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Self-Driving Cars Have a Bicycle Problem

68 points by type0 10y ago

codemac 10y ago
Human driven cars have a bicycle problem as well. Humans aren't very good at predicting or seeing them either in dense urban areas. Grade separation is the way to go!
- bamboozled 10y ago
  Did you just make that up ?
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    Make what up? Ask any cyclist, and they'll be able to recite to you a long litany of horror stories involving human-driven vehicles. I routinely deal with multiple cars driving in the (non-grade-separated) bike lane on my commute every single day.
    - wtvanhest 10y ago
      Yeah, I started commuting via bike recently. 5sh miles, all on busy city streets. Up valencia, then market, then about a mile along embarcadero. We really need to do something about people parking in bike lanes and in my opinion should completely close market to cars. Allow chariots, public buses etc. Anything with 5+ passangers, but close it to everyone else. There is just too much going on to have that mix. We also desperately need more grade-seperated bike lanes and bicycle only traffic signals that are aggressively policed.
    - bamboozled 10y ago
      Sorry if I offended you or anyone else. I too commute a lot via bicyle and also drive, which is why I disputed your comment. I find motorists often see me fine...when they're paying attention and I'm using common sense, ie lights when riding at dawn, not running reds etc. We're talking about vision / detection here, not people being unattentive, aggressive or inconsiderate, which seems to be the actual problem with motorists and cyclists. If a self-driving car is 100% dedicated to driving and still has problems detecting bikes 75% (at best) in optimum conditions, that's a different and important issue that I don't believe exists in human drivers today. I actually hope for both our sakes that if self-driving cars do take over, it's for our benefit as cyclists.
      - CydeWeys 10y ago
        No offense taken, I just couldn't make heads nor tails of your comment. I too am quite optimistic that self-driving cars will be vastly better to deal with than human-driven ones. The constant 360 vision and 100% adherence to turn signaling will be vast improvements. Every day I deal with drivers making unexpected turns, and not checking for the presence of bikers before turning across a path that bikers might be traveling in. Self-driving cars won't have these problems.
        m0nty 10y ago
        > Self-driving cars won't have these problems. My concern is that they will, but policymakers decide a few dead cyclists is a price worth paying. In the UK, we're already ignoring an air pollution crisis (mostly from car fumes) which is killing c. 40k people each year. On top of the KSIs from actual road accidents. Uber have shown all too clearly that some companies will hide or ignore safety issues in this area.
      - _greim_ 10y ago
        Pro-cyclist advocacy seems to have reached a point of equilibrium against apathy and anti-cyclist sentiment, thus bicycling amongst human-driven cars is as safe as it's ever going to be. With robot-driven cars, the bicycle problem is an area that engineers can focus on and iteratively improve—essentially forever—even if cycling amongst robot-driven cars right now is as dangerous as cycling amongst human-driven ones.
- Stratoscope 10y ago
  Human drivers don't even follow the most basic bicycle safety rules, such as merging into the bike lane before making a right turn to prevent "right hook" collisions. From my observations, probably no more than one out of ten drivers does this. I guess they think it's illegal to drive in the bike lane at all, even though the opposite is true: at least in California you're legally required to merge into the bike lane in the last 200 feet before the intersection when making a right turn. http://www.sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/ http://www.sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/
  - koenigdavidmj 10y ago
    Oregon law actually requires the unsafe behavior, though I expect that has very little to do with how drivers behave.
  - phil21 10y ago
    If you travel (and drive) regularly between 2 or 3 states, it will be almost impossible to "intuitively" remember all these rules. What you describe is outright illegal in my home state, but required in a large city I also split my time in. Road rules for bikes and bike lanes are wildly different depending on state, and heck - even city. There are states where you have one set of rules within city limits, and entirely different throughout the rest of the state. It's a huge mess, and doing things like putting unprotected bike lanes to the right of traffic lanes is almost criminally stupid and dangerous. You cannot undo decades of muscle memory ("things don't pass me in the right lane especially on dense city streets") and then point to "there is a rule that says you have to!" when the expected tragedies start occurring. I used to think drivers and bikers were just "assholes" to each other in the US - then I spent time in the Netherlands and Belgium and realized these two modes of transportation are purposefully being put at odds against each other in the US for political reasons. It's quite possible to combine these modes of transportation into a network that works for both types of users.
    - cardiffspaceman 10y ago
      By physically separating bicycles and automobiles? A perspective from a writer who favors separating bikes and cars: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/07/vehicular-cyclists-secret-sect.html http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/07/vehicular-cyclists-secr...
- tetetttte 10y ago
  much as I wish humans could share the road, separation is the way to go. People are too territorial on the road, and drivers and riders alike have too little attention available to reliably avoid each other. The road makes people stressed and leads to mistakes
- flukus 10y ago
  I don't know if it's a recognition problem, IME it's a not knowing how wide their vehicle is problem.
hprotagonist 10y ago
Considering the limitations of computer vision, this should really come as no surprise.
- agildehaus 10y ago
  Which is why LIDAR seems so essential. Computer vision has made some amazing steps forward but it's still not perfect.
  - hprotagonist 10y ago
    lidar solves some of your depth of field issues, but there's still a challenge in seeing a bike at a relative velocity of 50mph and reacting appropriately.
jlgaddis 10y ago
I was thinking about this a while back, wondering if these self-driving cars were any better at "seeing" bicycles (and motorcycles and pedestrians) than humans are. I haven't rode a bicycle since I was a kid but I do put ~10k miles/year on my Harley. In the last 10 years, I've been hit head-on twice, ran off the road once, and had too-many-to-count "close calls" by drivers who weren't paying attention (not to mention the friends that been killed) -- and that's on a loud, relatively visible (compared to a bicycle), 900-pound piece of steel. I can't imagine the average bicyclist is "seen" better than I am, especially in busy traffic areas/large cities/etc. I'm all for anything that can makes the roads safer for those of us on two wheels!
- mirimir 10y ago
  I suspect that motorcycles are the harder problem. They aren't that much larger than bicycles. They use the road like cars, which only pushy bicyclists do. And they're faster than cars, and almost as maneuverable as bicycles.
  - cpt1138 10y ago
    Pushy? Since bicycles are defined as motor vehicles they have just as much right to the road as cars.
    - stouset 10y ago
      Ah yes, but you see I'm in a hurry home to catch Game of Thrones reruns and I had to wait twelve entire seconds for oncoming traffic to pass so I could get around some inconsiderate guy trying to stay fit and/or reducing the effects of traffic. </sarcasm> The sad irony is it's those "pushy" cyclists who stay alive, by making themselves more visible, being a part of typical traffic patterns, and refusing to be pushed off to the side by cars trying to squeeze into the same lane.
      - mirimir 10y ago
        Yes, I've been a pushy cyclist, for that very reason. Getting pushed off the road, or broken on opened doors, is no fun.
jessriedel 10y ago
Are self-driving cars really worse at noticing bicyclists than pedestrians? The first paragraph makes it sound this way, but there's no way it's harder to track them than birds, and it's hard to tell whether the quote from Steven Shladover is making a comparison to pedestrians.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Well, pedestrians don't move as fast or maneuver as well as bicycles. And birds? I've had many close calls with birds. But I've never hit one. And more to the point, there's nothing that I could have done to change the outcome. Except maybe to roll the car, or whatever.
- Someone 10y ago
  I don't think so, but we build infrastructure for pedestrians, so that there are fewer points where they interact with cars.if pedestrians would have to walk in car lanes (which, by the way, should be called vehicle lanes), they would pose a big problem, too.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
"Now Johnny, when you ride your bike you must wear your I-am-a-bike vest and follow these patterns or the cars are likely to kill you." :-) Summary is that "people riding bikes" (PRB) is a much denser image set than "people in cars" (PIC) and "people walking or jogging" (PWJ), and the PRB objects have a much higher dynamic angular vector capability (they can change direction extremely quickly) combined with a wider dynamic velocity vector to PWJ they strain the ability of the predictive filters to reliably asses the collision threat. As a result you need either faster/better hardware or better algorithms to deal with that particular group. I'm not particularly surprised by that, I expect the cars to also end up with small animal issues, as they can appear suddenly and aggressive evasive maneuvers to avoid hitting them may injure passengers at the cost of saving a squirrel's life. And all of that adds up to some of the many things that one has to think about when claiming victory here. It is going to be a long hard engineering slog to get to full autonomy. My question is you can build a computer that can drive a car fully autonomously, what other missions could you create for it? Some of those are kind of scary.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Re your last point, this leaped immediately to mind. http://souvenirsfromaprogramme.tumblr.com/post/44133459703/the-unbelievable-truth-series-9-episode-2-the http://souvenirsfromaprogramme.tumblr.com/post/44133459703/t... David: The Robo-Cup Federation hope that by 2050 a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players will win a soccer game, complying with the official FIFA rules against the winner of the most recent World Cup of human soccer. That terrifies me. If they can run around and kick a ball and beat us at football, what else can they do? John: Bring us breakfast in bed! David: Yes, and then strangle us.
  - nl 10y ago
    I don't understand this logic at all. We are supposed to be terrified by robot soccer players strangling us in bed? Sure it could happen, but there seems to be easier ways to die. Apparently one of them is riding a bike around self driving cars.
    - 10y ago
andy_ppp 10y ago
Really interesting article... This is why I'm considered annoy by some drivers - I take up too much space on the road for them. However, better to be seen and be considered "annoying" than be killed. The solution is likely a device that cyclists can wear that self driving cars can detect - I'm going to bet the AI for bikes is intractable because they are fast, virtually invisible at some angles and travel in between the traffic in strange ways. An alternative could be all self driving cars near by sending each other information about cyclists via some means. Or self driving bikes ;-)
- landryraccoon 10y ago
  > I'm going to bet the AI for bikes is intractable because they are fast, virtually invisible at some angles and travel in between the traffic in strange ways. If this is true, do you think humans can handle it any better? What you just described would be a nightmare for any human driver as well. Is it reasonable to allow self driving cars that are only marginally safer than human drivers?
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    These are good questions, I have no idea about answers to them. Turning it around a second, do you think it's acceptable that all self driving cars could be as bad as current humans are?
    - a_t48 10y ago
      Not OP, but as long as it's not worse than current humans and still much better in other areas, I personally find it acceptable. But the goal is for it to be better in all areas.
    - a_t48 10y ago
      Not OP, but as long as it's not worse than current humans and still much better in other areas, I personally find it acceptable. But the goal is for it to be better in all areas.
    - landryraccoon 10y ago
notatoad 10y ago
I don't think bicycles are that unique of a computer vision problem. If self-driving cars have a bicycle problem, they probably also have a children problem, a wildlife problem, and a road debris problem that's simply masked by the relatively low frequency of those things compared to bicycles on the road. Another comment mentions motorcycles, i'm very curious to see the detection data for them: they should have roughly similar characteristics to a bicycle, but at a similar or higher frequency.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
vosper 10y ago
It seems like it would be useful if there was some standard for actively notifying autonomous vehicles of something they need to be aware of. For example, a bike light might also transmit a radio signal to the car, or perhaps it includes lights operating with a specific color or pattern that self-driving cars can look out for (maybe it doesn't even need to be in the visible spectrum). Obviously this needs some thought. For example, how would you prevent people from messing with the cars - maybe it's very short range, or line-of-sight only?
- stormbrew 10y ago
  In the end, the "messing with cars" problem renders almost all explicit-communication-between-vehicles moot, or at least not as useful as people first imagine. The autonomous car will still, no matter what, have to trust its 'vision' over any informative messages. This is not any different from cars driven by humans, btw. Someone can put up a sign (say a merge left sign and some pylons) that can cause accidents pretty easily, which is why drivers still have to pay attention. The thing is that wide, let alone 360 degree, vision should provide the computer with more and more useful 'messages' than humans are ever capable of taking in. And probably more than any attack vulnerable information messages could provide too.
  - vosper 10y ago
    Yes, though I can't recall any incidents where someone set up traffic signage to intentionally cause an accident (I'm sure it's happened, but I bet it's really uncommon). Anyway, I'm not suggesting that the car take a remote signal on blind faith, but I still think it might be useful to have some kind of indicator. It can be factored into the other sensor data - "this signaling object does appear to be in close proximity and moving like a cyclist". Just as people don't tend to mess with signage and cause crashes now, I think they're unlikely (on the whole) to do it with these kind of signals. Especially since you'd be in serious trouble if you caused a wreck.
    - stormbrew 10y ago
      Well, keep in mind how much harder might be to catch someone messing with traffic with radio signals of some sort than by physically being present and visible and putting nonsensical signs in the road. I do think it would be more common.
a2tech 10y ago
No they have a problem with people on bicycles not following the rules. A problem human drivers encounter on a daily basis.
- steve_b 10y ago
  It seems you might be wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/15/cycling-bike-accidents-study https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/15/cycling...
- wott 10y ago
  A problem human drivers believe they encounter on a daily basis because themselves do not know 50% of the road laws (in the best case).
- poolbath1 10y ago
  I encounter human drivers exceding the speed limit on a daily basis as well. Is that not also failing to follow the rules? At least the robots won't do that.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I think self driving cars is a 95% problem. It'll be relatively "easy" to get 95% of the way there. The last 5% will be almost impossible to get right.
- sooheon 10y ago
  Car driving humans is also a 95% problem. It's almost impossible to get people to follow (or set) good laws, pay attention, not be under the influence, etc. I'm betting that cars will improve at a faster rate than human capability.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Yes. But what I said was not a comment on how well (or not) humans can drive now or in the future.
temp-ora 10y ago
i really want to make a self driving bike. a car is so big and serious and expensive but a bike is so cheap and comparatively harmless. adding retractable training wheels would make self driving considerably easier too. once full autonomy is achieved, it can be sent out to collect food orders and bring them back to your house.
- noobermin 10y ago
  Half of the joy of biking is the riding aspect. For example, I get my exercise for free.
  - Ace17 10y ago
    Who said you wouldn't still need to pedal?
    - noobermin 10y ago
      Okay, consider this, why would you want to ride a horse if you just press a button and you get to point B from point A? For frequent commutes where I don't feel like it, I just take public transport. A lot of time, I bike for the fun of biking, although many times it is also for the sake of transit.
sandworm101 10y ago
I say to robots: welcome to the club. A bike on a roadway is a tricky problem for the best of us. They can move quickly, at or above traffic speeds in many circumstances. They dont follow the same rules (stop signs) and at any moment can transform autobot-style into a pedestrian. It's an issue. And when it goes wrong it is the biker who suffers. That is life driving a car. If you cannot get it right 99.9999% of the time, you aren't good enough to drive. I have yet to see a car capable of reading the body language of a bicyclist or motorcyclist. As one of those, i still want to look a driver in the eye before i trust him not to squish me. Robots arent anywhere near there yet.
- trmsw 10y ago
  And when robots get there I wonder if they will resent cyclists for the computational cost they impose - and if they will find endless ways to rationalise that resentment (cyclists break the rules, cyclists don't pay road tax etc). I cycle and drive and when I drive I hate cyclists and find it very hard not to blame them for it, but it's just because they make driving harder
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    Really? You hate cyclists when you drive? That seems pretty selfish really. If I drive a ferrari, should I hate all those non-turbo car peasants for making me have to drive slower? Of course not, I'm using shared infrastructure that everyone has paid for, even those pesky cyclists and slower vehicles. I'm a cyclist 80% of the time, a driver the other 20%. I pay my taxes and rego on my car and follow the rules, even while cycling, and you still hate me. I hate our lack of suitable infrastucture with properly separated cycle paths, not the riders. When you're driving on a shared road you need to deal with slower vehicles and drive safely. If that's too hard for you to deal with, maybe you shouldn't be on the road.
Neliquat 10y ago
How about motorcycles?
zkms 10y ago
This is a good reason for self-driving vehicles to use high-performance (read as "subject to ITAR", alas) IR imaging sensors alongside LIDAR. Detecting/identifying humans on bicycles (or, more generally, humans/wildlife in/near roadways) can be done a lot more reliably with IR imagery than with just visual imagery.
chrismorgan 10y ago
I wonder what they do about more exotic vehicles like my recumbent tricycle. They’ll see it alright, but I wonder what they classify it as and thus what evasion model they employ.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  It'll just be the standard bicycle "kill all humans" program. :) But seriously, you bring up a good point. Maybe both cyclists and yourself will come up with ways of gaming the system in their favor. I can't find a link now, but I'm reminded of an experiment where baby chickens would prefer a ruler with three lines painted on it to their real parents. Perhaps you could have a design on the back of your seat that tricks the self-driving cars into thinking you were a gas tanker truck or similar large, dangerous vehicle, and get yourself a wide berth.
tbrowbdidnso 10y ago
Automatic driving is totally possible, but self driving cars have a huge problem that automated planes and trains don't. They share the road in close proximity to human controlled vehicles and humans. The huge, insurmountable problem is that people will NEVER accept autonomous transport that regularly kills people and causes accidents, even if the computer driver is better than an average human. As long as self driving cars share roads with humans they will never stop killing people. Humans are unpredictable by nature, and there will regularly be situations a self driving car encounters where death is just unavoidable. When self driving cars start killing people what is going to happen? You can't sue a machine. What if the machine has to decide who dies? This is an insurmountable problem. Cars may drive automatically but there will always be a qualified human sitting behind the wheel. Look at planes, it's a lot easier than driving since there's nothing to run into up there. We've had fully automated flying systems of various kinds for decades. Hell, even the space shuttle could land itself... from space. To this day every commerical flight with humans on it has not just one, but two human pilots. The other big problem with self driving cars is that hardly anyone needs them. Cars are built to transport people, and it turns out people are pretty good at driving. So the vast majority of the time there is zero need for the car to drive itself. In cases where it would be convenient we already have cruise control type inventions and automated lane following. So what about trucks? For one, if people won't tolerate a 3000 lb piece of automated steel killing people occasionally they sure as hell aren't going to tolerate a 80,000 pound piece of steel doing the same. So why don't we make special roads for the automated cars and trucks and hitch them together so they can't hit each other? We've had this for over 100 years and it's called a train. Basically, automated cars with no humans behind the wheel will never happen. This gets rid of most of the advantage of a car driving itself in the first place. Also, if humans need to be able to take back control there goes all the advantages of packing cars close together on highways and stuff too.
tetetttte 10y ago
ok i don't get it. Why not develop a general obstacle-avoidance system ? simply make the car be repelled by any objects, whatever shape or speed, and make it give more margin for obstacles that have a higher entropy of motion.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  Yes, people love to have these endless discussions about how the cars will decide about who gets to live and who dies, and about how people won't want to buy a car that has a chance of making the moral decision to save someone other than them. Literally the only thing the self-driving car needs to do is be able to stay on the road, and if the road is blocked, use the brakes. There's no moral dilemmas and no grey areas. if {obstacle} then {brakes = 1} Detecting what's an obstacle and what isn't is of course a difficult problem, but I'd think it'll be the legal issues that will actually be the largest barrier to self-driving cars. Someone has to be responsible when it fails. If the human isn't driving, then the car maker has to be responsible. This liability will have to be added to the cost of the vehicle.

68 points by type0 10y ago

Human driven cars have a bicycle problem as well. Humans aren't very good at predicting or seeing them either in dense urban areas. Grade separation is the way to go!

bamboozled 10y ago
Did you just make that up ?
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Make what up? Ask any cyclist, and they'll be able to recite to you a long litany of horror stories involving human-driven vehicles. I routinely deal with multiple cars driving in the (non-grade-separated) bike lane on my commute every single day.
  - wtvanhest 10y ago
    Yeah, I started commuting via bike recently. 5sh miles, all on busy city streets. Up valencia, then market, then about a mile along embarcadero. We really need to do something about people parking in bike lanes and in my opinion should completely close market to cars. Allow chariots, public buses etc. Anything with 5+ passangers, but close it to everyone else. There is just too much going on to have that mix. We also desperately need more grade-seperated bike lanes and bicycle only traffic signals that are aggressively policed.
  - bamboozled 10y ago
    Sorry if I offended you or anyone else. I too commute a lot via bicyle and also drive, which is why I disputed your comment. I find motorists often see me fine...when they're paying attention and I'm using common sense, ie lights when riding at dawn, not running reds etc. We're talking about vision / detection here, not people being unattentive, aggressive or inconsiderate, which seems to be the actual problem with motorists and cyclists. If a self-driving car is 100% dedicated to driving and still has problems detecting bikes 75% (at best) in optimum conditions, that's a different and important issue that I don't believe exists in human drivers today. I actually hope for both our sakes that if self-driving cars do take over, it's for our benefit as cyclists.
    - CydeWeys 10y ago
      No offense taken, I just couldn't make heads nor tails of your comment. I too am quite optimistic that self-driving cars will be vastly better to deal with than human-driven ones. The constant 360 vision and 100% adherence to turn signaling will be vast improvements. Every day I deal with drivers making unexpected turns, and not checking for the presence of bikers before turning across a path that bikers might be traveling in. Self-driving cars won't have these problems.
      - m0nty 10y ago
        > Self-driving cars won't have these problems. My concern is that they will, but policymakers decide a few dead cyclists is a price worth paying. In the UK, we're already ignoring an air pollution crisis (mostly from car fumes) which is killing c. 40k people each year. On top of the KSIs from actual road accidents. Uber have shown all too clearly that some companies will hide or ignore safety issues in this area.
    - _greim_ 10y ago
      Pro-cyclist advocacy seems to have reached a point of equilibrium against apathy and anti-cyclist sentiment, thus bicycling amongst human-driven cars is as safe as it's ever going to be. With robot-driven cars, the bicycle problem is an area that engineers can focus on and iteratively improve—essentially forever—even if cycling amongst robot-driven cars right now is as dangerous as cycling amongst human-driven ones.
Stratoscope 10y ago
Human drivers don't even follow the most basic bicycle safety rules, such as merging into the bike lane before making a right turn to prevent "right hook" collisions. From my observations, probably no more than one out of ten drivers does this. I guess they think it's illegal to drive in the bike lane at all, even though the opposite is true: at least in California you're legally required to merge into the bike lane in the last 200 feet before the intersection when making a right turn. http://www.sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/ http://www.sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/
- koenigdavidmj 10y ago
  Oregon law actually requires the unsafe behavior, though I expect that has very little to do with how drivers behave.
- phil21 10y ago
  If you travel (and drive) regularly between 2 or 3 states, it will be almost impossible to "intuitively" remember all these rules. What you describe is outright illegal in my home state, but required in a large city I also split my time in. Road rules for bikes and bike lanes are wildly different depending on state, and heck - even city. There are states where you have one set of rules within city limits, and entirely different throughout the rest of the state. It's a huge mess, and doing things like putting unprotected bike lanes to the right of traffic lanes is almost criminally stupid and dangerous. You cannot undo decades of muscle memory ("things don't pass me in the right lane especially on dense city streets") and then point to "there is a rule that says you have to!" when the expected tragedies start occurring. I used to think drivers and bikers were just "assholes" to each other in the US - then I spent time in the Netherlands and Belgium and realized these two modes of transportation are purposefully being put at odds against each other in the US for political reasons. It's quite possible to combine these modes of transportation into a network that works for both types of users.
  - cardiffspaceman 10y ago
    By physically separating bicycles and automobiles? A perspective from a writer who favors separating bikes and cars: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/07/vehicular-cyclists-secret-sect.html http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/07/vehicular-cyclists-secr...
tetetttte 10y ago
much as I wish humans could share the road, separation is the way to go. People are too territorial on the road, and drivers and riders alike have too little attention available to reliably avoid each other. The road makes people stressed and leads to mistakes
flukus 10y ago
I don't know if it's a recognition problem, IME it's a not knowing how wide their vehicle is problem.

hprotagonist 10y ago

Considering the limitations of computer vision, this should really come as no surprise.

agildehaus 10y ago
Which is why LIDAR seems so essential. Computer vision has made some amazing steps forward but it's still not perfect.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  lidar solves some of your depth of field issues, but there's still a challenge in seeing a bike at a relative velocity of 50mph and reacting appropriately.

jlgaddis 10y ago

I was thinking about this a while back, wondering if these self-driving cars were any better at "seeing" bicycles (and motorcycles and pedestrians) than humans are. I haven't rode a bicycle since I was a kid but I do put ~10k miles/year on my Harley. In the last 10 years, I've been hit head-on twice, ran off the road once, and had too-many-to-count "close calls" by drivers who weren't paying attention (not to mention the friends that been killed) -- and that's on a loud, relatively visible (compared to a bicycle), 900-pound piece of steel. I can't imagine the average bicyclist is "seen" better than I am, especially in busy traffic areas/large cities/etc. I'm all for anything that can makes the roads safer for those of us on two wheels!

mirimir 10y ago
I suspect that motorcycles are the harder problem. They aren't that much larger than bicycles. They use the road like cars, which only pushy bicyclists do. And they're faster than cars, and almost as maneuverable as bicycles.
- cpt1138 10y ago
  Pushy? Since bicycles are defined as motor vehicles they have just as much right to the road as cars.
  - stouset 10y ago
    Ah yes, but you see I'm in a hurry home to catch Game of Thrones reruns and I had to wait twelve entire seconds for oncoming traffic to pass so I could get around some inconsiderate guy trying to stay fit and/or reducing the effects of traffic. </sarcasm> The sad irony is it's those "pushy" cyclists who stay alive, by making themselves more visible, being a part of typical traffic patterns, and refusing to be pushed off to the side by cars trying to squeeze into the same lane.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      Yes, I've been a pushy cyclist, for that very reason. Getting pushed off the road, or broken on opened doors, is no fun.

jessriedel 10y ago

Are self-driving cars really worse at noticing bicyclists than pedestrians? The first paragraph makes it sound this way, but there's no way it's harder to track them than birds, and it's hard to tell whether the quote from Steven Shladover is making a comparison to pedestrians.

mirimir 10y ago
Well, pedestrians don't move as fast or maneuver as well as bicycles. And birds? I've had many close calls with birds. But I've never hit one. And more to the point, there's nothing that I could have done to change the outcome. Except maybe to roll the car, or whatever.
Someone 10y ago
I don't think so, but we build infrastructure for pedestrians, so that there are fewer points where they interact with cars.if pedestrians would have to walk in car lanes (which, by the way, should be called vehicle lanes), they would pose a big problem, too.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

"Now Johnny, when you ride your bike you must wear your I-am-a-bike vest and follow these patterns or the cars are likely to kill you." :-) Summary is that "people riding bikes" (PRB) is a much denser image set than "people in cars" (PIC) and "people walking or jogging" (PWJ), and the PRB objects have a much higher dynamic angular vector capability (they can change direction extremely quickly) combined with a wider dynamic velocity vector to PWJ they strain the ability of the predictive filters to reliably asses the collision threat. As a result you need either faster/better hardware or better algorithms to deal with that particular group. I'm not particularly surprised by that, I expect the cars to also end up with small animal issues, as they can appear suddenly and aggressive evasive maneuvers to avoid hitting them may injure passengers at the cost of saving a squirrel's life. And all of that adds up to some of the many things that one has to think about when claiming victory here. It is going to be a long hard engineering slog to get to full autonomy. My question is you can build a computer that can drive a car fully autonomously, what other missions could you create for it? Some of those are kind of scary.

M_Grey 10y ago
Re your last point, this leaped immediately to mind. http://souvenirsfromaprogramme.tumblr.com/post/44133459703/the-unbelievable-truth-series-9-episode-2-the http://souvenirsfromaprogramme.tumblr.com/post/44133459703/t... David: The Robo-Cup Federation hope that by 2050 a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players will win a soccer game, complying with the official FIFA rules against the winner of the most recent World Cup of human soccer. That terrifies me. If they can run around and kick a ball and beat us at football, what else can they do? John: Bring us breakfast in bed! David: Yes, and then strangle us.
- nl 10y ago
  I don't understand this logic at all. We are supposed to be terrified by robot soccer players strangling us in bed? Sure it could happen, but there seems to be easier ways to die. Apparently one of them is riding a bike around self driving cars.
  - 10y ago

andy_ppp 10y ago

Really interesting article... This is why I'm considered annoy by some drivers - I take up too much space on the road for them. However, better to be seen and be considered "annoying" than be killed. The solution is likely a device that cyclists can wear that self driving cars can detect - I'm going to bet the AI for bikes is intractable because they are fast, virtually invisible at some angles and travel in between the traffic in strange ways. An alternative could be all self driving cars near by sending each other information about cyclists via some means. Or self driving bikes ;-)

landryraccoon 10y ago
> I'm going to bet the AI for bikes is intractable because they are fast, virtually invisible at some angles and travel in between the traffic in strange ways. If this is true, do you think humans can handle it any better? What you just described would be a nightmare for any human driver as well. Is it reasonable to allow self driving cars that are only marginally safer than human drivers?
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  These are good questions, I have no idea about answers to them. Turning it around a second, do you think it's acceptable that all self driving cars could be as bad as current humans are?
  - a_t48 10y ago
    Not OP, but as long as it's not worse than current humans and still much better in other areas, I personally find it acceptable. But the goal is for it to be better in all areas.
  - a_t48 10y ago
    Not OP, but as long as it's not worse than current humans and still much better in other areas, I personally find it acceptable. But the goal is for it to be better in all areas.
  - landryraccoon 10y ago

notatoad 10y ago

I don't think bicycles are that unique of a computer vision problem. If self-driving cars have a bicycle problem, they probably also have a children problem, a wildlife problem, and a road debris problem that's simply masked by the relatively low frequency of those things compared to bicycles on the road. Another comment mentions motorcycles, i'm very curious to see the detection data for them: they should have roughly similar characteristics to a bicycle, but at a similar or higher frequency.

deleted 10y ago
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vosper 10y ago

It seems like it would be useful if there was some standard for actively notifying autonomous vehicles of something they need to be aware of. For example, a bike light might also transmit a radio signal to the car, or perhaps it includes lights operating with a specific color or pattern that self-driving cars can look out for (maybe it doesn't even need to be in the visible spectrum). Obviously this needs some thought. For example, how would you prevent people from messing with the cars - maybe it's very short range, or line-of-sight only?

stormbrew 10y ago
In the end, the "messing with cars" problem renders almost all explicit-communication-between-vehicles moot, or at least not as useful as people first imagine. The autonomous car will still, no matter what, have to trust its 'vision' over any informative messages. This is not any different from cars driven by humans, btw. Someone can put up a sign (say a merge left sign and some pylons) that can cause accidents pretty easily, which is why drivers still have to pay attention. The thing is that wide, let alone 360 degree, vision should provide the computer with more and more useful 'messages' than humans are ever capable of taking in. And probably more than any attack vulnerable information messages could provide too.
- vosper 10y ago
  Yes, though I can't recall any incidents where someone set up traffic signage to intentionally cause an accident (I'm sure it's happened, but I bet it's really uncommon). Anyway, I'm not suggesting that the car take a remote signal on blind faith, but I still think it might be useful to have some kind of indicator. It can be factored into the other sensor data - "this signaling object does appear to be in close proximity and moving like a cyclist". Just as people don't tend to mess with signage and cause crashes now, I think they're unlikely (on the whole) to do it with these kind of signals. Especially since you'd be in serious trouble if you caused a wreck.
  - stormbrew 10y ago
    Well, keep in mind how much harder might be to catch someone messing with traffic with radio signals of some sort than by physically being present and visible and putting nonsensical signs in the road. I do think it would be more common.

a2tech 10y ago

No they have a problem with people on bicycles not following the rules. A problem human drivers encounter on a daily basis.

steve_b 10y ago
It seems you might be wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/15/cycling-bike-accidents-study https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/15/cycling...
wott 10y ago
A problem human drivers believe they encounter on a daily basis because themselves do not know 50% of the road laws (in the best case).
poolbath1 10y ago
I encounter human drivers exceding the speed limit on a daily basis as well. Is that not also failing to follow the rules? At least the robots won't do that.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

I think self driving cars is a 95% problem. It'll be relatively "easy" to get 95% of the way there. The last 5% will be almost impossible to get right.

sooheon 10y ago
Car driving humans is also a 95% problem. It's almost impossible to get people to follow (or set) good laws, pay attention, not be under the influence, etc. I'm betting that cars will improve at a faster rate than human capability.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Yes. But what I said was not a comment on how well (or not) humans can drive now or in the future.

temp-ora 10y ago

i really want to make a self driving bike. a car is so big and serious and expensive but a bike is so cheap and comparatively harmless. adding retractable training wheels would make self driving considerably easier too. once full autonomy is achieved, it can be sent out to collect food orders and bring them back to your house.

noobermin 10y ago
Half of the joy of biking is the riding aspect. For example, I get my exercise for free.
- Ace17 10y ago
  Who said you wouldn't still need to pedal?
  - noobermin 10y ago
    Okay, consider this, why would you want to ride a horse if you just press a button and you get to point B from point A? For frequent commutes where I don't feel like it, I just take public transport. A lot of time, I bike for the fun of biking, although many times it is also for the sake of transit.

sandworm101 10y ago

I say to robots: welcome to the club. A bike on a roadway is a tricky problem for the best of us. They can move quickly, at or above traffic speeds in many circumstances. They dont follow the same rules (stop signs) and at any moment can transform autobot-style into a pedestrian. It's an issue. And when it goes wrong it is the biker who suffers. That is life driving a car. If you cannot get it right 99.9999% of the time, you aren't good enough to drive. I have yet to see a car capable of reading the body language of a bicyclist or motorcyclist. As one of those, i still want to look a driver in the eye before i trust him not to squish me. Robots arent anywhere near there yet.

trmsw 10y ago
And when robots get there I wonder if they will resent cyclists for the computational cost they impose - and if they will find endless ways to rationalise that resentment (cyclists break the rules, cyclists don't pay road tax etc). I cycle and drive and when I drive I hate cyclists and find it very hard not to blame them for it, but it's just because they make driving harder
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  Really? You hate cyclists when you drive? That seems pretty selfish really. If I drive a ferrari, should I hate all those non-turbo car peasants for making me have to drive slower? Of course not, I'm using shared infrastructure that everyone has paid for, even those pesky cyclists and slower vehicles. I'm a cyclist 80% of the time, a driver the other 20%. I pay my taxes and rego on my car and follow the rules, even while cycling, and you still hate me. I hate our lack of suitable infrastucture with properly separated cycle paths, not the riders. When you're driving on a shared road you need to deal with slower vehicles and drive safely. If that's too hard for you to deal with, maybe you shouldn't be on the road.

Neliquat 10y ago

How about motorcycles?

zkms 10y ago

This is a good reason for self-driving vehicles to use high-performance (read as "subject to ITAR", alas) IR imaging sensors alongside LIDAR. Detecting/identifying humans on bicycles (or, more generally, humans/wildlife in/near roadways) can be done a lot more reliably with IR imagery than with just visual imagery.

chrismorgan 10y ago

I wonder what they do about more exotic vehicles like my recumbent tricycle. They’ll see it alright, but I wonder what they classify it as and thus what evasion model they employ.

brokenmachine 10y ago
It'll just be the standard bicycle "kill all humans" program. :) But seriously, you bring up a good point. Maybe both cyclists and yourself will come up with ways of gaming the system in their favor. I can't find a link now, but I'm reminded of an experiment where baby chickens would prefer a ruler with three lines painted on it to their real parents. Perhaps you could have a design on the back of your seat that tricks the self-driving cars into thinking you were a gas tanker truck or similar large, dangerous vehicle, and get yourself a wide berth.

tbrowbdidnso 10y ago

Automatic driving is totally possible, but self driving cars have a huge problem that automated planes and trains don't. They share the road in close proximity to human controlled vehicles and humans. The huge, insurmountable problem is that people will NEVER accept autonomous transport that regularly kills people and causes accidents, even if the computer driver is better than an average human. As long as self driving cars share roads with humans they will never stop killing people. Humans are unpredictable by nature, and there will regularly be situations a self driving car encounters where death is just unavoidable. When self driving cars start killing people what is going to happen? You can't sue a machine. What if the machine has to decide who dies? This is an insurmountable problem. Cars may drive automatically but there will always be a qualified human sitting behind the wheel. Look at planes, it's a lot easier than driving since there's nothing to run into up there. We've had fully automated flying systems of various kinds for decades. Hell, even the space shuttle could land itself... from space. To this day every commerical flight with humans on it has not just one, but two human pilots. The other big problem with self driving cars is that hardly anyone needs them. Cars are built to transport people, and it turns out people are pretty good at driving. So the vast majority of the time there is zero need for the car to drive itself. In cases where it would be convenient we already have cruise control type inventions and automated lane following. So what about trucks? For one, if people won't tolerate a 3000 lb piece of automated steel killing people occasionally they sure as hell aren't going to tolerate a 80,000 pound piece of steel doing the same. So why don't we make special roads for the automated cars and trucks and hitch them together so they can't hit each other? We've had this for over 100 years and it's called a train. Basically, automated cars with no humans behind the wheel will never happen. This gets rid of most of the advantage of a car driving itself in the first place. Also, if humans need to be able to take back control there goes all the advantages of packing cars close together on highways and stuff too.

tetetttte 10y ago

ok i don't get it. Why not develop a general obstacle-avoidance system ? simply make the car be repelled by any objects, whatever shape or speed, and make it give more margin for obstacles that have a higher entropy of motion.

brokenmachine 10y ago
Yes, people love to have these endless discussions about how the cars will decide about who gets to live and who dies, and about how people won't want to buy a car that has a chance of making the moral decision to save someone other than them. Literally the only thing the self-driving car needs to do is be able to stay on the road, and if the road is blocked, use the brakes. There's no moral dilemmas and no grey areas. if {obstacle} then {brakes = 1} Detecting what's an obstacle and what isn't is of course a difficult problem, but I'd think it'll be the legal issues that will actually be the largest barrier to self-driving cars. Someone has to be responsible when it fails. If the human isn't driving, then the car maker has to be responsible. This liability will have to be added to the cost of the vehicle.