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Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

venturebeat.com

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Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#81

Post by dev_tty01 »

ghaff wrote: post #68
chrisseaton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me. Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe that's what an autonomous car would do.

Pulling over in a snowstorm to the side of the highway can be pretty dangerous too. Once you're in that situation there aren't necessarily great alternatives.

Yeah, I think people who believe that pulling over is an easy solution may not have been in one of these situations. It can come up quickly and there may be no exit for miles. Pull over into what? The snow bank on the side of the road? Now you are a hazard for everyone else coming along behind you. Sometimes you just have to make it work as best you can until the circumstances change.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#82

Post by [deleted] »

yellowapple wrote: post #57
dmitriid wrote: post #13

Besides the sheer complexity of situations described in this video, I wonder how these vehicles will deal with differences in traffic rules in different countries (when even road signs can be different).

It sounds like it currently "cheats" a bit by already having driving rules, maps (including signs), etc. baked in; it'd be akin to a human driver memorizing the California Vehicle Code and a map of San Francisco word-for-word and lane-for-lane. Presumably Zoox deployments in other cities would work similarly, "cheating" by baking in local driving rules and road maps. A consumer-owned self-driving car would likely be…

[deleted]

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#83

Post by vladislav »

NightlyDev wrote: post #76

This is really cool, but the environment is also really simple and I think we're definetly at least 15+ years out before self driving cars can handle somewhat challenging situations as well as humans. Just try to put one of this vehicles in a situation with varying road width, no markings, snow with no sticks to mark the edges so you really have to pay attention to where the road actually is. What would this do if yo…

"we're definetly at least 15+ years out". Similar statements were made about Go the year it was solved. AV is a vastly harder problem and requires new techniques to get there, but AI can progress can happen any time.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#84

Post by chrisseaton »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #81
ghaff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pulling over in a snowstorm to the side of the highway can be pretty dangerous too. Once you're in that situation there aren't necessarily great alternatives.

Yeah, I think people who believe that pulling over is an easy solution may not have been in one of these situations. It can come up quickly and there may be no exit for miles. Pull over into what? The snow bank on the side of the road? Now you are a hazard for everyone else coming along behind you. Sometimes you just have to make it work as best you can until the circumstances change.

Why is any traffic moving in conditions this bad? Just stop.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#85

Post by vladislav »

vardump wrote: post #33

Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather, perfect road surfaces. Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to deal with an imperfect world.

They're probably not even detecting the lane markings or road surfaces as they're baked into the HD map.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#86

Post by BubRoss »

ghaff wrote: post #67
BubRoss wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a parking lot the car would be starting from a position it can stay in, so requiring a person to intervene is one option. Also busy parking lots frequently don't stay busy forever and heavy rain doesn't last forever either. A look at the local weather could see where a storm is and give an estimate of when it will be able to automate leaving and require a person otherwise. I think there are pragmatic answers to ex…

As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. It can also be hard to predict weather in much of the US. And as soon as you place too many restrictions, you no longer have a reliable transportation option. Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?

If it was a robo taxi and not your own car, you could go take a different robo taxi.

Also, predicting the weather a week out isn't the same as giving an ETA when you can see a map of the storm happening live. That is a completely separate scenario.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#87

Post by BubRoss »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #79
anchpop wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. You have a robo-taxi that works when it's not raining, which is still pretty good (assuming it can safely disengage/pull over if it thinks the weather is getting bad). > Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be? I and many other…

Hmm. If I'm a city administrator, I'm not going to license fair weather robo-taxis to operate in the city. They would drive out many other taxis and then people can't get home when the weather turns bad. Anything else is just bad resource management.

This person said navigating automatically out of a crowded parking lot in the rain. You shifted this to just driving in the rain.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#88

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

> Handling yellow lights properly, involves us having to predict how long they will remain yellow for

No. That isn't how yellow lights work in the US. If the light turns yellow and you have enough space/time to make a safe stop you do it. There's no need to predict the remaining time on yellow phase. We don't need robot cars bending these rules.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#89

Post by carapace »

It really really bothers me that these folks are using a live city with real, non-volunteer test subjects of all ages (little kids and old folks use public streets) as a test bed for their massive car-shaped robots.

It's bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we've fought put together.

I'm one of those people who say, "Self-driving cars can't happen soon enough." But I don't think that justifies e.g. killing Elaine Herzberg.

Ask yourself this, why start with cars? Why not make a self-driving golf cart? Make it out of nerf (soft foam) and program it to never go so fast that it can't brake in time to prevent collision.

Testing these heavy, fast, buggy robots in crowds of people is extremely irresponsible.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#90

Post by nradov »

Fricken wrote: post #26
matdehaast wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the info. Can you clarify what predictions in multi agent scenarios are?

Imagine an uncontrolled intersection. The Robotaxi is approaching from one direction. In the opposite direction is a cyclist who intends to turn left across the Robotaxi. There is also a pedestrian that may or may not cross the street, and another vehicle about to cross in front of the Robotaxi from the other direction. There are a huge number of ways this scenario can play out, and any decision made by one agent can…

What is progress like on dealing with hand signals (or other gestures) from law enforcement or construction workers directing traffic?
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