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Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

technologyreview.com

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Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#71

Post by thewarrior »

prawn wrote: post #67
webignition wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would have to experience first-hand what it is like to drive in almost any country that is outside the US, Europe or most of the commonwealth to really appreciate the difficulty of developing a self-driving car that could handle such conditions more safely than humans. It very much is hard. I've driven in and around India. Aside from the fact that the majority of vehicles have four wheels and generally mo…

Can you imagine the sensors and speeds that might be available within one decade let alone two or three? Compare that to a human looking in just one direction at any given time and with imperfect reaction time. You know those larger, heavier vehicles you mentioned? What if they're self-driving long-haul transport? They'll likely be able to make it through. Cost will be the thing that prevents self-driving cars from d…

I'm not trying to be snarky or anything but take a look at this :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twMj9MTs3lw

A self driving car would just sit there frozen as there would be no 100 % safe action to take.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#73

Post by neolefty »

gfodor wrote: post #10

Personally I think the path forward for autonomous cars goes hand-in-hand with services like Uber. First you need there to be a population of people who can get by without owning cars and have them rely exclusively on driving service. Then you slowly augment the driving service with autonomous vehicles when these folks are going to be traveling along routes that are supported by the cars. These routes will likely be…

Yes, self driving cars make more sense as a service than as a possession. And knowing their limitations helps us see where they might be useful today, so that they can be gradually incorporated into traffic.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#74

Post by ASneakyFox »

agildehaus wrote: post #66
snowmaker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each approach has a different challenge. For autonomous cars, the challenge is software. It's very difficult to build software that handles all the edge cases mentioned in the article. The hardware (cars) is a solved problem. For autonomous personal flying machines, you're right that the software is easy, but the challenge is power density. The only VTOL machine that can carry humans a considerable distance without r…

Also, the software for autonomous flying machines would NOT be easy if suddenly we had tens of millions of them in the air.

If all flying cars had autopilot I don't think itd be that hard. They'd all follow the same autopilot guidlines. Ground cars will forever have to deal with the millions of "legacy" systems like lights, manual cars, stop signs, pedestrians.

A flying car system would be totally networked from day one. Id imagine it being like the cars from the minority report.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#75

Post by renox »

luos wrote: post #19
gfodor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is driving is a skill, and one which you can lose if you do not exercise it. A self driving car which only works 99% of the time seems like a non-starter, since by that point the humans inside of them are no longer qualified to take over. Particularly if that 1% is in conditions that are particularly difficult.

I don't have a driver license so for me that would be perfect. I don't care about driving, I don't want to drive, but I want my (or a) car to come for me to the bar / after work. If the weather is not good then I will use public transport. I think people overestimate their abilities. Sure, this is a new technology but in X years these cars will be better drivers than 99% of the people.

> I don't have a driver license so for me that would be perfect.

No, it WOULDN'T be perfect! What if it's starting to rain/snow while you already being in the car? And you still need to drive the car for parking..

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#76

Post by kruczek »

yen223 wrote: post #53
letstryagain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just have to be significantly safer than humans, and that's not hard.

The self-driving car has trouble telling whether a white object on the road is a piece of paper or a rock. Most humans don't have that problem. I don't why we like to think that all people are stupid. At the moment, the human brain is still significantly more intelligent than computers.

But a self-driving car doesn't need to be more intelligent than a human brain, it just needs to be better at driving. Human brain is certainly a better general-purpose compuing machine, but there are many situations where technology can vastly improve its performance for specific cases (e.g. reaction time).

As for distinguishing rock and paper, humans also often fail at similar tasks - "is it a lump of snow on the road ahead, or is it a rock?". Better to just avoid uncertain objects in such cases. But true that there is certainly some room for improvement (for cars, because we are unable to improve brains).

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#77

Post by scottlocklin »

kruczek wrote: post #76
yen223 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self-driving car has trouble telling whether a white object on the road is a piece of paper or a rock. Most humans don't have that problem. I don't why we like to think that all people are stupid. At the moment, the human brain is still significantly more intelligent than computers.

But a self-driving car doesn't need to be more intelligent than a human brain, it just needs to be better at driving. Human brain is certainly a better general-purpose compuing machine, but there are many situations where technology can vastly improve its performance for specific cases (e.g. reaction time). As for distinguishing rock and paper, humans also often fail at similar tasks - "is it a lump of snow on the ro…

An autonomous vehicle needs to be at least as good as people at crap like reading numbers and street signs. There is no such thing as a computer which can do this task, though all drivers can do it, or they wouldn't pass their driver tests. That's why these are still considered challenging data sets for machine vision people:

http://ufldl.stanford.edu/housenumbers/ http://benchmark.ini.rub.de/

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#78

Post by Rapzid »

kelnos wrote: post #57
pseudonym wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how "reasonably close" they end up coming. If it ends up being a xeno's paradox of issues where it can handle 90% of situations, then 99%, then 99.9%, then 99.99%, etc, but each of those incremental improvements prove harder and harder to achieve, how many lawmakers are going to say "Sure, only .001% of robot cars on the road get into catastrophic accidents in unhandled situations, that's fine, let's ma…

how many lawmakers are going to say "Sure, only .001% of robot cars on the road get into catastrophic accidents in unhandled situations, that's fine, let's make these things legal"? If they're actually thinking properly (doubtful), they'll look at the rate of catastrophic accidents with human drivers, and make a call based on whether or not self-driving cars are an improvement.

Yeah, hopefully. There are right near 200M licensed drivers in the US. That would be 200k catastrophic accidents!

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#79

Post by prawn »

thewarrior wrote: post #71
prawn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine the sensors and speeds that might be available within one decade let alone two or three? Compare that to a human looking in just one direction at any given time and with imperfect reaction time. You know those larger, heavier vehicles you mentioned? What if they're self-driving long-haul transport? They'll likely be able to make it through. Cost will be the thing that prevents self-driving cars from d…

I'm not trying to be snarky or anything but take a look at this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twMj9MTs3lw A self driving car would just sit there frozen as there would be no 100 % safe action to take.

Yes, I've seen crazy intersections in person - I considered exactly that sort of thing with my comment.

But I can also see that a self-driving car could edge forward gradually until it had the opportunity to take a larger advantage. A lot of those vehicles and bikes are not travelling at full speed and are also prepared to brake if need be. A self-driving car would be able to judge all of these things almost immediately unlike the reaction lag we get with humans.

Re: Hidden obstacles for self driving cars

#80

Post by dalore »

bagels wrote: post #32
balloot wrote: post #31

I've been saying this for years, as I took Thrun's class when he was at Stanford. Google's dirty little secret is that self driving cars are still mostly smoke and mirrors. Given relatively controlled conditions and a trained driver who can play backup when needed, they work. But if you put them in complicated situations - snow, a busy city environment, abnormal signage - watch out. The problem is that the driving mo…

One that Google has not solved, for instance, is navigating a gas station. When they fill up gas at Shoreline & Middlefield in Mountain View, I see humans doing the driving.

Why would a car of the future be using an old tech like gas? Surely it will be electric.
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