15 ms·

> Driverless long-haul trucks are apparently just a few years away, and the main worry now is not so much the safety of these trucks but the specter of unemploy

by 60654 10y ago

> Driverless long-haul trucks are apparently just a few years away, and the main worry now is not so much the safety of these trucks but the specter of unemployment facing millions of people currently employed as truck drivers. No, no they're not. We have some lane tracking in good weather etc., but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy that would make drivers behind the wheel unnecessary. But it only goes to show that not even computer science experts are immune to marketing hype and well funded PR campaigns. :) As for the unreasonable ineffectiveness - it's not just in systems research. ML can be very effective in some areas (especially when there is a ton of training data), but many areas of human endeavor are hard to model via function approximation techniques like those used in most of ML.

therpe1 10y ago
We are certainly not decades away. It seems to be a classic human error: people always seem to overestimate how far we've come and how far we've to go... and also underestimate the rate of progress/change. That's why technologies like the iPhone seem to show up "out of the blue" and "change everything." That said, people also seem to never take into account the politics. Even if the technology was ready tomorrow it's not clear that certain special interests and elected officials would allow driverless 40-ton trucks to roam free on the highways. There would probably be a lot of push-back -- for the kids of course. Transportation is the definition of a highly-regulated industry and it's not clear that technologists will be able to move in and disrupt it so easily.
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
> but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy that would make drivers behind the wheel unnecessary. Do you have a citation for that? I often see this asserted, and I see many assertions the other way. Whenever I personally see self-driving cars in the wild, I'm astounded at their effectiveness on uncontrolled access roads. What makes you think controlled access roads will be much more difficult? Or to be more specific, why is industry consensus that we are decades (or more) away from this goal? Or is this just your personal opinion?
- xfs 10y ago
  > none of us in the automobile or IT industries are close to achieving true Level 5 autonomy - Gill Pratt, Toyota Research Institute http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/toyota-gill-pratt-on-the-reality-of-full-autonomy http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self... > It will be 25 years before self-driving cars take off in America - Bill Gurley, Uber investor http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-self-driving-cars-25-years-away-in-us.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-sel...
  - sroussey 10y ago
    At the point of level 4, the roads and conditions will change to better accommodate, likely pushing cities and villages farther apart (particularly in America).
    - freeone3000 10y ago
      How would they be pushed father apart? Where would they be pushed to? America isn't exactly known for its density.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Is that industry consensus? Also, I think closed-access freeways are very well mapped, is level 5 needed to disrupt the trucking industry, or will level 4 do?
    - sdenton4 10y ago
      Yeah, my guess is that for trucking, we'll be looking at two drivers per N trucks, moving as a convoy. (Two drivers means one can sleep, and the convoy never needs to take long breaks.) You have to have someone there to take over if a truck goes down half way between Boise and East Nowhere. All the better if they can keep an eye on the monitoring systems for the convoy; taking over driving the lead truck will presumably also be an option for as long as it needs to be.
  - 10y ago
snackai 10y ago
> but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy Decades? Are you really sure? This assumption seems quite uninformed to me. The Grand Challenge was 12 years ago, from then we evolved from Level 1 to Level 3. Back then there was no data, computing power wasn't available as today, chips (&sensors) can be designed an built within a few months or even less these days for far less money. Machine Learning and Computer Vision made many advances in these 12 years (talent in these fields is now easier to acquire as more people can learn about it these days). We are at a completely different point these days. Level 5 is not the matter of decades, 5 years, 10 max. But not decades.
- eellpp 10y ago
  It max 5 years or even less, if the problem is in engineering the solution. But if the problem is in underlying maths in building Level 5, then surely its decades
  - mturmon 10y ago
    One of the lessons of these first steps toward autonomous driving is: if you have a big array of sensors, and plenty of on board computing, then many driving problems, especially in semi controlled circumstances, like open highways, are within our grasp now. The sensors and computing are expensive now - especially lidar. But that's an engineering problem, as you suggest.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      The problems in automated driving are not in controlled and normal circumstances but in all the edge cases and exceptions.
      - neltnerb 10y ago
        Just don't forget that the competition isn't a perfect driver, but a human one. That's a much lower bar.
ma2rten 10y ago
Waymo's test drivers have to take control once every 5,000 miles.
- tyingq 10y ago
  That is impressive, but isn't Waymo driving on some limited number of pre-set routes? It would be nice if there were some credible, unbiased sources that were predicting when full level 5 might be viable. Edit: Maybe a somewhat credible opposing view. Though he may be crabby about his department being drained of talent, and so not unbiased: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/robotics-lab-uber-gutted-says-driving-cars-are-not-even-close-carnegie-mellon-nrec https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/robotics-lab-uber...
  - obstinate 10y ago
    Unfortunately, there are no unbiased sources that have knowledge of the state of the art, since it exists inside a small handful of companies. The best outsiders can do is speculate. Personally, I very much doubt we're more than a decade away from cars-drive-way-better-than-people levels of tech. Whether that means you'll be able to buy one is another question.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lmkg 10y ago
    Waymo does a lot of driving in suburban Austin and suburban Mountain View. Their claim is that this is more difficult than most driving, since stop-and-go traffic with intersections every quarter-mile and pedestrians around is a more complex environment than highway driving. This claim is almost certainly true for the topic at hand, since long-haul trucking is the highway-est of highway driving. Outside of the topic at hand, my own extremely subjective opinion is that they chose some of the tamest suburbs possible (I have significant experience in the Bay Area, SoCal, Austin, and Pittsburgh).
  - the8472 10y ago
    > That is impressive, but isn't Waymo driving on some limited number of pre-set routes? Even if that's the case, that would probably be sufficient for long-haul trucks. Especially in europe which has a pretty dense network of controlled-access highways.
maxerickson 10y ago
I saw a thing on CBS Sunday Morning about a company planning to run the local parts of truck routes on remote control. More: the point being that it is a huge opportunity and there doesn't necessarily need to be a perfect, fully capable system to start having a significant impact on the number of drivers.
stevenh 10y ago
Anyone involved in the creation or deployment of driverless vehicles should be applauded for ushering in a future we can all agree is sorely needed. The current world where every driver is an unpredictable human being is just too dangerous. I'm excited to leave it behind forever.
patrickmn 10y ago
Trucks driving autonomously on the interstate and being picked up by a human operator near city limits doesn't seem that far away. The trick will be to balance competition and the need to be first to market with the risk of accidents, because every negative PR hit for self-driving cars sets back the entire field politically.
- grzm 10y ago
  This is an interesting idea. It has parallels with harbor pilots who guide ships through harbors and other hazardous waterways. Edit to add: Taking the idea a bit further, why not have remote drivers who can handle these problematic bits?
  - gpvos 10y ago
    Regarding remote drivers: probably for the same reason we don't have remote harbour pilots.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Do you have a specific reason in mind? I have no experience in this area, so my own speculations are just that. One practical issue may be lag. Connectivity would also of course be very important. There are historical reasons as well, but given we're discussing new technology (automated trucking), there are plenty of things that will change as a result and may not have much sway going forward.
      - azernik 10y ago
        I'm not familiar with the actual design decisions involved, but I'd also imagine field of view for an on-the-spot operator would be better than for someone operating through cameras, unless you invest in a very expensive surround setup.
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    Can't remember the name of the start-up, but there are people working on remote truck driving.
PeterisP 10y ago
Noone is entirely sure exactly when we'll reach level-5 autonomy, however, that doesn't matter for the specter of unemployment - the currently demonstrated level of availability seems clearly enough to put half of truck drivers out of work by all kinds of automation e.g. trucks self-driving on the regulated toll roads during time that drivers have their mandated rest; one driver supervising multiple trucks or driving a column of two-three trucks, etc. This alone is sufficient for both a significant tick in unemployment and as a downward pressure on wages of there low-skill workers that have a job. The question of "replacing drivers" isn't about when machines will be able to do exactly what drivers do now, it's about when we'll figure out to achieve the same end result with much less labor, likely implementing significant changes to the process.
- hakcermani 10y ago
  > one driver supervising multiple trucks or driving a column of two-three trucks Could be introduced much earlier than fully autonomous mode.
- abalone 10y ago
  > trucks self-driving on the regulated toll roads during time that drivers have their mandated rest How would this be possible at anything less than level 4-5 autonomy? If they can take a nap, the truck's got to be fully autonomous.
  - peteretep 10y ago
    Level 4 includes autonomy in the "operational design domain (ODD)" of a vehicle. I'd have thought that on a tollway that's being maintained specifically to support some self-driving trucks that the difficulty of Level 4 is a few orders of magnitude easier than cars in a residential district.
    - flamedoge 10y ago
      Maintaining tollway for self-driving is still going to add to "manually helping" cost. The operational domain of a vehicle includes roads of varying conditions that a human driver can navigate with relative ease.
vhold 10y ago
We don't have to get to level 5 to start automating trucking. In fact level 4 would likely be better than many drivers on that road now. Level 5 is an ideal we probably won't reach for decades, self driving cars better or equal to the best most attentive drivers in all situations. I think the level system is also a bit over simplified. Level 4 highway is very different from level 4 city, and level 4 highway would be enough to automate a lot of trucking.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Sure. The levels are fairly general. There's a big difference between your operation domain being a section of 280 on a sunny day and it being any paved US road so long as it's not snowing. One is mostly just interesting R&D and the other is genuinely useful to a lot of people. The problem is that it leads people to say we'll have Level 4 in a decade or less when they mean the former case. Whereas the sort of capabilities needed for autonomous taxis are decades away.
est 10y ago
> No, no they're not. We have some lane tracking in good weather etc., but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy that would make drivers behind the wheel unnecessary. How about a mixed adoption, on 99% of pure-highway the truck is driver-less, but there are dedicated service stations for a human driver to take over into the urban area.
- ghaff 10y ago
  And maybe we'll call those autonomous trucks trains or something like that. (In many/most cases, the long haul overland transportation today is already handled by freight railways. It's unclear how big a win there is to having what amounts to an additional form of intermodal transportation as opposed to just keeping a person around who can also handle breakdowns, etc.)
oflannabhra 10y ago
The most difficult problem for semi-trucks and their drivers are delivery and pickup. Full level 5 autonomy for a truck would need to include navigating busy parking lots, backing up to bay doors, loading docks, and loading lots. Other tasks simple for a human, but difficult for machines would be identifying where the delivery/pickup point is, and actually unloading/loading goods. All these can be solved, but will require some level of standardization. I expect they will be easier and cheaper to solve with humans for some time. I see a future where drivers get in the truck, handle the hard bits at the beginning and end, the truck handles the tedious A->B without stopping, while the drivers can rest, and then the drivers take over at B.

by 60654 10y ago

therpe1 10y ago

We are certainly not decades away. It seems to be a classic human error: people always seem to overestimate how far we've come and how far we've to go... and also underestimate the rate of progress/change. That's why technologies like the iPhone seem to show up "out of the blue" and "change everything." That said, people also seem to never take into account the politics. Even if the technology was ready tomorrow it's not clear that certain special interests and elected officials would allow driverless 40-ton trucks to roam free on the highways. There would probably be a lot of push-back -- for the kids of course. Transportation is the definition of a highly-regulated industry and it's not clear that technologists will be able to move in and disrupt it so easily.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

> but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy that would make drivers behind the wheel unnecessary. Do you have a citation for that? I often see this asserted, and I see many assertions the other way. Whenever I personally see self-driving cars in the wild, I'm astounded at their effectiveness on uncontrolled access roads. What makes you think controlled access roads will be much more difficult? Or to be more specific, why is industry consensus that we are decades (or more) away from this goal? Or is this just your personal opinion?

xfs 10y ago
> none of us in the automobile or IT industries are close to achieving true Level 5 autonomy - Gill Pratt, Toyota Research Institute http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/toyota-gill-pratt-on-the-reality-of-full-autonomy http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self... > It will be 25 years before self-driving cars take off in America - Bill Gurley, Uber investor http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-self-driving-cars-25-years-away-in-us.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-sel...
- sroussey 10y ago
  At the point of level 4, the roads and conditions will change to better accommodate, likely pushing cities and villages farther apart (particularly in America).
  - freeone3000 10y ago
    How would they be pushed father apart? Where would they be pushed to? America isn't exactly known for its density.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Is that industry consensus? Also, I think closed-access freeways are very well mapped, is level 5 needed to disrupt the trucking industry, or will level 4 do?
  - sdenton4 10y ago
    Yeah, my guess is that for trucking, we'll be looking at two drivers per N trucks, moving as a convoy. (Two drivers means one can sleep, and the convoy never needs to take long breaks.) You have to have someone there to take over if a truck goes down half way between Boise and East Nowhere. All the better if they can keep an eye on the monitoring systems for the convoy; taking over driving the lead truck will presumably also be an option for as long as it needs to be.
- 10y ago

snackai 10y ago

> but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy Decades? Are you really sure? This assumption seems quite uninformed to me. The Grand Challenge was 12 years ago, from then we evolved from Level 1 to Level 3. Back then there was no data, computing power wasn't available as today, chips (&sensors) can be designed an built within a few months or even less these days for far less money. Machine Learning and Computer Vision made many advances in these 12 years (talent in these fields is now easier to acquire as more people can learn about it these days). We are at a completely different point these days. Level 5 is not the matter of decades, 5 years, 10 max. But not decades.

eellpp 10y ago
It max 5 years or even less, if the problem is in engineering the solution. But if the problem is in underlying maths in building Level 5, then surely its decades
- mturmon 10y ago
  One of the lessons of these first steps toward autonomous driving is: if you have a big array of sensors, and plenty of on board computing, then many driving problems, especially in semi controlled circumstances, like open highways, are within our grasp now. The sensors and computing are expensive now - especially lidar. But that's an engineering problem, as you suggest.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    The problems in automated driving are not in controlled and normal circumstances but in all the edge cases and exceptions.
    - neltnerb 10y ago
      Just don't forget that the competition isn't a perfect driver, but a human one. That's a much lower bar.

ma2rten 10y ago

Waymo's test drivers have to take control once every 5,000 miles.

tyingq 10y ago
That is impressive, but isn't Waymo driving on some limited number of pre-set routes? It would be nice if there were some credible, unbiased sources that were predicting when full level 5 might be viable. Edit: Maybe a somewhat credible opposing view. Though he may be crabby about his department being drained of talent, and so not unbiased: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/robotics-lab-uber-gutted-says-driving-cars-are-not-even-close-carnegie-mellon-nrec https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/robotics-lab-uber...
- obstinate 10y ago
  Unfortunately, there are no unbiased sources that have knowledge of the state of the art, since it exists inside a small handful of companies. The best outsiders can do is speculate. Personally, I very much doubt we're more than a decade away from cars-drive-way-better-than-people levels of tech. Whether that means you'll be able to buy one is another question.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- lmkg 10y ago
  Waymo does a lot of driving in suburban Austin and suburban Mountain View. Their claim is that this is more difficult than most driving, since stop-and-go traffic with intersections every quarter-mile and pedestrians around is a more complex environment than highway driving. This claim is almost certainly true for the topic at hand, since long-haul trucking is the highway-est of highway driving. Outside of the topic at hand, my own extremely subjective opinion is that they chose some of the tamest suburbs possible (I have significant experience in the Bay Area, SoCal, Austin, and Pittsburgh).
- the8472 10y ago
  > That is impressive, but isn't Waymo driving on some limited number of pre-set routes? Even if that's the case, that would probably be sufficient for long-haul trucks. Especially in europe which has a pretty dense network of controlled-access highways.

maxerickson 10y ago

I saw a thing on CBS Sunday Morning about a company planning to run the local parts of truck routes on remote control. More: the point being that it is a huge opportunity and there doesn't necessarily need to be a perfect, fully capable system to start having a significant impact on the number of drivers.

stevenh 10y ago

Anyone involved in the creation or deployment of driverless vehicles should be applauded for ushering in a future we can all agree is sorely needed. The current world where every driver is an unpredictable human being is just too dangerous. I'm excited to leave it behind forever.

patrickmn 10y ago

Trucks driving autonomously on the interstate and being picked up by a human operator near city limits doesn't seem that far away. The trick will be to balance competition and the need to be first to market with the risk of accidents, because every negative PR hit for self-driving cars sets back the entire field politically.

grzm 10y ago
This is an interesting idea. It has parallels with harbor pilots who guide ships through harbors and other hazardous waterways. Edit to add: Taking the idea a bit further, why not have remote drivers who can handle these problematic bits?
- gpvos 10y ago
  Regarding remote drivers: probably for the same reason we don't have remote harbour pilots.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Do you have a specific reason in mind? I have no experience in this area, so my own speculations are just that. One practical issue may be lag. Connectivity would also of course be very important. There are historical reasons as well, but given we're discussing new technology (automated trucking), there are plenty of things that will change as a result and may not have much sway going forward.
    - azernik 10y ago
      I'm not familiar with the actual design decisions involved, but I'd also imagine field of view for an on-the-spot operator would be better than for someone operating through cameras, unless you invest in a very expensive surround setup.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Can't remember the name of the start-up, but there are people working on remote truck driving.

PeterisP 10y ago

Noone is entirely sure exactly when we'll reach level-5 autonomy, however, that doesn't matter for the specter of unemployment - the currently demonstrated level of availability seems clearly enough to put half of truck drivers out of work by all kinds of automation e.g. trucks self-driving on the regulated toll roads during time that drivers have their mandated rest; one driver supervising multiple trucks or driving a column of two-three trucks, etc. This alone is sufficient for both a significant tick in unemployment and as a downward pressure on wages of there low-skill workers that have a job. The question of "replacing drivers" isn't about when machines will be able to do exactly what drivers do now, it's about when we'll figure out to achieve the same end result with much less labor, likely implementing significant changes to the process.

hakcermani 10y ago
> one driver supervising multiple trucks or driving a column of two-three trucks Could be introduced much earlier than fully autonomous mode.
abalone 10y ago
> trucks self-driving on the regulated toll roads during time that drivers have their mandated rest How would this be possible at anything less than level 4-5 autonomy? If they can take a nap, the truck's got to be fully autonomous.
- peteretep 10y ago
  Level 4 includes autonomy in the "operational design domain (ODD)" of a vehicle. I'd have thought that on a tollway that's being maintained specifically to support some self-driving trucks that the difficulty of Level 4 is a few orders of magnitude easier than cars in a residential district.
  - flamedoge 10y ago
    Maintaining tollway for self-driving is still going to add to "manually helping" cost. The operational domain of a vehicle includes roads of varying conditions that a human driver can navigate with relative ease.

vhold 10y ago

We don't have to get to level 5 to start automating trucking. In fact level 4 would likely be better than many drivers on that road now. Level 5 is an ideal we probably won't reach for decades, self driving cars better or equal to the best most attentive drivers in all situations. I think the level system is also a bit over simplified. Level 4 highway is very different from level 4 city, and level 4 highway would be enough to automate a lot of trucking.

ghaff 10y ago
Sure. The levels are fairly general. There's a big difference between your operation domain being a section of 280 on a sunny day and it being any paved US road so long as it's not snowing. One is mostly just interesting R&D and the other is genuinely useful to a lot of people. The problem is that it leads people to say we'll have Level 4 in a decade or less when they mean the former case. Whereas the sort of capabilities needed for autonomous taxis are decades away.

est 10y ago

> No, no they're not. We have some lane tracking in good weather etc., but we are still decades (or more) away from full level-5 autonomy that would make drivers behind the wheel unnecessary. How about a mixed adoption, on 99% of pure-highway the truck is driver-less, but there are dedicated service stations for a human driver to take over into the urban area.

ghaff 10y ago
And maybe we'll call those autonomous trucks trains or something like that. (In many/most cases, the long haul overland transportation today is already handled by freight railways. It's unclear how big a win there is to having what amounts to an additional form of intermodal transportation as opposed to just keeping a person around who can also handle breakdowns, etc.)

oflannabhra 10y ago

The most difficult problem for semi-trucks and their drivers are delivery and pickup. Full level 5 autonomy for a truck would need to include navigating busy parking lots, backing up to bay doors, loading docks, and loading lots. Other tasks simple for a human, but difficult for machines would be identifying where the delivery/pickup point is, and actually unloading/loading goods. All these can be solved, but will require some level of standardization. I expect they will be easier and cheaper to solve with humans for some time. I see a future where drivers get in the truck, handle the hard bits at the beginning and end, the truck handles the tedious A->B without stopping, while the drivers can rest, and then the drivers take over at B.