

Post by readhn »

lisper wrote: post #325
dorfsmay wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my armchair diagnosis > my 1991 PH.D. thesis on autonomous driving Going to hide in a corner and stay quiet on HN until I forget about this comment!

:-) Just in case you're interested: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/38880 and the associated conference paper: http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/aaai92.pdf Most of the work was done on a Mac II with 8MB (that's megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM. The progress that has been made since those days boggles my mind.

shameless plug! haha just kidding and WOW! Autonomous driving so early on, JPL, Google..

Im going to go hide in the corner as well.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#414

Post by kwhitefoot »

decebalus1 wrote: post #392

One thing baffles me. Where is the insurance industry in this? I would expect them to drastically increase premiums in light of these developments.

Here in Norway insuring a Tesla is no more expensive, in fact probably cheaper, than insuring a petrol car in a similar class. I'm pretty sure that the insurance companies wouldn't do it if it meant losing money.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#415

Post by lisper »

readhn wrote: post #413
lisper wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-) Just in case you're interested: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/38880 and the associated conference paper: http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/aaai92.pdf Most of the work was done on a Mac II with 8MB (that's megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM. The progress that has been made since those days boggles my mind.

shameless plug! haha just kidding and WOW! Autonomous driving so early on, JPL, Google.. Im going to go hide in the corner as well.

The most impressive thing in retrospect is that all that work was done on 32-bit processors with ~16 MHz clocks and ~8MB of RAM. And those machines cost $5000 each in 1991 dollars. Today I can buy a machine with 100 times faster clock and 1000 times as much RAM for about 1% of the price. That's seven orders of magnitude price-performance increase in <30 years. It's truly mind-boggling.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#416

Post by kwhitefoot »

syntaxing wrote: post #283

Does anyone know if all these recent accidents are with the old MobilEye technology or the new Nvidia system? Or was it a rumour that Tesla was moving towards Nvidia rather than MobilEye (I think MobileEye was the one that didn't want to renew their contract?)?

It's hard to be sure in every case because most 'news' stories and most HN comments don't specify even the model of car involved. But the incident in which the driver was killed running into the divider was a model X so that means hardware version 2 and Tesla's own software rather than Mobileye that is in, for instance my 2015 S 70D.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_2

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#417

Post by [deleted] »

lisper wrote: post #122

Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in fro…

[deleted]

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#418

Post by sumedh »

ucaetano wrote: post #300
hw wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more people need to embrace and understand the fact that we are a long way from having fully autonomous vehicles that you can just give the steering reins to from start to finish. The term 'Autopilot' gives off the wrong idea that the driver can sit back and relax while the car brings you from point A to point B safely. The same is happening with chatbots - more and more businesses think they can put a chatbo…

> I think more people need to embrace and understand the fact that we are a long way from having fully autonomous vehicles that you can just give the steering reins to from start to finish Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown. > The term 'Autopilot' gives off the wrong idea that the driver can sit back and relax while the car brings you from point A to point B safely. Agreed, the "but that's not how autopilots w…

> Apparently, we're not, as Waymo has shown.

Does Waymo drive at high speeds all the videos I have seen are at low speeds.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#419

Post by gowld »

lisper wrote: post #122

Here is my armchair diagnosis: right before the car veers towards the barrier it drives through a stretch of road where the only visible lane marker is on the left. Then the right lane marker comes into view at about the point where the lane starts to widen out for the lane split. The lines that will become the right and left lane markers of the split left and right lanes respectively are right next to the van in fro…

If you are aware when you are wrong... you would not be wrong.

If you are referring to assigning confidences/probabilities to decisions, this is standard in ML.

Re: Another Tesla on autopilot steers towards a barrier

#420

Post by userbinator »

sjwright wrote: post #410
guidedlight wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that auto-braking during autonomous driving doesn’t normally react to stationary objects like barriers. Otherwise it would brake for things like cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and other debris that often makes its way onto the road. But rather, autonomous driving AI puts a lot of trust into its lane guidance.

In what world would you not want your car to brake for a cardboard box? You don’t know what is inside. It could be empty, or could be full of nails. Or a cat. Regardless, it should be trivial have a different behavior for a moving object that enters the road versus a rigid object that has not been observed moving.

Sometimes it's just a piece of paper or something similarly harmless that happens to be positioned on the road in such a way that it appears to be an obstacle.
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