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Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

cnn.com

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Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#51

Post by simion314 »

nicbou wrote: post #35
im3w1l wrote: post #4

This is my biggest fear with self-driving cars. Correlated failures. As a society we are extremely good at dealing with independent accidents. We can calculate very precisely how many people will die of traffic in a given year and we can account for it, we can have insurances, and we can decide exactly how much we are willing to spend to save a life on the margin. But if everything is fine, everything is fine, everyt…

On the other hand, the cars were recalled, a team will study what happened, the problem will get fixed, simulations and tests will be created. When I make a dumb mistake, the other drivers rarely learn from it.

So in future your self driving car might be recalled at any random time because a new corner case from an infinity was found. If the car can't be driven by a human all owners of thsi cars will be stuck wherever they were at that moment.

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#52

Post by isthatafact »

nicbou wrote: post #35
im3w1l wrote: post #4

This is my biggest fear with self-driving cars. Correlated failures. As a society we are extremely good at dealing with independent accidents. We can calculate very precisely how many people will die of traffic in a given year and we can account for it, we can have insurances, and we can decide exactly how much we are willing to spend to save a life on the margin. But if everything is fine, everything is fine, everyt…

On the other hand, the cars were recalled, a team will study what happened, the problem will get fixed, simulations and tests will be created. When I make a dumb mistake, the other drivers rarely learn from it.

As someone else hinted, there may be nothing to "fix", but rather this seems like a specific situation that it had just never encountered before. Adjusting the model to cause a safe response to that particular single rare situation (either manually or by accidental training) does not solve the apparent problem that the machine is not able to comprehend the world.

At least that is how I (as a non-expert) imagine these models work -- the model has an excellent chance of crashing at every new unique situation it encounters out of a nearly unlimited set of possible situations (which implies a high frequency of encountering new situations).

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#53

Post by rainbowzootsuit »

andreareina wrote: post #39

Do we have a picture of the truck? I'm having difficulty imagining it given that surely the tow truck would want the towed vehicle in-line to make driving go smoothly?

The towed vehicle has its rear driven wheels up on a tow hook type of tow truck and It sounds like a locked steering wheel that has been turned. This would lead to the angled tracking of the front wheels.

This would be common for a debt recovery or when a city impounded the vehicle where it's taken without cooperation of the owner.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#54

Post by yowzadave »

Out_of_Characte wrote: post #30
avalys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t a solid wall, it was another vehicle. The brakes don’t respond immediately - you need to be able to detect that a collision is imminent several seconds before it actually occurs. This means you have to also successfully exclude all the scenarios where you are very close to another car, but a collision is not imminent because the car will be out of the way by the time you get there. Yes, at some point before…

My brakes respond immediatly,for all intents and purposes as a human with a reaction time. I'm at fault if the person in front of me stops and I dont have the stopping distance to avoid a collision. I get that self driving software is difficult. But theres no excuse for this type of accident.

I don't think anyone is excusing Waymo or saying that an accident is acceptable in this situation--it's just an interesting engineering problem to speculate about, and people are trying to figure out what caused it to fail.

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#55

Post by bigyikes »

weaksauce wrote: post #28
hyperman1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice, when e.g. it rains enough for long enough, a lot if people get annoyed and start driving badly. You get some kind of contagion where everybody gets annoyed and tired because all other drivers are annoyed, tired assholes. Sometimes it even persists after the bad weather, especially if there was gridlock and/or end of workday. Humans do have a (lighter) version of collective bad driving.

that's one reason crash traffic happens and stays for hours after the original reason for the traffic to happen in the first place is gone. I remember reading that one person applying their brakes too hard can have a knock on effect causing a traffic pattern to emerge for a long time after the initial braking ever occurred.

Yeah, I wish this was emphasized more in driving school. I wonder how much traffic could be reduced just by making people conscious of their traffic-causing behaviors. (for example, using your brakes to slow down when there is nothing in front of you and others behind you)

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#56

Post by 83 »

adrians1 wrote: post #45

This is what people don't appreciate when quoting those statistics about how self-driving cars are safer than humans: when a human driver causes an accident, it was because that particular person did something wrong. When a self-driving car handles a situation wrongly that's a big issue, because all the self-driving cars run the same software.

On the other hand when a human driver causes an accident one driver learns a lesson (maybe). When a self driving car causes an accident all cars get to learn from it.

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#57

Post by lotsoweiners »

antisthenes wrote: post #29
avalys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t a solid wall, it was another vehicle. The brakes don’t respond immediately - you need to be able to detect that a collision is imminent several seconds before it actually occurs. This means you have to also successfully exclude all the scenarios where you are very close to another car, but a collision is not imminent because the car will be out of the way by the time you get there. Yes, at some point before…

This is why autonomous vehicles need a hard cap on the speed limit they are driving at. If the max speed is 35mph, that allows a good braking system to respond by safely stopping from LIDAR info 99% of the time.

Yeah but then people aren’t going to want to take them because they are slow.

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#58

Post by ghodith »

midasuni wrote: post #22
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #13

I wish there was a picture of the strange towing configuration. I wonder if I would be confused as well, although my guess is that I’d read the situation correctly

I’ve been confused occasionally by road situations. Somehow I’ve never managed to drive into a multi-ton object.

Can't say the same for everyone.

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#59

Post by Cacti »

midasuni wrote: post #22
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #13

I wish there was a picture of the strange towing configuration. I wonder if I would be confused as well, although my guess is that I’d read the situation correctly

I’ve been confused occasionally by road situations. Somehow I’ve never managed to drive into a multi-ton object.

Well that car has been going around saying at least it hasn’t been posting uninformative, useless anecdotes on HN.

Re: Waymo recalls software after two self-driving cars hit the same truck

#60

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

Mageek wrote: post #6
Fricken wrote: post #2

A pick-up truck being towed crooked and backwards. Both vehicles failed to read the situation in the same manner. Autonomous vehicles have various redundant systems built-in that can take priority and override false positives. I was previously under the assumption that one of the really important reasons for Lidar is that it can get you closer to an absolute truth about whether something is a solid object, and where…

The article says it: “We determined that due to the persistent orientation mismatch of the towed pickup truck and tow truck combination, the Waymo AV incorrectly predicted the future motion of the towed vehicle.” It was detected, but it predicted the truck would move in a way that it didn’t end up moving.

I don't find that acceptable in any way, no human driver is going to do that and by that I mean no human driver is going to drive into something just because it moved in a way they didn't expect. they're going to slam on the brakes and the only way that's going to happen is if momentum is too high.

I understand we have to have explanations or we can't fix them, but it's just as important to understand this should never have happened even WITH the described failure.

If I had to guess, there's code to avoid stopping at every little thing and that code took precedence (otherwise rides would not be enjoyable). And I get the competing interests here but there must be a comparison to humans when these incidents happen.

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