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Google is "losing out" in the sense that it's actually making an effort to perfect the technology to the point where a car can safely drive itself with no drive

• mcphilip 10y ago
  Agreed. My suspicion is that they are way ahead of competitors in terms of data from testing self driving cars and realize there are still so many unsolved problems that true autonomous vehicles aren't going to happen nearly as soon as competitors claim. For instance, I see self-driving Google cars on a daily basis here in central Austin. There are a ton of zero visibility turns where you have to slowly edge out and hope no one is coming because visibility is blocked by a hedge. How can self-driving cars handle that scenario without delegating to manual intervention?
  • pinko 10y ago
    I agree with your point, but I'm not sure about your example! Can't self-driving cars "see" around the blind corner much earlier than a human could due to the fact that they have sensors on the very front of the car, as opposed to our "sensors" (eyes) back behind the windshield? They might do better!
    • Strom 10y ago
      Not only the placement, but with radars [1] you can see through a bunch of objects like trees, wooden fences, and indeed also hedges. Of course making sense of the data in a completely new environment is hard. This is where fleet learning helps a lot. [1] This one police radar seems to also nicely work through stone http://www.camero-tech.com/product.php?ID=38 http://www.camero-tech.com/product.php?ID=38
    • smileysteve 10y ago
      The self driving car can also react without a >=.7 second reaction time; which, at 60 mph is nearly 100 feet.
  • sosuke 10y ago
    As an Austin driver I can agree with the dangers of our roads but I think those zero visibility turns are solvable in exactly the manner you propose. Slowly edge out until a front corner sensor can look down the road. I'm sure there are an unlimited other factors I can't imagine so I understand it isn't as simple as that.
    • Animats 10y ago
      Exactly. With a point cloud system, the sensor system is aware of where its sensing is blocked.
  • PinguTS 10y ago
    Mercedes is working on that and it is partly available as a driving assistant called: Cross-Traffic Assist. But I assume there is still a lot of additional work to do. Second, it will come when cars finally talk to each other, which will become mandatory in a few years.
    • snowwrestler 10y ago
      Cars talking to each other is a terrible idea. I don't want your car to infect mine with a virus. It's bad enough that cars talk to central servers.
  • daveFNbuck 10y ago
    My question would be how can a human handle that scenario without computer assistance? You can always add a visual sensor near the front bumper of a self-driving car to safely let it peak around the corner without having to pull forward far enough to get hit.
    • futureproofd 10y ago
      Mud on front bumper...hmm
      • Naritai 10y ago
        No different from mud on a windshield. Alert goes off that it can't drive until the camera is cleaned off.
        • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
          So they'll automatically pull over to the side of the road, even if there's no shoulder? Or unsafe?
          • icebraining 10y ago
            No, they just won't do turns with poor visibility in the meantime.
        • damienkatz 10y ago
          Or some sort of cleaning mechanism on the sensor. A "wiper" if you will.
      • captaincanoe 10y ago
        How is it better to prevent the computer from safely see around the corner almost all the time only because mud will prevent it some of the time, but allow the human to continue driving while never being able to safely see around the corner?
    • stcredzero 10y ago
  • stephengillie 10y ago
    Get a human (or some other sensor) to look around the hedge? At some point, humans are going to become "just another sensor platform" for the car's autonomy to utilize. And then we can just work to replace human sensors with cheaper sensors.
  • electricEmu 10y ago
    I agree with your sentiment. Wouldn't the scenario you posed be solved by not turning in red lights though?
  • 1123581321 10y ago
    I agree with your main point. Google certainly has enough data to have encountered issues beyond the progress of the automakers advancing incrementally. However, I would not be surprised if Tesla's approach is also yielding advances unavailable to Google. I would love to see their results combined at some point. Discussing your specific example, I wonder if autonomous vehicles might learn to avoid blinds given enough crash data.
  • icebraining 10y ago
    How can self-driving cars handle that scenario without delegating to manual intervention? One possible way: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/ http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/
  • ape4 10y ago
    A camera on a telescoping pole.
  • DannyBee 10y ago
    There are a lot of things that are opaque to normal-band light that are transparent to other things, like infrared, ultraviolet etc (and vice versa). This goes for more than just light. It all depends on the wavelengths. One should not assume that simply because a human can't see through it, doesn't mean a computer with the right kinds of sensors can't.
  • OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
    You are not familiar with the technology. The sensors can easily "see" beyond a hedge easier than a person could. Look into it you'll see that the sensors have a far wider range of perception than a human driving.
  • cwilkes 10y ago
    Another thought: because all this data is collected and analyzed it will be easier to automatically report this as a problem intersection to the city planners. Granted this can happen now with people calling in but they will forget to do so, won't have images to show for backup, etc. Roads can be made safer this way.
  • taigeair 10y ago
    Radar?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• thr0waway1239 10y ago
  I don't know how much Google is perfecting the technology, but I agree with the sentiment about the other car makers. There should be the equivalent of a "do no harm" first approach when AI technology crosses some threshold and goes into life-or-death territory. People who talk about how computers are safer drivers than humans in the aggregate still don't seem to ask questions about the split second decisions humans can take when they are about to crash (and in general, all the pattern matching instincts humans have in potential crash situations) http://bogbit.com/vancouver-man-sacrifices-self-to-save-wife-unborn-child/ http://bogbit.com/vancouver-man-sacrifices-self-to-save-wife...
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • SamPhillips 10y ago
    Sure, but there are those 30,000-50,000[0] times a year that humans get it wrong too. Would you rather have surgery from a human with a 90% success rate but a 0.0001% of a heroic save, or a robot with a 98% success rate, with the bonus that the robot will only be getting better with more adoption. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
    • thr0waway1239 10y ago
      Please provide a reference to your comment about where robots are used completely unsupervised in surgery so we know the comparison is similar. The marketing message from autonomous car makers is that you can not only take your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the road, but also that you can put your full attention to a completely different task.
• jackcosgrove 10y ago
  This same argument could be extended to say that auto makers are ahead of Google. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression of the Google car was that it relied more on accurate maps, while the auto makers had better sensing hardware.
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Well, Google technically has "better sensing hardware" in that it has "more expensive sensing hardware". George Hotz estimated the cost of the sensors on a Google car at about $150,000. Obviously, every Tesla doesn't have that. But you are correct in that other companies design their cars to drive themselves, and Google's just making an overglorified Google Maps client with collision detection. And the reality that maps will never be accurate actually renders Google's methodology a complete nonstarter for ever being a real product.
• pjc50 10y ago
  Indeed. Calling a car that requires constant human supervision with the ability to retake control in a few hundred miliseconds "autonomous" is misleading and practically fraudulent. If it can't get from A to B without a human behind the wheel, it's not autonomous.
  • greglindahl 10y ago
    Here's the language that the US Federal Government uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification
    • QuercusMax 10y ago
      Seems like the key is providing a "sufficiently comfortable" time. To me that sounds like at least 15 seconds, but that's just a guess.
  • shogun21 10y ago
    It's even more dangerous if it creates a false sense of security.
  • robotresearcher 10y ago
    > If it can't get from A to B without a human behind the wheel, it's not autonomous. How about if it can achieve this 99.9% of the time, but needs help very occasionally? How many nines do you need? Humans are not at 100% overall. There's no clear definition of autonomy.
    • ghaff 10y ago
      It's hard to evaluate in terms of a percentage. Is that 99.9% of hours it's fine and the other 0.1% it will plow into something? That means that it will have an accident, possibly a serious one, one every 1,000 hrs. Which is probably about once a year for a lot of people.
      • 10y ago
• Eridrus 10y ago
  If I were Google, I would be concerned that competitors are getting much more data much more cheaply than they are and that recent advances in image recognition/processing make the tech that much easier for Ford, etc to build in-house without having to license it from Google. Though I guess Google/Uber are probably getting significantly higher resolution data than Tesla/MobileEye/etc since you can't stream all sensor data back to HQ over LTE. I think a lot of these articles are driven by the fact that Google has been working on this for so long and yet we have upstarts that are getting cars on the road in a fraction of the time. It's very possible that Google overestimated the problems with Level 3 Autonomy and the public backlash associated with it and building L3 tech as an on-ramp towards L4 may turn out to be the correct path to market and funding further development effort.
  • dave1619 10y ago
    Most Tesla cars are connected to wifi when parked at home, so that's when data can be uploaded to Tesla's servers.
    • Eridrus 10y ago
      Ah, that makes sense. Still, I sort of expect raw sensor data to be very high volume, so Tesla engineers can probably deploy "queries" to the fleet for which data to upload, but not get the whole thing.
  • Fricken 10y ago
    Google had come out saying they don't believe that an incremental approach will lead to fully driverless cars; at some point the leap has to be made. Sooner rather than later in Google's case. Given that Google doesn't make cars, I don't really see how they would go about commercializing L3, even though it's well within their capacity from an innovation standpoint. I really don't think they expected the auto industry to respond so aggressively with their own proprietary autonomous driving OSs, determined to shut Google out. At this stage their only option is to get to six sigma level 4 in a way that leaves everyone else scratching their heads wondering how Google did that. It's going to take a lot longer than Google anticipated. Now Google could probably release level 4 quite soon in a limited capacity that's more an amusement park ride than a relable, profitable transportation service, but it's probably smarter for them to keep their eye on the prize and keep plugging away at it. They're in too deep to throw in the towel.
• 6DM 10y ago
  I wonder if Google is worried their competitors will actually "ruin" things by getting a bunch of people killed. Thus causing huge regulations or potetionally alienating the population to the point that nobody will trust autonomus cars anymore.
  • AlphaSite 10y ago
    This is the same fear that many supporters of VR have; the risk of pointing people's impressions of VR from cheap, substandard experiences which induce nausea and frankly just aren't very interesting. HTC/Valve and Occulus have produced a high quality product and then you have the trashy phoneVR which isn't even comparable. Is the prevalence of a substandard VR behind the recent slump in sales? It's fairly probable (with other factors).
    • cLeEOGPw 10y ago
      Slump in sales might just mean that people who wanted to buy the device have bought it already and other people are not interested enough to buy it. There are many explanations to it, blaming phone VR is one of less probable ones I think.
  • dboreham 10y ago
    "anymore"??
    • 6DM 10y ago
      I guess this guy trusted autopilot: http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/30/12072408/tesla-autopilot-car-crash-death-autonomous-model-s http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/30/12072408/tesla-autopilot-c... Not to mention the youtube video of those two guys sleeping while the car is driving. (can't find a link, sorry) Personally I'll be Will Smith in the movie "I, Robot" and will never trust them.
• mason240 10y ago
  I think these "attentive driver systems" like lane assist, auto braking, ect, are eventually going to get banned by the DOT because they seem to be causing people to over rely on them and drive distracted. They keep causing high profile fatal accidents, like the recent one where a guy was watching a movie with lane assist on and his car plowed right into a the back of a semi. It's going to get to a point where they say it's all or nothing, we can't rely on people to stay attentive when the car is doing 90% of the driving.
  • spullara 10y ago
    1 crash is literally all of them. Also it was a truck passing across the path of tge vehicle.
    • makomk 10y ago
      1 crash is more than the expected number of crashes for that amount of highway driving, at least from the stats I've seen, and driving at full speed under a truck despite having more than enough time to break is a really nasty failure mode.
    • krapp 10y ago
      >Also it was a truck passing across the path of the vehicle That is exactly the sort of situation self-driving cars are expected to be perfect, or at least superior, to humans at handling. If they're no better than a human driver or even a bit worse when edge-cases occur than what's the point?
  • nil_is_me 10y ago
    Right, 1 accident. Have we banned air travel due to all of the crashes?
    • throwaway7767 10y ago
      The statistics aren't in yet, and it's too soon to make a reasonable comparison. That said, I think GP will be proven right in time. Risk compensation[0] is a well-documented phenomenon and this seems highly likely to trigger that sort of behaviour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
• SEJeff 10y ago
  Not really. Tesla has made it overwhelmingly clear that their plan is full autonomy in the entire fleet. Tesla is doing it a bit more brazenly, but they're also getting real data to run analytics / mathematical models over (the big in "big data") which will make their solution safer than Google's over the long term. This blog post pretty much sums it up: https://electrek.co/2016/04/11/google-self-driving-car-tesla-autopilot/ https://electrek.co/2016/04/11/google-self-driving-car-tesla... They'll also have the equiv of a waze killer when the model 3 hits and there are a lot more Tesla vehicles on the road. As it stands today, I am literally unable to come to work and back without seeing at least 2-3 Teslas (model S or X) on the road in Chicago. Tesla is on their way to be a bit of a creepy monopolist, but I'd rather them do it than say General Motors.
  • cromwellian 10y ago
    Safer how? They are missing cameras and sensors, this won't be a simple software upgrade. I think people are handwaving away the true difficulty of door-to-door (as opposed to lane-keeping) driver-less cars that can operate safely without humans being attentive all the time.
    • robotresearcher 10y ago
      > They are missing cameras and sensors Human drivers have actively-pointed stereo vision sensors, IMU, and haptic feedback from the steering wheel and pedals. That's it. We know it can be done with only those sensors.
      • cromwellian 10y ago
        We know it can be done unsafely, to the tune of 30,000 deaths on American highways every year. We want cars to have super human sensor capability, otherwise, there's no point.
        • buzzybee 10y ago
          I think the criticism is real, but also that we market the pre-stage 4 technologies inappropriately by implementing them as binary "completely hands off, else emergency" systems. Integrated in a way that is more assisted, keeping the driver in control of the overall decisions but making some cautionary adjustments to implementation of those decisions to adjust speed or direction to stay in lane, avoid excessive tailgating, allow merges, etc., they could still be powerful tools to reduce some number of that death toll.
• ThomPete 10y ago
  We have had autopilot in the form of speed control for years, but perhaps it will be so widespread that there will be too many accidents. On the other hand one could argue that putting these sub-par systems out there teach us a lot we couldn't learn in a closed environment. Also as far as I am aware, Google have had their self-driving cars driving on the road for year now.
• tronje 10y ago
  Little bit of a tangent here, but I've always hated the fact that Tesla calls its assisted driving thingy "autopilot", which clearly implies complete autonomy, while still requiring a person to stay alert and intervene at a moment's notice. What Google is trying to do is an actual autopilot, which is much more difficult, I suppose.
  • spullara 10y ago
    Autopilot is accurate but most people don't know wat a plane's autopilot does.
    • Xylakant 10y ago
      A plane autopilot is supposed to be capable of flying the plane unattended and handing over control in an orderly, controlled fashion before critical problems arise [1]. A ships autopilot is expected to do the same. The same should be expected from a car autopilot. The fact that the environment is much much simpler for planes and ships doesn't change the fundamental expectation. As long as car autopilots are not capable of fulfilling the expectation that they can autonomously and safely control a car in a given real-worlds environment with other participant they should not be marketed as autopilots. They're driving assist programs. [1] there are examples where this did not happen, but they're considered a failure.
      • danielsju6 10y ago
        A plane's auto-pilot maintains bearing, altitude, and speed—seems pretty similar to "lane assist" / tesla-autopilot to me. Some can land, in optimal conditions, but can't taxi.
        • dogma1138 10y ago
          Landings are also mostly automated just through a different system(s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland
• xwvvvvwx 10y ago
  I have always been of the opinion that the best way to build high quality software is to build small increments and test them in the field as early as possible. To me it seems so hard as to be almost impossible to jump directly from no computer assistance to fully autonomous driving, without first moving through (and learning from) all of the semi-autonomous steps in between.
  • lawless123 10y ago
    Problem is here people die, not a server.
  • kmonsen 10y ago
    Most car companies (and Google/Apple) is testing it in controlled environment or with professional drivers behind the wheel. Tesla on regular highways with sleepy consumers behind the wheel.
• devy 10y ago
  Google’s self-driving car project team is also having a brain drain when a handful of high profile engineers jumping out of the boat. This to me is a bigger issue contributing to the "losing out" scenario.
• findjashua 10y ago
  yep, google seems to be the only one trying to make it truly 'driver-less'
• Fricken 10y ago
  It's an interesting comparison between Uber and Google. Both of them are L4 or bust, but while Google is developing in an ivory tower, Uber is directly in the fray. This means that Uber can implement 'mostly there' driveless vehicles in a patchwork fashion before everything is perfect. If Ubers engineers can master a circuit for driverless cars that runs from, say, the airport to downtown and back, but only when the weather is good and traffic is light, they can do it because they've got the human drivers available to pick up any slack in the service. With Google, if they're only taking passengers partway to their destination or if the system is down 20% of the time, it's just going to piss people off.
  • personjerry 10y ago
    I think it's interesting that the drivers are funding the research that makes them redundant. Though I supposed most R&D works similarly?
  • kartan 10y ago
    > Uber is directly in the fray Do you mean Tesla? Is quite pointless for Uber to have a car that almost drives itself. They are not car makers trying to sell a better product, they need to get rid of the driver to get any money out of it. If you are going from the airport to downtown you don't want your car to stop working because it is starting to rain and wait until a human driver comes along. I think that in that sense Uber is competing directly against Google and not, for example, Tesla. And it looks like Google's technology is more mature, even that it is still not good enough. For Google is a long time investment, I think that Uber is quite wrong if they think that is a short time investment for them.
    • stale2002 10y ago
      These problems aren't that big of a deal. There are lots of places where it doesn't rain very much. They could also be running only when the weather forecast says that it will definitely not rain. If there are problem locations where it is difficult to drive, simply don't run them in those locations! Also, they could have self driving being opt in for a discount. If there are problems, well you signed HP for it. Don't want to deal with them, then don't take the 90 percent discount!
• ap22213 10y ago
  That's kind of the point though. Google seems to think of itself more as a research institution than a business. When I think of companies that are good at execution, Google isn't on the list.
• mathattack 10y ago
  Yes - Google's endgame is much more ambitious. It does them no good to get close.
• jlarocco 10y ago
  I think jumping to fully autonomous is a mistake. Gradually introducing self-driving features lets the competition gradually gain consumer trust and confidence in the technology, as well as giving them more data for future improvements, and it also gives them a revenue stream to fund future development.
• cowardlydragon 10y ago
  That is a stupid approach. Cars have always been coevolutionary with infrastructure and, hell, society as a whole. Why solve a problem for a point in time and its assumptions... the hard way? By adopting adaptive and coevolutionary timelines, self-driving cars and a society that uses them can "organically" (sorry for the buzzword) adopt them. And ignores multiple levels of useful intermediate achievements: stage 1: self-driving on superhighways for the long haul: a wayyyy easier task with much more controlled information, markings, protocols, risks, etc. And with massive payoffs in consumer and business transportation. stage 2: more extreme weather events, highways besides superhighways, handle commuting and congestion after that: progressively more local streets and conditions.