6 ms·

>> Emergency braking should be on unless explicitly disabled I'm trying to think of a scenario outside of a mechanic's garage that emergency braking would ever

>> Emergency braking should be on unless explicitly disabled I'm trying to think of a scenario outside of a mechanic's garage that emergency braking would ever be disabled. This should really be mandatory on all cars.

startling 10y ago
fog / rain / low visibility (potentially fooling the sensor into thinking there's an object in front of you), cars behind you?
- beamatronic 10y ago
  That raises an interesting question: It is 2016, do we ( or do we not ) currently have economically feasible technology to place into cars that can reliably and accurately determine when you are about to hit a solid object or not?
  - mapt 10y ago
    Define "Solid object". In the lab, opaque textured objects in sufficient lighting are pretty easy to localize by a variety of methods. Reflective objects are quite a lot harder, but there are methods that work. Reflective objects through distortion like rain/fog... harder, but often doable. In low light? Depends. The weird thing with environment modelling in computer vision is that there are a lot of overlapping methods, but sensor fusion of these methods is rarely attempted. Most robots end up with a pair of laser rangefinders or a pair of cameras or something equally simple to program. Creating a high-reliability automated vehicle that can bypass all the edge cases where these things fail is another thing entirely. You want overlapping, inter-reinforcing models of the world, with algorithms that not only identify items in a well-calibrated system, but calibrate the system in real time based on items identified. My lab was really excited about replacing stereoscopic computer vision with monocular computer vision for 3D modelling, but the opposite direction is where you want to go if you care about as many 9's of reliability as possible and hardware is cheap. You want a few dozen cameras with fixed orientation, you want parallax laser rangefinders in a variety of bands, you want time of travel LIDAR units, you want a {GPS + 3DoF gyroscope + 3DoF magnetometer + 3 DoF accelerometer + barometer + thermometer}†, you want ultrasonic and radar rangefinders; You want everything you can get. You want enough lenses that if one gets obscured by water, hey, there are others that will pick up the slack, and do it without bothering the driver. You want to shrink the 'no coverage of object in environment' surface as small as possible. Nobody seems to respect this on the academic software side. Novelty, sure, but people don't seem to earn grants publishing extra 9's using a mashup of a bunch of pricy sensors. 'Less is more' is not how you get the data needed to make things reliable, it's how you get best-case detection rather than worst-case awareness. †This combination is now found in quadrotor IMUs. Each individual sensor is inaccurate enough that it would be useless for automation, but combine them to check each other's deficits and you get a remarkably elegant system.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Where the solid object is a car or truck, yes. Phased array radar is good enough for that, and there are lots of deployed units on the road. Telephone poles, deer, and pedestrians - maybe.
ctdonath 10y ago
Which promptly trains all drivers into a "meh" attitude toward braking, leaving it to the computer, and then surprised into paralysis (and subsequent crash) when it doesn't work.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  law of unintended consequences. I can even imagine a net increase in accidents until the technology is mature enough to actually take over full responsibility. So far all of the assistive technologies were straightforward to understand and control - by that I mean ABS, ESP, velocity keeping, and autobraking. You were never tempted to think that the car will drive for you with these. But the moment you add lane keeping and take over the steering wheel, there's no immediate obligation to pay attention anymore. It's deep in the uncanny valley and I'll have none of it until we have fully autonomous cars.
- jsight 10y ago
  That sounds like exactly what happened in the crash scenario. The driver tapped the break, said "meh, the car will handle it" and then plowed into the car in front of them. I'm pretty leery of these systems at the moment due to people using them like this. That's just not what they are ready for at the moment and people's unrealistic expectations are leading them down dangerous paths.
- nlawalker 10y ago
  Is this not basically what Autopilot is doing for driving in general?
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Another user linked a Fifth Gear video testing the auto-braking systems in Volvo/Mercedes/VW cars. In it, they say the auto-braking systems only engage by braking hard at the last second specifically so you don't get blasé about it as if it were a smooth controlled braking. It's not a mode you want to use because it really feels like you're going to crash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo
  - 10y ago
superuser2 10y ago
In some urban environments it is necessary to nudge very slowly through pedestrian crossings to thread through gaps; if the car brakes at the sight of any perceived obstacle and waits for a totally clear right of way, there are certain crosswalks and right turns in Chicago you will not pass for several hours.
- function_seven 10y ago
  Good point. For those situations, there should be a separate override button to disable the feature, just like there often is one for traction control (on normally, button lights up when disabled). Or for the passenger airbag back before weight sensors replaced a manual override. But otherwise, even when in manual driving mode, the emergency brake feature should be active and watching for impending collisions.
  - will_hughes 10y ago
    It is, but if when it starts braking you press the brake pedal, it turns off under the assumption that you want to manage braking.
    - function_seven 10y ago
      That's why it should be a separate button, so that it never assumes you want to manage braking unless you specifically turn the system off. Just pressing the brake pedal doesn't mean you want automatic braking to go away.
  - eru 10y ago
    Just make the emergency brakes kick in only above 5km/h?
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Well if you're going under 5mph then it's not really 'emergency braking' any more.
shalmanese 10y ago
The canonical example would be a plastic bag on the freeway.
- slacka 10y ago
  The point is any anti-collision system should be smart enough to tell the difference between a car and a bag. It should NEVER let you plow into another car just because you tapped the brake. It shouldn't even matter if autopilot is on or off. Only if this was a child or animal, could I see the bag argument. Also, it was a UI failure not notifying the driver clearly that auto-pilot has disengaged. Even the primitive cruise control in my car has a big green light, that turns off when you tap the break. The more autonomous a car is, the more important it is to clearly notify the driver of control handoff.
  - gambiting 10y ago
    Well of course, but there are always edge cases. Large rock, or a football? A person, vs. a cardboard cutout of a person? An empty plastic bag, vs. heavy bag with clearly something in it? A human can instantly tell the difference between all three, but for a computer to do it you would need some extremely good image recognition(in the case of a loaded bag the problem becomes near impossible, it's hard enough to just recognize something as a bag, being able to tell if it's weighted requires spatial awareness that no one proposed how to solve yet). In the meantime out best of the best image recognition software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. So for now, while we wait for the algorithms to improve, there should always be an easy (with an emphasis on easy) way to disable automatic breaking.
Animats 10y ago
It's surprising that Tesla made that choice. BMW's anti-collision system is on even during manual driving.[1] BMW will brake even if the driver is pressing the accelerator. So will Volvo. Top Gear compares the various systems as of 2015.[2] Volvo did best; Mercedes didn't stop soon enough and hit the dummy car. VW's city car only does this up to 18MPH. Maybe Tesla has a false-alarm problem that BMW and Volvo have overcome. More to the point, this behavior needs to be standardized, or people shifting from one car to another will do the wrong thing. The National Transportation Safety Board is working on this.[3] In a few years, anti-collision may be as standard as anti-skid is now. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7494989/bmw-i3-self-parking-anti-collision-ces-2015 http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7494989/bmw-i3-self-parking... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo [3] http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-recs/recletters/H-15-008-009.pdf http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-recs/recletters/H-15-008-0...
- sundvor 10y ago
  I love, love, love the dynamic cruise control on my 2014 Mazda 3 Astina. I stretched my budget for this, our 2nd car, as I was dead set on getting next generation safety features. Got an ex demo manual, couldn't be happier with the overall package. Even though my car is a 6sp manual, the automatic distance keeping is making the commute much more relaxing. I can't recommend it enough. Funnily enough the radar system is separate to the AEB, which uses cameras. AEB stands for automatic / autonomous emergency braking. As I'm someone who likes to know how stuff works, especially in cars for familiarity should a real event occur, I did set out to experience how AEB works. I rigged some large but light cardboard boxes, reversed down the road a bit, accelerated quickly to around 40 km/h, kept the throttle pedal steady as though if to drive through them. All times, although it felt like surely it wouldn't, the car intervened at the very last second. The first time it drove through them by a metre. The next two times the car stopped before impact. System uses 100% brake force engaging the ABS and also putting on the hazard lights for good measure. I came out highly impressed. It ought to pick up cars better, but I'm not about to actively try that.
gambiting 10y ago
You are going 80mph on a motorway, and a large shopping bag blows into your way - having the car do an emergency stop in that situation would be extremely dangerous, so a gentle tap on the brake to tell that car "yes, I am in control of the situation, there is an obstacle in front but I don't mind hitting it" is the only solution.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Signalling the car "yes, I'm in control" is a good and only solution, however, tapping the brakes is (a) definitely not the only way to signal that; (b) not a intuitive way to do that if you really want to make this signal but aren't sure how; (c) not a safe interpretation, as it's likely that people will tap the brake with other intent than the signal "it's ok, I got this". An appropriate way to signal it would be distinct from any emergency controls and also show a highly visible signal that you've turned the system off and are in a different "mode"; even a simple separate dashboard switch with a light would be better for it than the brake pedal.
Ntrails 10y ago
> I'm trying to think of a scenario outside of a mechanic's garage that emergency braking would ever be disabled. This should really be mandatory on all cars. So there's an accident, and I swerve to avoid. I think I'm going to make it but the car isn't certain so it brakes, and it brakes really fucking hard. At this point who is responsible for what happens? Breaking like that fundamentally changes the behaviour of the car. If I had just braked, maybe I stop in time maybe I don't - I chose another option and it is completely valid. The very idea of that kind of behaviour terrifies me. I'll take a 100% automated car with pleasure, but I have no interest at all in this hybrid control concept. I would turn that shit off on delivery.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > So there's an accident, and I swerve to avoid. I think I'm going to make it but the car isn't certain so it brakes, and it brakes really fucking hard. At this point who is responsible for what happens? I'm having problems understanding your scenario. How exactly does the car breaking prevent you from swerving? The brakes should only stop your car mid-swerve, and you wouldn't collide. The only scenario when speed is an advantage when swerving is when you're trying to needle into an opening in the next lane and you need to match the speed of a 3rd car
  - daveguy 10y ago
    When swerving you should not apply the brake. It will cause you to lose control in the swerve.
    - Kadin 10y ago
      Not with a decent ABS system, and all the cars that have automatic braking have pretty good ABS.
  - marvin 10y ago
    Braking uses all the traction between your tires and the road to slow down your car, and you will be unable to turn. In the case of ABS, you will turn at a slower rate than if you hadn't been braking.
kqr 10y ago
Granted, ABS invalidates the following argument a little, but not entirely. The traditional wisdom when faced with bad road conditions and an impending accident is that maintaining control through steering is much preferable to braking, which lowers the speed with which you can manoeuvre out of the situation. It all depends so much on various variables so I find it hard to categorically say "it should always be on."
orasis 10y ago
I can think of two top of mind. A deer crossing the road in icy conditions. Its better to hit the deer than lose control. a large tumble weed blowing across the road with someone tail gating you.

startling 10y ago

fog / rain / low visibility (potentially fooling the sensor into thinking there's an object in front of you), cars behind you?

beamatronic 10y ago
That raises an interesting question: It is 2016, do we ( or do we not ) currently have economically feasible technology to place into cars that can reliably and accurately determine when you are about to hit a solid object or not?
- mapt 10y ago
  Define "Solid object". In the lab, opaque textured objects in sufficient lighting are pretty easy to localize by a variety of methods. Reflective objects are quite a lot harder, but there are methods that work. Reflective objects through distortion like rain/fog... harder, but often doable. In low light? Depends. The weird thing with environment modelling in computer vision is that there are a lot of overlapping methods, but sensor fusion of these methods is rarely attempted. Most robots end up with a pair of laser rangefinders or a pair of cameras or something equally simple to program. Creating a high-reliability automated vehicle that can bypass all the edge cases where these things fail is another thing entirely. You want overlapping, inter-reinforcing models of the world, with algorithms that not only identify items in a well-calibrated system, but calibrate the system in real time based on items identified. My lab was really excited about replacing stereoscopic computer vision with monocular computer vision for 3D modelling, but the opposite direction is where you want to go if you care about as many 9's of reliability as possible and hardware is cheap. You want a few dozen cameras with fixed orientation, you want parallax laser rangefinders in a variety of bands, you want time of travel LIDAR units, you want a {GPS + 3DoF gyroscope + 3DoF magnetometer + 3 DoF accelerometer + barometer + thermometer}†, you want ultrasonic and radar rangefinders; You want everything you can get. You want enough lenses that if one gets obscured by water, hey, there are others that will pick up the slack, and do it without bothering the driver. You want to shrink the 'no coverage of object in environment' surface as small as possible. Nobody seems to respect this on the academic software side. Novelty, sure, but people don't seem to earn grants publishing extra 9's using a mashup of a bunch of pricy sensors. 'Less is more' is not how you get the data needed to make things reliable, it's how you get best-case detection rather than worst-case awareness. †This combination is now found in quadrotor IMUs. Each individual sensor is inaccurate enough that it would be useless for automation, but combine them to check each other's deficits and you get a remarkably elegant system.
- Animats 10y ago
  Where the solid object is a car or truck, yes. Phased array radar is good enough for that, and there are lots of deployed units on the road. Telephone poles, deer, and pedestrians - maybe.

ctdonath 10y ago

Which promptly trains all drivers into a "meh" attitude toward braking, leaving it to the computer, and then surprised into paralysis (and subsequent crash) when it doesn't work.

m_mueller 10y ago
law of unintended consequences. I can even imagine a net increase in accidents until the technology is mature enough to actually take over full responsibility. So far all of the assistive technologies were straightforward to understand and control - by that I mean ABS, ESP, velocity keeping, and autobraking. You were never tempted to think that the car will drive for you with these. But the moment you add lane keeping and take over the steering wheel, there's no immediate obligation to pay attention anymore. It's deep in the uncanny valley and I'll have none of it until we have fully autonomous cars.
jsight 10y ago
That sounds like exactly what happened in the crash scenario. The driver tapped the break, said "meh, the car will handle it" and then plowed into the car in front of them. I'm pretty leery of these systems at the moment due to people using them like this. That's just not what they are ready for at the moment and people's unrealistic expectations are leading them down dangerous paths.
nlawalker 10y ago
Is this not basically what Autopilot is doing for driving in general?
kalleboo 10y ago
Another user linked a Fifth Gear video testing the auto-braking systems in Volvo/Mercedes/VW cars. In it, they say the auto-braking systems only engage by braking hard at the last second specifically so you don't get blasé about it as if it were a smooth controlled braking. It's not a mode you want to use because it really feels like you're going to crash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo
- 10y ago

superuser2 10y ago

In some urban environments it is necessary to nudge very slowly through pedestrian crossings to thread through gaps; if the car brakes at the sight of any perceived obstacle and waits for a totally clear right of way, there are certain crosswalks and right turns in Chicago you will not pass for several hours.

function_seven 10y ago
Good point. For those situations, there should be a separate override button to disable the feature, just like there often is one for traction control (on normally, button lights up when disabled). Or for the passenger airbag back before weight sensors replaced a manual override. But otherwise, even when in manual driving mode, the emergency brake feature should be active and watching for impending collisions.
- will_hughes 10y ago
  It is, but if when it starts braking you press the brake pedal, it turns off under the assumption that you want to manage braking.
  - function_seven 10y ago
    That's why it should be a separate button, so that it never assumes you want to manage braking unless you specifically turn the system off. Just pressing the brake pedal doesn't mean you want automatic braking to go away.
- eru 10y ago
  Just make the emergency brakes kick in only above 5km/h?
Dylan16807 10y ago
Well if you're going under 5mph then it's not really 'emergency braking' any more.

shalmanese 10y ago

The canonical example would be a plastic bag on the freeway.

slacka 10y ago
The point is any anti-collision system should be smart enough to tell the difference between a car and a bag. It should NEVER let you plow into another car just because you tapped the brake. It shouldn't even matter if autopilot is on or off. Only if this was a child or animal, could I see the bag argument. Also, it was a UI failure not notifying the driver clearly that auto-pilot has disengaged. Even the primitive cruise control in my car has a big green light, that turns off when you tap the break. The more autonomous a car is, the more important it is to clearly notify the driver of control handoff.
- gambiting 10y ago
  Well of course, but there are always edge cases. Large rock, or a football? A person, vs. a cardboard cutout of a person? An empty plastic bag, vs. heavy bag with clearly something in it? A human can instantly tell the difference between all three, but for a computer to do it you would need some extremely good image recognition(in the case of a loaded bag the problem becomes near impossible, it's hard enough to just recognize something as a bag, being able to tell if it's weighted requires spatial awareness that no one proposed how to solve yet). In the meantime out best of the best image recognition software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. So for now, while we wait for the algorithms to improve, there should always be an easy (with an emphasis on easy) way to disable automatic breaking.

Animats 10y ago

It's surprising that Tesla made that choice. BMW's anti-collision system is on even during manual driving.[1] BMW will brake even if the driver is pressing the accelerator. So will Volvo. Top Gear compares the various systems as of 2015.[2] Volvo did best; Mercedes didn't stop soon enough and hit the dummy car. VW's city car only does this up to 18MPH. Maybe Tesla has a false-alarm problem that BMW and Volvo have overcome. More to the point, this behavior needs to be standardized, or people shifting from one car to another will do the wrong thing. The National Transportation Safety Board is working on this.[3] In a few years, anti-collision may be as standard as anti-skid is now. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7494989/bmw-i3-self-parking-anti-collision-ces-2015 http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7494989/bmw-i3-self-parking... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHM6PVTjXo [3] http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-recs/recletters/H-15-008-009.pdf http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-recs/recletters/H-15-008-0...

sundvor 10y ago
I love, love, love the dynamic cruise control on my 2014 Mazda 3 Astina. I stretched my budget for this, our 2nd car, as I was dead set on getting next generation safety features. Got an ex demo manual, couldn't be happier with the overall package. Even though my car is a 6sp manual, the automatic distance keeping is making the commute much more relaxing. I can't recommend it enough. Funnily enough the radar system is separate to the AEB, which uses cameras. AEB stands for automatic / autonomous emergency braking. As I'm someone who likes to know how stuff works, especially in cars for familiarity should a real event occur, I did set out to experience how AEB works. I rigged some large but light cardboard boxes, reversed down the road a bit, accelerated quickly to around 40 km/h, kept the throttle pedal steady as though if to drive through them. All times, although it felt like surely it wouldn't, the car intervened at the very last second. The first time it drove through them by a metre. The next two times the car stopped before impact. System uses 100% brake force engaging the ABS and also putting on the hazard lights for good measure. I came out highly impressed. It ought to pick up cars better, but I'm not about to actively try that.

gambiting 10y ago

You are going 80mph on a motorway, and a large shopping bag blows into your way - having the car do an emergency stop in that situation would be extremely dangerous, so a gentle tap on the brake to tell that car "yes, I am in control of the situation, there is an obstacle in front but I don't mind hitting it" is the only solution.

PeterisP 10y ago
Signalling the car "yes, I'm in control" is a good and only solution, however, tapping the brakes is (a) definitely not the only way to signal that; (b) not a intuitive way to do that if you really want to make this signal but aren't sure how; (c) not a safe interpretation, as it's likely that people will tap the brake with other intent than the signal "it's ok, I got this". An appropriate way to signal it would be distinct from any emergency controls and also show a highly visible signal that you've turned the system off and are in a different "mode"; even a simple separate dashboard switch with a light would be better for it than the brake pedal.

Ntrails 10y ago

> I'm trying to think of a scenario outside of a mechanic's garage that emergency braking would ever be disabled. This should really be mandatory on all cars. So there's an accident, and I swerve to avoid. I think I'm going to make it but the car isn't certain so it brakes, and it brakes really fucking hard. At this point who is responsible for what happens? Breaking like that fundamentally changes the behaviour of the car. If I had just braked, maybe I stop in time maybe I don't - I chose another option and it is completely valid. The very idea of that kind of behaviour terrifies me. I'll take a 100% automated car with pleasure, but I have no interest at all in this hybrid control concept. I would turn that shit off on delivery.

sangnoir 10y ago
> So there's an accident, and I swerve to avoid. I think I'm going to make it but the car isn't certain so it brakes, and it brakes really fucking hard. At this point who is responsible for what happens? I'm having problems understanding your scenario. How exactly does the car breaking prevent you from swerving? The brakes should only stop your car mid-swerve, and you wouldn't collide. The only scenario when speed is an advantage when swerving is when you're trying to needle into an opening in the next lane and you need to match the speed of a 3rd car
- daveguy 10y ago
  When swerving you should not apply the brake. It will cause you to lose control in the swerve.
  - Kadin 10y ago
    Not with a decent ABS system, and all the cars that have automatic braking have pretty good ABS.
- marvin 10y ago
  Braking uses all the traction between your tires and the road to slow down your car, and you will be unable to turn. In the case of ABS, you will turn at a slower rate than if you hadn't been braking.

kqr 10y ago

Granted, ABS invalidates the following argument a little, but not entirely. The traditional wisdom when faced with bad road conditions and an impending accident is that maintaining control through steering is much preferable to braking, which lowers the speed with which you can manoeuvre out of the situation. It all depends so much on various variables so I find it hard to categorically say "it should always be on."

orasis 10y ago

I can think of two top of mind. A deer crossing the road in icy conditions. Its better to hit the deer than lose control. a large tumble weed blowing across the road with someone tail gating you.