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Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#641

Post by johnnyanmac »

BurningFrog wrote: post #624
johnnyanmac wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>data clearly shows that the experiment is successful in reducing crashes. That's fine. But crashes are relatively rare and what matters is accountability. Will Waymo be accountable for hitting this kid the way a human would? Or will they fight in court to somehow blame the pedestrian? Those are my big concerns when it comes to self driving vehicles, and history with tech suggests that they love playing hot potato in…

Waymo is driving the car and should be held accountable like any other driver. I assume that's how it works already.

I hope so too. I'll be keeping a close eye on how they handle this, though. My benefit of the doubt for tech was already long drained, and is especially critical for safety critical industries.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#642

Post by rdtsc »

somenameforme wrote: post #622
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And to add > Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.

You're omitting the context provided by the article. This wasn't just a random scenario. Not only was this by an elementary school, but during school drop off hours, with both children and doubled parked cars in the vicinity. If somebody doesn't know what double parking is - it's when cars parallel park beside one another, implicitly on the road, making it difficult to see what's beyond them. So you are around young…

That's my thinking as well. Taken in some abstract scenario, all those steps seems very reasonable, and in that abstract scenario we can even say it would do better than an average human would. But that is missing the overall context that this was an elementary school during drop-off hours. That's when you crawl at 3 mph expecting kids to jump behind any car, and not going at 17mph.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#643

Post by TulliusCicero »

expressadmin wrote: post #617
belorn wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed. One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time. For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7k…

I recently visited a friend that lives in Sweden (couple hours south of Stockholm). Something he said while I visited stuck with me: "Sweden hates cars." There must be a happy medium somewhere in between.

It's true, Sweden isn't quite bike and pedestrian friendly enough yet, but they'll get that balance someday!

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#644

Post by javchz »

mlsu wrote: post #395
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #2

From the Waymo blog... > the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path. Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle. The Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made. > Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, w…

An honest account of this situation would place at least some blame on there being a tall SUV blocking visibility. These giant SUVs really are the worst when it comes to child safety

I bet we'll the the SUV mania in the future as something crazy, like smoking in a plane or using lead for gasoline. Irrational large size cars that people get because everyone it's afraid of another SUV hitting them in a sedan. The tragedy of the commons.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#645

Post by Dylan16807 »

dekhn wrote: post #585
bee_rider wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they speculate about things like “we’re near a school zone, kids are unloading, there might be a kid I’ve never seen behind that SUV?” (I’m legitimately asking I’ve never been in a Waymo).

It's not particularly meaningful to ponder the subjective experience of the waymo driving computer. Instead, focus on its externally visible behavior.

Asking whether an entity has modeled and evaluated a specific situation, using that evaluation to inform its decisions, is not about subjective experience.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#646

Post by Dylan16807 »

Marsymars wrote: post #599
ufmace wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but note that getting much more severe on enforcement and punishment for DUI/OWI will result in an even higher prison population, more serious life consequences for poor and minorities, etc, when the US is constantly getting trashed for how bad those things are already. To be a bit snarkier, and not directed at you, but I wish these supposedly superior Europeans would tell us what they actually want us t…

I suspect you could step up enforcement in ways that don’t involve prison time simply by taking away people’s licenses, and then having a fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license.

Taking away licenses is a bad way to enforce driving rules because so many people have to be able to drive or their life collapses. The problems of aggressive license revocation are similar to the problems of aggressive prison time.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#647

Post by davorak »

somenameforme wrote: post #622
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And to add > Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.

You're omitting the context provided by the article. This wasn't just a random scenario. Not only was this by an elementary school, but during school drop off hours, with both children and doubled parked cars in the vicinity. If somebody doesn't know what double parking is - it's when cars parallel park beside one another, implicitly on the road, making it difficult to see what's beyond them. So you are around young…

Driving is based so much off of feel so my numbers may be off, but in the scenario you are talking about 5mph seems reasonable, 10mph already seems like to much.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#648

Post by red75prime »

energy123 wrote: post #57
simojo wrote: post #12

I'm curious as to what kind of control stack Waymo uses for their vehicles. Obviously their perception stack has to be based off of trained models, but I'm curious if their controllers have any formal guarantees under certain conditions, and if the child walking out was within that formal set of parameters (e.g. velocity, distance to obstacle) or if it violated that, making their control stack switch to some other "p…

From a purely stats pov, in situations where the confusion matrix is very asymmetric in terms of what we care about (false negatives are extra bad), you generally want multiple uncorrelated mechanisms, and simply require that only one flips before deciding to stop. All would have to fail simultaneously to not brake, which becomes vanishingly unlikely (p^n) with multiple mechanisms assuming uncorrelated errors. This i…

The true self-driving trolley problem. How many rear-end collisions and riders' annoyance caused by phantom braking a manufacturer (or a society) is going to tolerate to save one child per N million miles?

Uncorrelated approach improves sensitivity at the cost of specificity. Early sensor fusion might improve both (maybe at the cost of somewhat lesser sensitivity).

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#649

Post by mlyle »

Aloisius wrote: post #529
mlyle wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes time for even a Waymo to recognize a dangerous situation Reaction time makes the math even better here. You travel v1 * reaction_time no matter what, before entering the deceleration regime. So if v1 gets smaller, you get to spend a greater proportion of time in the deceleration regime. > linear deceleration. After reaction time, stopping distance is pretty close to n^2. There's weird effects at high speed…

I was thinking more that how hard the brakes are applied likely varies based on uncertainty of a collision. Without that these vehicles could only start braking when certainty crossed some arbitrary threshold.

I think the strategy is a lot more nuanced than that.

In any case, with zero reaction time, linear deceleration time to stop is proportional to velocity squared. With reaction time, the linear deceleration time is that plus the velocity times the reaction time.

so the two cases we're comparing are 17 * r + (17^2 - 5^2) vs. 16 * r + (16^2), or 17 * r + 264 vs 16 * r + 256. As long as reaction time isn't negative, a vehicle that could slow to 5MPH starting at 17MPH could slow to 0MPH starting at 16MPH.

(There are weird things that happen at <2.5MPH reducing deceleration to sublinear, but the car moves only a few inches at these speeds during a panic stop).

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#650

Post by davorak »

mlyle wrote: post #60
veltas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, I can tell you right now that many human drivers are probably safer than the Waymo, because they would have slowed down even more and/or stayed further from the parked cars outside a school; they might have even seen the kid earlier in e.g. a reflection than the Waymo could see.

It seems it was driving pretty slow (17MPH) and they do tend to put in a pretty big gap to the right side when they can. There are kinds of human sensing that are better when humans are maximally attentive (seeing through windows/reflections). But there's also the seeing-in-all-directions, radar, superhuman reaction time, etc, on the side of the Waymo.

17MPH is way to fast, depending on the details. I do not think the article gives the details to know if it was a reasonable speed to be going or not, enough details to know it might be to fast, like proximity to a school and children present, yes.
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