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Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#91

Post by debt »

rayiner wrote: post #31

What this shows is that Tesla isn’t even on the path to self-driving technology. It sounds like “Autopilot” has no world model (or an extremely basic one)—it ignores stationary objects because it can’t tell whether it’s approaching something on the side of a road that curves away versus an obstacle in the lane. It can’t tell because it doesn’t know what the car is going to do and what the lane is going to do. That’s…

Makes me think that Google’s whole Street View project was original designed to create a model of the streets that’d eventually be used in a self driving car.

Here I was thinking it was silly gimmick that I’d barely use. The self-driving Waymos of the future may all work perfectly because if it.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#92

Post by rootusrootus »

sib wrote: post #77
stevenwoo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the radar/camera system Toyota uses for its Pre Collision System has the same weaknesses as Tesla's sensor suite but the list of exceptions in the Toyota manual is pretty brutally honest about the issues. Just for pedestrians it warns: Some pedestrians such as the following may not be detected by the radar sensor and camera sensor, preventing the system from operating properly: • Pedestrians shorter tha…

I'm trying to figure out whether there are actually a meaningful fraction of pedestrians who would be detected...

I imagine that list was drafted with the direction of the legal department and they wanted to exhaustive list that might very well exclude basically all pedestrians. They don't really expect many people to read it unless they find themselves in court, when it will be too late.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#93

Post by mirimir »

rayiner wrote: post #31

What this shows is that Tesla isn’t even on the path to self-driving technology. It sounds like “Autopilot” has no world model (or an extremely basic one)—it ignores stationary objects because it can’t tell whether it’s approaching something on the side of a road that curves away versus an obstacle in the lane. It can’t tell because it doesn’t know what the car is going to do and what the lane is going to do. That’s…

Right, and yet Tesla is pretending and promoting Autopilot as a "self-driving" system.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#94

Post by mattnewport »

atomical wrote: post #86
mattnewport wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That very much depends on where you live. It's generally a lot better in Europe for a variety of reasons: historical, political and geographical. I use public transit quite a bit here in Vancouver but my limited experience of it in SF gives me some appreciation why people might not want to use it there.

People smell better in Europe? When people trot out their arguments against public transportation they always refer to the inefficiencies and completely ignore the human element. No one wants to be crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers every day.

I'd say the median public transit user in Europe smells better than the median public transit user in SF yes. In Europe public transit tends to be used by a much broader cross section of the population.

No one wants to be stuck in bay area traffic every day either. Public transit is used for a higher percentage of journeys in Europe though because it's a better option relative to the available alternatives than it is in much of the US. If we had free teleportation I imagine you'd see very few people using any other form of transport.

There is probably a degree to which public transit usage is higher in Europe not because it is a better experience than it is in the US but because driving is a worse experience. Based on my own experience it's a bit of both but clearly usage levels vary around the world due in part to varying tradeoffs between transport options based on historical, geographical, political and economic factors. There may also be a cultural element as well where preferences vary but I don't think that's the biggest factor.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#95

Post by dasil003 »

atomical wrote: post #86
mattnewport wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That very much depends on where you live. It's generally a lot better in Europe for a variety of reasons: historical, political and geographical. I use public transit quite a bit here in Vancouver but my limited experience of it in SF gives me some appreciation why people might not want to use it there.

People smell better in Europe? When people trot out their arguments against public transportation they always refer to the inefficiencies and completely ignore the human element. No one wants to be crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers every day.

No one wants to be stuck in traffic either. In Europe the equation is different in terms of road space, density, transit and parking availability.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#96

Post by newnewpdro »

Someone1234 wrote: post #38
newnewpdro wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even bothering to flip through a meager 1" thick manual for a newly acquired automobile strikes me as negligent. At least review the sections covering features you've never had in a vehicle before, geez.

And when people rent a vehicle? Or borrow a friend's vehicle? Etc Ad infinitum.

Just because it's common for people to get in and go with unfamiliar cars doesn't make it any less negligent.

If you don't know how to e.g. turn on the hazard lights in the vehicle you're driving without searching extensively or digging out the user's manual, you've failed to be a responsible driver.

If I got in a loaner car with semi-autonomous features there's no way I'd drive away without first paging through a user's manual or online guide understanding those features first. especially given how many crashes have occurred due to apparent misuse of these vehicles.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#97

Post by jaimex2 »

Radar on autopilot is a crutch and not a great one. I know Tesla are working hard on moving everything to vision detection. Andrej Kaparthy head of autopilot vision gave a really good talk recently on what keeps him up at night - datasets so the cars know what they are dealing with.

It did make me wonder if firetrucks were accidentally left out of the datasets.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#98

Post by kjksf »

rwbcxrz wrote: post #87
kjksf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona "Phoenix is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With 1,626,078 people (as of 2017), Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide" Explain the criteria you used to classify it as "suburbs". Phoenix is the first metro area to launch the service. Waymo (and others) are testing in other places. From https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ : Kirkland (…

I lived and drove in the Phoenix metro area for many years, and there are very, very few areas that are as dense as most other cities. On top of that, the infrastructure is relatively new, the roads and lanes are nice and wide, and weather isn't a major concern almost all the time. GP's assertion that driving in Phoenix is easier than most other places is absolutely correct.

His assertion was that it's 100x harder to drive in Detroit during winter than in Phoenix. Is that absolutely correct?

I don't dispute that Phoenix is easier to drive than San Francisco or Detroit during winter.

It's perfectly rational to debut such service in the easiest possible environment.

I just don't think that it's a fundamentally different problem to make this work elsewhere.

This technology already improved by leaps and bounds. At first those cars couldn't finish a drive in the desert, with no other traffic.

I don't have an inside knowledge on this but the fact that they are already testing the cars in more difficult areas indicates they are working on more difficult problems.

It's anyone's guess how far they are on that front.

My guess is that after launching publicly in Phoenix, it'll take less than a year to launch publicly in San Francisco.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#99

Post by todd8 »

kjksf wrote: post #84
School-Cotton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think "works in Phoenix" is anywhere near "works in most places" ? I think the difficulty of driving in Phoenix suburbs is maybe 1% of the difficulty of driving in urban areas, anywhere with snow and rain, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona "Phoenix is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With 1,626,078 people (as of 2017), Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide" Explain the criteria you used to classify it as "suburbs". Phoenix is the first metro area to launch the service. Waymo (and others) are testing in other places. From https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ : Kirkland (…

> Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide

Yes, but that same source for population indicates that Phoenix is only the 169th most congested city in the U.S. It's suburbs are presumably even less congested.

Re: Why emergency braking systems sometimes hit parked cars and lane dividers

#100

Post by dchichkov »

lovemenot wrote: post #90
dchichkov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be even worse than that. They likely think that they are on the path, because they are running a massive data-collection campaign on the sensor suite installed on the fleet. But the reality might be different. Running a data collection campaign is easy. Engineering products with machine learning is hard. Most of the teams don't even know what they need to know, to do it right. And so they engage into classic…

>> Running a data collection campaign is easy. Not sure why you think so. If this is correct, there should be many other equivalent or better campaigns currently running at the same scale, right? On the contrary, I imagine that data is a very significant limiting factor in this field. Both data and computation are hard problems. AFAIK Tesla should still be leading in the former category by virtue of the number of its…

Do you know, if the data collection campaign that they are running is not a cargo cult? I don't. I hope it is a good and well designed campaign, because it utilizes useful society resources.

edit yes, personally I'm very impressed by the size of the campaign. It is just that again, there is a spectrum of difficulty between running a campaign even of this size and running it right, in a way that is actually useful to building a product. And still, in my opinion, building an autonomous vehicle is much harder in comparison, to running a campaign of that size in a right way.

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