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After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

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Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#51
The comments are scary. People defending Tesla's misleading advertisement re: full self-driving hardware etc.

Because clearly "having full self-driving hardware" only means the hardware is there, not that the car can actually self-drive.

I bet those people find themselves misunderstood in pretty much every discussion with people outside their nerdy circle.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#52

Scary... software developers at these robotic cars and their mistakes/bugs aren’t just going to bring down a business application(lose money) but kill their customers and innocent drivers. Progress to where it’s safer is going to be a killer and we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires’ dreams/goals.

> we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires’ dreams/goals.

we'll adapt, ie. adjust our behavior to account for that new factor. Police for example have already learnt how to pretty safely stop a Tesla on autopilot with a driver sleeping behind the wheel and not reacting to any signals (because of being deadly drunk for example).

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#53

Scary... software developers at these robotic cars and their mistakes/bugs aren’t just going to bring down a business application(lose money) but kill their customers and innocent drivers. Progress to where it’s safer is going to be a killer and we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires’ dreams/goals.

Unwilling? Don't buy a Tesla. Don't believe the hype. It's that simple. Granted, there is nothing stopping any ECU from killing you, but I'd trust a company like Honda way before Tesla.

I generally have zero interest in cars and don't follow the new models, but my impression from articles I've seen in the last years is that Volvo is actually a top contender for driver assistant systems (when you don't fool yourself into thinking you have an autopilot, but you really want sensible safety augmentation features).

Is that impression accurate?

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#54

Scary... software developers at these robotic cars and their mistakes/bugs aren’t just going to bring down a business application(lose money) but kill their customers and innocent drivers. Progress to where it’s safer is going to be a killer and we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires’ dreams/goals.

Unwilling? Don't buy a Tesla. Don't believe the hype. It's that simple. Granted, there is nothing stopping any ECU from killing you, but I'd trust a company like Honda way before Tesla.

Tesla crashes can injure people who don't drive a Tesla themselves.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it wasn't really "fixed" -- the driver is still dead.

Sure, if you construe the meaning of 'fixed' to mean 'roll back all events and time', which I don't think anyone expects. They probably fixed the software bug.

I think that it's important to note that "we'll fix bugs via live patches" is a deadly decision when it comes to self driving software.

Just discussing the incident in terms of a "software bug" does a disservice to the severity of the issue.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#56

Scary... software developers at these robotic cars and their mistakes/bugs aren’t just going to bring down a business application(lose money) but kill their customers and innocent drivers. Progress to where it’s safer is going to be a killer and we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires’ dreams/goals.

Willing guinea pig here. I'm going to do my best not to die, but I'm excited about this tech and willing to deal with the drawbacks of being an early adopter.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#57

That’s a very strange way to close a highway. Where are the blinkenlights? The words? The flashing arrows? The plastic jersey barriers? The buckets full of sand or water? The repainted lines directing you to the right? Can’t tell if this is temporary or long-term closure, but if it’s a multi month thing, I would expect more “Don’t you dare fork to the left” signalling. Not everyone is a local.

The section of road shown in the video is the I-5 express lane where it rejoins the regular freeway in North Seattle: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7021836,-122.3299637,3a,71.1... Note how it's configured for southbound traffic in the street view image. It switches direction twice a day.

Though you can't see it very well in the video, there is a crash arresting net after all the signs. https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7034263,-122.3302029,3a,19.3... You can't just drive through a couple of boards and run into oncoming traffic.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#58

Tesla can only really gather depth data from there radars, while the cameras operate a DNN to detect features and make adjustments for steering and speed based on fusing those two pieces of data together. An error in the radar or the DNN detecting features incorrectly because of lighting, road color change or object on the road which the model was not trained on, can cause problems like this.

"Tesla can only really gather depth data from there radars" - they can also do it visually through depth from motion

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#59
post #36

Watching the video, '2019.5.15 - Try 2' is interesting. You can see the car moving normally, then it starts to follow the black crack in the road and moves to the right- at this moment, the white Nissan in front is blocking the white lines ahead where the lanes actually split. Does AP use other cars as reference points, or just the road? Ideally in this situation it would be both: "The line has disappeared, and there…

>Watching the video, '2019.5.15 - Try 2' is interesting. You can see the car moving normally, then it starts to follow the black crack in the road and moves to the right- at this moment, the white Nissan in front is blocking the white lines ahead where the lanes actually split.

It seems like it's failing in different ways:

Try 1- Toughest to tell, but it looks like it failed to recognize any lines. Kept going straight which was at the barrier. Hard to tell if the car would have recovered.

Try 2- Looks like the car tried to go left into the closed lane. Seems like an error in detecting the barriers closing the road. I'd guess that it would have avoided the concrete barrier and driven down the closed lane

Try 3 - This one looks like it picked the wrong lane marker to be the left side of the road. In that it thought the right lane marker of the closed lane was actually the left lane marker. This one probably ends up with a smashed car and dead driver.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#60
I have been yelling about this for a long time: Tesla is not going to be able to deliver full self-driving as promised. They don't have the hardware, for one (ranging is terrible; they need stereo cameras), and second, their software strategy seems to be a dead end.

They need sensor fusion. The system needs to make maximum use of all the information available to it: Where is the road striping? Where are the other cars going? Where are the road signs and signals? (If there's one in your path, you certainly shouldn't drive into it!) Are there camera-visible obstructions? What were the interpretations and actions of previous Tesla trips along the same route?

In these problem cases, all data except the left and right lane striping seems to be completely ignored. There was even more information at the fatal offramp location (cross-striping over the lane separation zone), which the vehicle drove straight over. The system is not making maximum use of the information available to it, in fact it is using hardly any of it at all, and fixating on what it thinks is a single most salient piece of data.

Sensor fusion algorithms tend to behave the opposite way-- each additional piece of data informs the interpretation of all the other data. You can have very poor-quality data, but if it is even moderately over-constrained, your state estimate can be very good in spite of it. I think it would be completely reasonable to have a neural net in the loop of a sensor fusion algorithm, with fusion constraints informing the NN's interpretation, and the NN's estimates feeding back into the fusion algorithm as uncertain data.

IMO Tesla will do at least one of:

* Very expensively retract their promise of full self driving for delivered vehicles

* Completely overhaul/redesign their driving software and start again nearly from scratch

* Get into a regulatory/legal tangle with the NTSA/courts/DOJ over all the dead people their system is making.

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