Self-Driving vehicles

I’m not very impressed with that video at all. The car is only going 29 when it spots the deer and slows down to only 24. Then, the car veers back immediately after the deer clears the road instead of giving the animal ample room in case it turns around, which you can it start to do. That’s bad driving. You also need to look for the other three deer following the first one in the ditch that are about to jump out. I’d be a little impressed if he were driving along at 55 and the car actually slowed down to under 20 and steered correctly around the animal.

It is quite obvious from the behavior that the car is programmed to see a moving object of that size as a person and treats it as some sort of jaywalker rather than an unpredictable animal. It also appears from the video that the Tesla is more interested in maintaining speed than safely avoiding a potential obstacle.

Yeah, I felt about the same. But not a lot of deer videos up yet. :slight_smile:

Except for collisions with moose. It’s easy for a moose-car collision to propel a ton of animal right at the driver.

Hmm, I don’t know how much I want to dox myself. I’ll say that I’m from flyover territory and that I grew up rural enough that I am mocked, praised, and/or accused of being Canadian because of my accent. We don’t have mountains but I grew up driving plenty of hills and near rivers and wetlands that can make going off the road deadly. Dirt roads and narrow two lane highways are not unusual and I actually drove on one for my road test. When we travel to my in-laws, it’s a two hour drive and there is no interstate between here and there.

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When I’m having a bad day I tell myself, “at least I didn’t hit a moose.” I wish that was a joke.

Those may be the last roads for self-driving vehicles. But even in most of flyover territory, the interstates are pretty well built, with decent grading and shoulders and visibility and stuff.

False dichotomy. “Alien invasion” is “covered” with an “all perils (but those explicitly excluded)” since Alien invasion isn’t explicitly excluded.

The coverage I mentioned is explicitly listed as being covered (in main ISO forms anyway). If it’s explicitly state, there’s usually a reason for it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/uk-government-green-lights-self-driving-cars-motorways-2021-04-27/

The UK government on Wednesday became the first country to announce it will regulate the use of self-driving vehicles at slow speeds on motorways, with the first such cars possibly appearing on public roads as soon as this year.

Britain’s transport ministry said it was working on specific wording to update the country’s highway code for the safe use of self-driving vehicle systems, starting with Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) - which use sensors and software to keep cars within a lane, allowing them to accelerate and brake without driver input.

The government said the use of ALKS would be restricted to motorways, at speeds under 37 miles (60 km) per hour.

Gee, sounds like stuff I was ridiculed for saying on AO! (Article pasted in the spoilered section below if you don’t want to use one of your freebies from NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/technology/self-driving-cars-wait.html

The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On.

Many in Silicon Valley promised that self-driving cars would be a common sight by 2021. Now the industry is resetting expectations and settling in for years of more work.

By Cade Metz

May 24, 2021

It was seven years ago when Waymo discovered that spring blossoms made its self-driving cars get twitchy on the brakes. So did soap bubbles. And road flares.

New tests, in years of tests, revealed more and more distractions for the driverless cars. Their road skills improved, but matching the competence of human drivers was elusive. The cluttered roads of America, it turned out, were a daunting place for a robot.

The wizards of Silicon Valley said people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now. Instead, there have been court fights, injuries and deaths, and tens of billions of dollars spent on a frustratingly fickle technology that some researchers say is still years from becoming the industry’s next big thing.

Now the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset. Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the deepest-pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; auto giants; and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game.

Late last month, Lyft sold its autonomous vehicle unit to a Toyota subsidiary, Woven Planet, in a deal valued at $550 million. Uber offloaded its autonomous vehicle unit to another competitor in December. And three prominent self-driving start-ups have sold themselves to companies with much bigger budgetsover the past year.

The tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their driverless car projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic.

“This is a transformation that is going to happen over 30 years and possibly longer,” said Chris Urmson, an early engineer on the Google self-driving car project before it became the Alphabet business unit called Waymo. He is now chief executive of Aurora, the company that acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit.

So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its highest-profile companies.

That hype drew billions of dollars of investments, but it set up unrealistic expectations. In 2015, the electric carmaker Tesla’s billionaire boss, Elon Musk, said fully functional self-driving cars were just two years away. More than five years later, Tesla cars offered simpler autonomy designed solely for highway driving. Even that has been tinged with controversy after several fatal crashes (which the company blamed on misuse of the technology).

Perhaps no company experienced the turbulence of driverless car development more fitfully than Uber. After poaching 40 robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University and acquiring a self-driving truck start-up for $680 million in stock, the ride-hailing company settled a lawsuit from Waymo, which was followed by a guilty plea from a former executiveaccused of stealing intellectual property. A pedestrian in Arizona was killed in a crash with one of its driverless cars. In the end, Uber essentially paid Aurora to acquire its self-driving unit.

But for the deepest-pocketed companies, the science, they hope, continues to advance one improved ride at a time. In October, Waymo reached a notable milestone: It started the world’s first “fully autonomous” taxi service. In the suburbs of Phoenix, anyone can now ride in a minivan with no driver behind the wheel. But that does not mean the company will immediately deploy its technology in other parts of the country.

Dmitri Dolgov, who recently took over as Waymo’s co-chief executive after the departure of John Krafcik, an automobile industry veteran, said the company considered its Arizona service a test case. Based on what it has learned in Arizona, he said, Waymo is building a new version of its self-driving technology that it will eventually deploy in other places and other kinds of vehicles, including long-haul trucks.

The suburbs of Phoenix are particularly well suited to driverless cars. Streets are wide, pedestrians are few, and there is almost no rain or snow. Waymo supports its autonomous vehicles with remote technicians and roadside assistance crews who can help get cars out of a tight spot, either via the internet or in person.

“Autonomous vehicles can be deployed today, in certain situations,” said Elliot Katz, a former lawyer who counseled many of the big autonomous vehicle companies before launching a start-up, Phantom Auto, that provides software for remotely assisting and operating self-driving vehicles when they get stuck in difficult positions. “But you still need a human in the loop.”

Self-driving tech is not yet nimble enough to reliably handle the variety of situations human drivers encounter each day. It can usually handle suburban Phoenix, but it can’t duplicate the human chutzpah needed for merging into the Lincoln Tunnel in New York or dashing for an offramp on Highway 101 in Los Angeles.

“You have to peel back every layer before you can see the next layer” of challenges for the technology, said Nathaniel Fairfield, a Waymo software engineer who has worked on the project since 2009, describing some of the distractions faced by the cars. “Your car has to be pretty good at driving before you can really get it into the situations where it handles the next most challenging thing.”

Like Waymo, Aurora is now developing autonomous trucks as well as passenger vehicles. No company has deployed trucks without safety drivers behind the wheel, but Mr. Urmson and others argue that autonomous trucks will make it to market faster than anything designed to transport regular consumers.

Long-haul trucking does not involve passengers who might not be forgiving of twitchy brakes. The routes are also simpler. Once you master one stretch of highway, Mr. Urmson said, it is easier to master another. But even driving down a long, relatively straight highway is extraordinarily difficult. Delivering dinner orders across a small neighborhood is an even greater challenge.

“This is one of the biggest technical challenges of our generation,” said Dave Ferguson, another early engineer on the Google team who is now president of Nuro, a company focused on delivering groceries, pizzas and other goods.

Mr. Ferguson said many thought self-driving technology would improve like an internet service or a smartphone app. But robotics is a lot more challenging. It was wrong to claim anything else.

“If you look at almost every industry that is trying to solve really, really difficult technical challenges, the folks that tend to be involved are a little bit crazy and little bit optimistic,” he said. “You need to have that optimism to get up every day and bang your head against the wall to try to solve a problem that has never been solved, and it’s not guaranteed that it ever will be solved.”

Uber and Lyft aren’t entirely giving up on driverless cars. Even though it may not help the bottom line for a long time, they still want to deploy autonomous vehicles by teaming up with the companies that are still working on the technology. Lyft now says autonomous rides could arrive by 2023.

“These cars will be able to operate on a limited set of streets under a limited set of weather conditions at certain speeds,” said Jody Kelman, an executive at Lyft. “We will very safely be able to deploy these cars, but they won’t be able to go that many places.”

Some highlights:

Yeah, no kidding. I was definitely ridiculed for suggesting that this stuff was going to be difficult to solve.

I recall AOers confidently asserting the dates that they were hearing from executives.

I guess we’d have to define “commonplace” but this seems a little optimistic to me too. Not as wildly optimistic as “your next car will not have a steering wheel or brake pedal” said probably 5 years ago. But optimistic.

:rofl::rofl::rofl:
I remember calling him crazy at the time and being told I was crazy for calling Elon Musk crazy.

Yes, agree, for the reasons listed as well as others not mentioned.

Yep, I’ve been saying this for years!

I think another tricky thing is you can’t really do a gradual transition from human driving to self-driving I don’t think.

For example if you had a car that could drive by itself 95% of the time but then occasionally, in the worst conditions, it needed the human to drive that wouldn’t really be a great outcome because now you’ve got an inexperienced human behind the wheel at the most difficult moment.

Arguably we’re in a good spot now, with humans but some safety features, and would ideally stay that way until it’s 100% autonomous.

Yeah, I like the level II features on my car. Namely adaptive cruise control and a feature where it stays in clearly marked lanes as long as there’s no intersection or a moderately heavy rain. I don’t recall what that feature is called, and it’s annoying to have on all the time.

But if I’m getting out my sunglasses or opening a bottle of soda or eating fast food from the drive thru, it’s nice to feel like it’s reasonably safe to take my hands off the wheel for 90 seconds or so. And yes, I’ve even sent the occasional text message!

Honestly just the automatic braking I think is huge, but yeah some of those features are handy too. But still important if humans are going to be the safety net for them to remain highly experienced, imo.

not going to google the history, but how smooth was the transition from horses to manual cars? gradual or sudden? based on social acceptance or mandate?

this will probably be similar. having both self driving and manually driven cars on the road at the same time is just not optimal

I think it was gradual for a bit because cars were very expensive, and then GM made a mainstream model and it was pretty rapid.

I like reading old newspapers, so when I’m reading papers of the 1910s, I see stories of horse-drawn carriages & automobiles crashing… these were all at slow speeds, and the worst result in one of the stories is that one lady lost her hat.

The big issue, of course, is the quality/material of the roads. Roads intended for use by horses are very different from the ones we like for cars now.

I mentioned that this morning to my daughter, b/c we live in horse country. I mentioned that though the bridle trails do cross one of the main roads, and that they’re allowed to ride their horses on these roads, it’s really not great for the horses. People prefer to stick to riding their horses over dirt & turf. [obviously, not dragging any carts behind them]

That one is sometimes annoying. I’m slowing down at a slower rate than my car thinks I should be… perhaps with good reason. Like the light has already turned green and the cars have started to move so I’m trying to conserve energy and maximize my minimum speed and then WHAM… automatic brakes kick in when I was in no danger of hitting anything and had my foot on the brake ready to decelerate more rapidly if the cars in front of me don’t perform as I anticipate they will.

It’s costing me a little in terms of MPGs. And a little unnecessary wear & tear on my brakes. Not much, but a little.

But I suppose on balance it’s probably a good thing to put in cars. It’s not unsafe, just occasionally inefficient.

:laughing: yeah that does sound annoying, I haven’t had it give me any trouble although it does occasionally beep to warn me it’s stressed out when it doesn’t need to be.

I’ve never worked in Auto but I believe at one CAS conference on autonomous cars it was mentioned automatic braking is the one innovation with any significant loss benefit, although could be dated/wrong, I didn’t see any data myself.

GM?

By GM I meant Ford… I think?

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