Waymo: Google's self-driving car company • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#461

Post by galdosdi » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #238

derefr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two sides of the same coin. If you can rent your neighbour's car, why own your own? Heck, why have driveways? In cities, at least, I could fully imagine new townhouse developments operating more like apartment buildings: one central parking lot for the "pool" of (mostly) driverless cars. Your car drops you off at your door and then parks in the pool; then comes back out to get you in the morning.

While driverless cars obviously make short-term car rental more attractive on a cost basis, I think that people here tend to overestimate the impact of this. * A large percentage of people will want to have their own car because they don't want to put up with the occasional hassle of unavailability of rental cars during a peak time, and/or occasional long waits for the car to reach them (particularly when they are be…

* Availability can be addressed with a dedicated option, where you pay extra (if a fleet) or get paid a bit less (if renting out your self driving car) to ensure there's always a car whose destination's time distance from you plus remaining trip length is less than some amount you specify such as 15min.

* To address the mobile depot use case, I've heard of proposals to have storage areas (possibly trunk, but not necessarily) that are only accessible by the owner, not by renters. Even that may not be perfect though, I do see your point.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#462

Post by bhntr3 » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

My scuba instructor shared this piece of wisdom: "You don't have to swim faster than the shark. You just need to swim faster than your buddy."

People get this stuff wrong all the time. Especially when they're drunk, tired or texting. These cars won't be perfect but I think pretty good and conservative under uncertainty will be better than human, drunk and overconfident.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#463

Post by LinuxBender » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:19 PM UTC

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

I agree with all of this.

I would also add; that I will stay consider these vehicles to be unsafe until the manufacturers can prove to be beyond a shadow of doubt that I or the local computer are the ones piloting the vehicle.

When a random person can remotely take control of a vehicle; whether it be the windshield wipers, or full control of the vehicle, then it is not safe to contain a power source in the vehicle near a public road. I don't want 4chan driving me into another vehicle.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#464

Post by brwr » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:19 PM UTC

dontreact wrote: post #318

riprowan wrote: post #308

A lot of comments here and I haven't seen one that addresses the problem of impulsivity. Many / most of the times I need a car are not schedulable events but impulses. For example when I'm working on a project around the house, it's typical to need to run up to the hardware store 3 times in a day. I think autonomous transport will be very popular but shared vehicles will be hardly more popular than Uber / taxis are n…

What about on-demand transportation doesn't meet the needs of your impulse to run to the hardware store? Just call for a car 6 (there and back) times and you won't worry about having to park on either side.

I think the concern is more about availability. How long does it take for a car to show up each time OP needs to go to the store?

This is a problem with Uber now. I need to be at the airport at 5:00 AM tomorrow morning and I'm just hoping like hell that there will be an Uber around. Most drivers will be home sleeping.

Low-volume times like my example above are where autonomous vehicles can shine. Making the economics work during times of high volume is more difficult. You can always buy more cars, but that's just that many more cars you need storage space for outside of peak hours.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#465

Post by trome » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:20 PM UTC

walrus1066 wrote: post #448

BurningFrog wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that will be best solved by making a lot of other actors communicate directly with the car. Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio. Emergency vehicles, roadworks, traffic signs etc will do the same. Or so I assume, because it makes so much of sense. I know there is vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Yes, I think you're right. We'd need to update a lot of our infrastructure to make it friendlier for these cars. I should also add: - very fast mobile data, with no blackspots, so a remote driver can take over a car that's confused by a situation - a replacement for GPS, it's not reliable enough, the signal is far too weak - digital signal beacons embedded in lane markings, and edges of the road, and on traffic cones…

Why should local municipalities foot the bill for adding beacons to stop lights, etc? I get trying to make infrastructure friendly towards self driving cars, but the general public should not be footing the bill for someone's life choice to buy such a vehicle.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#466

Post by ticviking » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:20 PM UTC

bhntr3 wrote: post #462

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

My scuba instructor shared this piece of wisdom: "You don't have to swim faster than the shark. You just need to swim faster than your buddy." People get this stuff wrong all the time. Especially when they're drunk, tired or texting. These cars won't be perfect but I think pretty good and conservative under uncertainty will be better than human, drunk and overconfident.

That's a key point here.

The cars don't have to be perfectly safe, just safer than the average driver.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#467

Post by londons_explore » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:21 PM UTC

walrus1066 wrote: post #416

londons_explore wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These issues could mostly be solved by the car having a "remote control" where an expert in a remote immersive environment could take manual control of the car for a few seconds to resolve whatever the problem is. Now you've reduced all your problems down to simply "identify problem and alert a remote human". If each of those problems only happen once per day, and they are resolved in 30 seconds, it's going to cost o…

That's an option, but London has loads of signal black holes, or the speed is just not good enough. Infinitely worse in the country, if we want autonomous lorries. I think we'd need a huge infrastructure upgrade to make life easier for autonomous cars. It'd have to be >100 Mb/s mobile data, with extremely good coverage (for the recovery mechanism you mention). Think GPS would need to be replaced too, the signal is wa…

No need for high speed - all these issues can be resolved by inching forward or back to get the car back onto the open road. (although obviously high speed is a bonus)

Connectivity you see is from a single mobile phone. A car could have a better antenna, service from all the mobile networks rather than just one, wifi fallback and a backup satellite uplink. If all those fail, you dispatch an engineer to find the car wherever it's stuck and add a solar powered LTE repeater.

If you have a map of the whole service area and know where you started and have a camera looking out the window the whole time, there is no need for GPS really.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#468

Post by arthurfm » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:21 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #434

walrus1066 wrote: post #339

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

A lot of that will be best solved by making a lot of other actors communicate directly with the car. Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio. Emergency vehicles, roadworks, traffic signs etc will do the same. Or so I assume, because it makes so much of sense. I know there is vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

> Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio.

Most of the traffic lights in Las Vegas already support vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, although you need an Audi A4, Q7 or Allroad manufactured after 1st June 2016 and an Audi Connect Prime subscription ($33.33/month) to make use of it [1].

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/12/13923254/audi-v2i-las-veg...

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#469

Post by Retric » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:21 PM UTC

walrus1066 wrote: post #437

monk_e_boy wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine in an emergency the car would show a set of options on a screen and you click one and the car will do it. For example getting out of the way of emergency vehicles on a blocked road. It will ask you what to do and if you tell it to drive up the pavement or into a bus lane or cross to the wrong side of the road -- the car will just do it. I do wonder about all the non-verbal human-to-human communication. But…

I think it's fine if there's a human in the car, simple, they just take control to manage the incident. But to truly disrupt our lives (24 hour robot trucks, autonomous taxi fleets ), which is what all these companies are aiming for, the car needs to be able to drive without a human.

Having a human on call to remote into a Car is still a viable option in most of the US. This is not a good fit for sub second response times or tunnels, but it vastly reduces the endless .0001% edge cases.

ED: Not hitting kids is manditory, not blocking traffic is mandatory, parking in every random stop is optional as long as their are safe places it can drive to.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#470

Post by jimstr » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:22 PM UTC

walrus1066 wrote: post #448

BurningFrog wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that will be best solved by making a lot of other actors communicate directly with the car. Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio. Emergency vehicles, roadworks, traffic signs etc will do the same. Or so I assume, because it makes so much of sense. I know there is vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Yes, I think you're right. We'd need to update a lot of our infrastructure to make it friendlier for these cars. I should also add: - very fast mobile data, with no blackspots, so a remote driver can take over a car that's confused by a situation - a replacement for GPS, it's not reliable enough, the signal is far too weak - digital signal beacons embedded in lane markings, and edges of the road, and on traffic cones…

> so a remote driver can take over a car

nope. nope.