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Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#751

Post by c22 »

jonthepirate wrote: post #415

Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…

I strongly agree with this sentiment. If this technology is going to be tested on the public then all the datasets from these vehicles should be openly shared and development should be done cooperatively. Let the market decide winners based on metrics like cabin comfort and leasing terms rather than odds of causing grievous injury.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#753

Post by IgorPartola »

obastani wrote: post #563
IgorPartola wrote: post #390

This is what's going to happen. If you've ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn't surprising at all. Basically, they'll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don't, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one. So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that…

Very little of what goes into a current-generation self-driving car is based on machine learning [1]. The reason is exactly your point -- algorithmic approaches to self-driving are much safer and more predictable than a machine learning algorithms. Instead, LIDAR should exactly identify potential obstacles to the self-driving car on the road. The extent to which machine learning is used is to classify whether each ob…

But that's the issue: identifying a pedestrian vs a snowman or a mailbox or a cardboard cutout is important when deciding whether to swerve left or right. It's an asymptotic problem: you'll never get 100% identification, and based on that, even the rigid algorithms will make mistakes.

LIDAR is also not perfect when the road is covered in 5 inches of snow and you can't tell where the lanes are. Or at predicting a driver that's going to swerve into your lane because they spilled coffee on their lap or had a stroke.

With erratic input, you will get erratic output. Even the best ML vision algorithm will sometimes produce shit output, which will become input to the actual driving algorithm.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#754

Post by jaxbot »

Spare_account wrote: post #712
Johnny555 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…

Braking distance ... for a 30mph is 45 ft Apologies for going off topic here, but I'm curious about this. I've tested every car I've ever owned and all of the recent cars with all-round disc brakes have outperformed this statistic, but I've never been able to get agreement from other people (unless I demonstrate it to them in person). I'm talking about optimal conditions here, wet roads would change things obviously…

In addition, some cars such as the Nissan Leaf have a feature that locks the brakes at full power when there is a sudden control shift from accelerator to brakes, meaning that if you stomp on the brakes and then reduce pressure, the car will continue to brake at maximum power. This was done for two reasons: one, people hesitating in emergency situations, and two, people being taught to pump brakes, which increases braking distance in cars with ABS.

I learned about this feature when reading car forums for my car and finding threads from people who were rear-ended when they accidentally triggered this feature by slamming on the brakes when they didn't intend to come to a complete stop.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#756

Post by Johnny555 »

Spare_account wrote: post #712
Johnny555 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…

Braking distance ... for a 30mph is 45 ft Apologies for going off topic here, but I'm curious about this. I've tested every car I've ever owned and all of the recent cars with all-round disc brakes have outperformed this statistic, but I've never been able to get agreement from other people (unless I demonstrate it to them in person). I'm talking about optimal conditions here, wet roads would change things obviously…

I knew I'd get called out for not including sources. Those figures are from published sources, and do not include decision time. I'd imagine that these sources are for "average" roads and "average" cars

http://www.government-fleet.com/content/driver-care-know-you...

http://www.brake.org.uk/facts-resources/15-facts/1255-speed

Car and Driver did a test with sports cars and profesional drivers and came up with 142 - 155 ft from 70mph, while my first reference quotes 245 ft (around 40% less, so extrapolating, their stopping distance from 35mph would be around 20 feet).

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/rocket-sleds-the-best-...

The average car on the road is not a sports car with performance tires and is not stopping on a clean, dry track. So I don't think it's a stretch to assume that an average car on average roads with tires optimized for tread life would be 40% worse than a $100K sports car with $400 tires that are optimized for grip rather than lifetime.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#757

Post by jakelazaroff »

cek wrote: post #3
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #2

On purpose to protect something "more valuable," or on accident?

There's an old saying around gun owners: "There's no such thing as a firearms accident. Only negligence." I think the same thing applies to autonomous things.

This is a dumb saying that ignores the fact that humans are fallible beings who make mistakes.

Sure, you might shoot yourself because you're just careless with your gun. Or you might be also thinking of an argument you had with your spouse, or you might be tired when you're handling your everyday carry on your way to work, or you might get startled, or a million and one other things that might prevent you from singly focusing your attention the gun you're handling.

Machines exist to serve us, not the other way around. If a product doesn't take human habits and flaws into account, it's a bad product, because over a large enough sample size someone will make a mistake.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#758

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

It's not hard to believe that self-driving autonomous cars will make the roads safer overall.

The issue is that while fewer lives will be lost, it will be a different set of lives than would have been lost without self-driving technology.

Those lives will have their day in court.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#759

Post by merb »

spyder wrote: post #659
jonthepirate wrote: post #415

Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…

Even worse: There are people who test their DIY self-driving hacks on public roads: https://youtu.be/GzrHNI6eCHo?t=100 Using https://github.com/commaai/openpilot , which is cool but not on public roads.

in germany you would get punished for doing something like that. (well somebody would need to catch you first, of course)

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#760

Post by [deleted] »

drstewart wrote: post #721
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #682

Had the car passed the driving test? There should probably be a specific, complex and comprehensive test for autonomous vehicles. Also I'd want to see shared liability, the company are driving it (by proxy through their software) so they should be liable to some extent.

>There should probably be a specific, complex and comprehensive test for autonomous vehicles Maybe we should start with a specific, complex and comprehensive test for human drivers first. And to build on the sentiment of this thread, every driver should finance their own test course to practice on before "subsidizing" their learning on public roads.

[deleted]
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