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Volvo admits its self-driving cars are confused by kangaroos
- TillE 9y agoDoesn't this just suggest that computer vision is practically impossible to perfect, and that cameras + LIDAR would be far better for safely driving a car? You need actual distances to objects, not just fuzzy error-prone inferences.
- rocqua 9y agoThe obvious counter-example are humans. On a more realistic level, stereoscopic vision seems like a pretty decent way to get distances.
- legolas2412 9y agoYour obvious counter example might need General Intelligence.
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- Animats 9y agoVolvo self-driving cars have multiple LIDARs and radars, in addition to vision.
- sandworm101 9y ago>> You need actual distances to objects, not just fuzzy error-prone inferences. Humans do pretty good with fuzzy notions of where the animal is. Exact distances aren't needed so much as reasonable estimates. If it is probably in the "need to brake zone" then the car brakes. Plus or minus a few meters isn't a big deal so long as you've got margins to work with. As animals are unpredictable, Volvo certainly has wide margins.
- lanstin 9y agoPlus if there is anything the human vision system is optimized for it would be seeing and assessing an unknown large mammal.
- mewse 9y agoHistory (and personal experience) shows pretty clearly that humans are really bad at predicting the movements of kangaroos, though. (I've never been in a car that hit one, but have had some close calls) The things seem to be able to effortlessly execute 90 degree turns between hops, at speed. Safety lesson: if you see kangaroos travelling alongside the road you're driving on, slow way down so you can execute an emergency stop, if needed; they're always only one hop from suddenly being right in front of you. Safety lesson 2: there is always another kangaroo. If you see a kangaroo bound across the road ahead of you, slow way down; there's likely to be another kangaroo a very short distance behind it. (And safety lesson 2 recurses and also applies to that second kangaroo; there is likely a third kangaroo just far enough behind it that you'll think there's no third kangaroo. And so on.)
- chris_wot 9y agoAnother is - don't let your dogs near a kangaroo around a body of water. The kangaroo hops into the water, the dog follows and the kangaroo holds it under and drowns it.
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- skybrian 9y agoBut apparently humans get confused by kangaroos too, based on the number of collisions.
- cptn_brittish 9y ago
- mikeash 9y agoThis stuff is still early days. I don't see how a problem encountered with a research project could possibly indicate that the whole problem is "practically impossible." It would be weird if they didn't have problems like this while building the technology.
- zinckiwi 9y agoWallaby damned.
- kartan 9y ago> The company’s “Large Animal Detection system” can identify and avoid deer, elk and caribou, but early testing in Australia shows it cannot adjust to the kangaroo’s unique method of movement. In Sweden there are elks and deer but not so many kangaroos. :) An intelligent system needs to learn. To learn it needs examples.
- eschutte2 9y agoFunny you say that, as I was just reading this: https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/motte-kenguruen-da-han-var-pa-vei-til-jobb-1.13580277 https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/motte-kenguruen-da-han-var-pa-ve... (not Sweden, I know). The video does show their interesting movement.
- hanoz 9y agoSo European intelligence is confused by kangaroos, artificial and otherwise.
- danieltillett 9y agoLots of human drivers are confused by kangaroos and kangaroos are confused by cars especially at night. You see an awful lot dead kangaroos on the side of the road in rural Australia. As an aside, kangaroos in motion are one of the most efficient and elegant mammals. I love watching them bounding away at speed effortlessly dodging scrub and trees - more like flight than running.
- joombaga 9y agoWhat's the general feeling about taking the meat after a collision? Where I grew up, people would butcher the animal if it's not terribly destroyed. Around here there's a wild hog problem, which are edible but not very tasty, so the local wildlife agency picks them up and they're used in soup kitchens to feed the homeless.
- cyberferret 9y agoI have actually heard of people saying they salvage kangaroo (or buffalo) meat after a collision. The tail is considered a delicacy. Of course, that is assuming you are still OK after hitting one - Kangaroos are BIG critters and can do considerable damage to the vehicle (and occupants) in a collision.
- jaclaz 9y agoCan't say about kangaroos, but many (did I say many?) years ago I was on a car when we hit a wallaby by accident. Wallabies are like 1/5 or less in size/weight when compared to kangaroos, they are small animals I would say comparable in size/weight to a large rabbit. The car was a not so small car, a Holden Torana, a V8 4.2 liters, if I recall correctly, still the hit was very hard and the australian guy that was driving didn't manage to keep the car on the road and we ended up in the field nearby. No physical harm to anyone on the car, but the fender and front of the car were seriously damaged. I wouldn't have wanted to have hit a full-sized kangaroo instead of the poor little wallaby.
- joshschreuder 9y ago
- hanoz 9y ago> "Although it hasn’t been tested in a kangaroo-specific environment, there was an instance where black swans were interfering" I think I know how to interpret that sentence...
- sandworm101 9y agoThey mean that they have in the past dealt with animal-specific issues, rather than a generic approach. I take it mean that they will have to write some roo-specific rules as they once did for black swans.
- elmar 9y agoBlack Swan Farming (Paul Graham) http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html
- andrewf 9y agoLiteral black swans are common in parts of Australia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan
- joering2 9y agoReminds me my comment from a month ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433094
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe letters in "confused by kangaroos" rearrange to spell "SOS! Fake, bouncy dragon." Who wouldn't be confused? h/t Gary Matthews, elsewhere.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoI'm kind of worried by the fact that the system judges depth based on visual cues (like a human with one eye closed does) instead of actual depth sensing hardware, to the point that the system needs to recognise kangaroos specifically. Shouldn't the car stop for any obstacle, even ones it doesn't recognise? They surely can't expect to train it on every possible type of debris.
- kalleboo 9y agoIt doesn't sound like the problem is it's detecting specific animals, but in how it's detecting the distance -using the ground as a reference for things that aren't standing on the ground. I wonder how it it handles low-flying birds.
- amag 9y agoWhen I learned t drive I was instructed not to mind smaller critters as the avoidance maneuver (steering away one way or the other or heavy breaking) is more likely to cause a serious accident than the collision with the small critter.
- kalleboo 9y agoTrue. You also don't want it avoiding a plastic bag that's floating across the road
- lb1lf 9y agoUnless, of course, you are the small critter. (When in driving school, I was taught to ignore anything smaller than a reindeer - but assure whoever showed up in distress after I'd put a set of tire marks over their pet's back that I'd tried my best to avoid it.)
- mac01021 9y agoYou needn't swerve but there's no harm in braking.
- chielk 9y ago
- gregw134 9y agoWhy does it need to recognize specific types of animals? It seems like bad programming practice to code (or learn) for each specific case. Is there not a way to program cars to avoid animals more broadly, or simply objects that are moving towards the road?
- smilekzs 9y agoBecause movement patterns of Kangaroos are too different from other animals?
- eli 9y agoI don't think I personally would deal well with a kangaroo appearing near my car due to my lack of specific experience. They move crazy differently from a dog or deer.
- laxd 9y agoI believe these systems are based on neural nets, they are trained, not programmed, to recognize animals.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoAt least that is an improvement on Tesla being confused by a large truck and hitting it at full speed. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot-death-self-driving-car-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-aut...
- dghughes 9y agoMoose must be hard to detect too I wonder how they tested for them. Imagine a 700kg (1,500 pound) moose with velvety brown fur suddenly wanting to cross the road at night in front of your car when you are traveling 120km/h (74mph). That weight is all up high too on spindly legs. It's like running into a high table with 700kg of weigh on it.
- King-Aaron 9y agoEmus have a similar effect - a good amount of mass sitting up quite high on little thin legs. The things punch straight through the windscreen when you hit them. Emus have the added bonus too of running directly at you when you sound the horn, instead of away as you'd expect. It's quite uncanny, and problematic at a hundred kilometres an hour.
- visarga 9y agoThose corner cases can be solved by simulation. Off to the sims, to implement kangaroos, deer and people in wheelchairs chasing ducks with a broomstick - just to be thorough.
- taneq 9y agoJust make sure you disable the kangaroos' rocket launchers before giving your big demo... ;)
- imron 9y agoGotta watch out for them kangaroos: http://www.snopes.com/humor/nonsense/kangaroo.asp http://www.snopes.com/humor/nonsense/kangaroo.asp
- 0xbear 9y agoAnd therein lies the problem no one talks about: all these autonomous vehicle technologies have only been tested in non-adversarial situations. Machine learning algorithms do not generalize the way humans do, and it has been shown that they’re fairly easy to fool. This is an active area of research at the moment, and no one really knows how to fix this, at least not without deploying an ensemble of networks with different architectures.
- pasta 9y agoThis is the first time I hear about animal detection in self driving cars. Do other brands also do this? Most demo's only show human interaction. Edit: and what about flying trash, leaves and so on? Thinking about it there are a lot of object types we interact with. Leaves for example mean nothing to us because they won't harm us. And we know crows will fly away. But pigeons on the other hand..
- jaimex2 9y agoI'm not sure what system Volvo has gone for, but most isn't this just a "train more kangaroo data into the neural network" thing to fix?
- jfries 9y agoFrom the article it seems the hopping it what makes it tricky. Their model is that the distance to the animal is the same as the distance to where their feet touch the ground. When an animal is in the air the feet appear to touch the ground further away due to perspective.
- lb1lf 9y agoSpeaking of getting confused by kangaroos... An old favourite of mine, presumably apocryphal, involving kangaroos and the dangers of reusing code: http://aviationhumor.net/combat-kangaroos/ http://aviationhumor.net/combat-kangaroos/
- tim333 9y agoFootage of Volvo and the kangaroos from a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YiZ0aHINBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YiZ0aHINBI