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When’s a pedestrian not a pedestrian? When it’s a decal
- smileysteve 9y agoI don't entirely understand why with this image though. While just a camera, looking just at the picture of the cyclist experience some perception issues due to skewing, the camera still sees the distance between the front bumper and the bicycle, but also sees the breadth of the car. If, in this image, we see 3 bicyclists and a car in front of us, what's the worst decision we can make? To only pass the bicyclists at that car's width? To wait until we can safely pass? To treat it like a bicycle race with a support vehicle and wait to pass until we can pass the entire group?
- jsmthrowaway 9y agoI’d imagine the software would predict slower speed from bicycles and react accordingly, potentially backing off more than it would a car. Which might not be a bad thing, depending on how much is prediction versus reaction in these setups. That it’s a different color recognition says something, and it might be that. Hard to say
- IanCal 9y agoWhat if the car thinks a person is very close in front? Will it suddenly brake? It won't be expecting a person to move in the same way as a car.
- yk 9y agoWe are already in a failure state, the camera did detect a cyclist that is not a cyclist. At this point motion detection will do something, but since the back of the car transforms differently than a real cyclist, this something is at best right by random chance. The worst decision it can make is, that the cyclists are speeding away from the autonomous car and it can therefore accelerate.
- icebraining 9y agoBut since the car itself was detected, the autonomous one couldn't accelerate even if it thought the cyclist was far.
- studentrob 9y agoThis is a failed state because the system has detected objects that are not present. We can't know how the system will react in a failed state because engineers will not have prepared for such an eventuality (ignoring negligence).
- Djvacto 9y agoI think the image is just meant to showcase that one sensor can be confused by edge cases. It's a good image that shows unintended interpretation of data. There are likely many other edges cases that are not as clear why a car will misinterpret them, which is why they went with this image.
- studentrob 9y agoYeah. Once seen, engineers could correct for this kind of situation. The point is there are many such unseen sitauations that current systems don't handle, and that diversifying the sensor array can help handle those.
- tyingq 9y agoWell, is one of many reasons why. I assume there are lots of edge cases. Floating plastic bags, for example.
- hectorr1 9y agoMy Volvo slammed on the autonomous brake yesterday for no discernible reason. Best guess was a leaf blew across the sensor.
- losteverything 9y ago"Avoid highway braking" was drilled into us as 15 year olds in drivers ed. That still is one sacred rule i swear by. Chain reaction braking, unnecessarily has caused many accidents (witnessed by me). Driving on I-95 in Florida you have (upgrades) where bridges are were built (limiting sight). Heavy congestion causes unnecessary braking. Several rear ends were witnessed on a trip north from the keys. Never highway brake. Im glad you posted this because it is good to know what cars may not respond the way a human was trained. Try braking on the Merritt parkway and see what happens
- bryanlarsen 9y agoBut when an accident due to highway braking occurs, the person in the following vehicle will always be considered at fault -- the person in front of you may brake hard for any reason good or bad, and if you collide into the back of that vehicle, you were following too closely, driving too fast, and/or not paying attention. The person in front may also be partially considered at fault if they didn't have a good reason, but the person following will always be considered at fault.
- losteverything 9y agoMy drivers ed class was taught by a lunatic (aren't they all?) that was ALL about safety. Especially defensive driving. Predicting possible outcomes, having an "out", seeing through cars, avoiding driving behind box trucks and much more Predicting what a driver will do is a large part of defensive driving.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoThat decal is a bad idea, regardless of whether the driver is an AI or a human. Apparently painting vehicles grey can cause people not to see them as well. Having photo realistic images of road scenes seems much worse. Have they never watched roadrunner cartoons?
- Declanomous 9y agoYeah, it's not hard to see that it is a car while stopped, but imagine if it is parked on the side of the road in foggy conditions. You could be thirty feet from it and not see it at all.
- tyingq 9y agoUnfortunately, cute ideas like that are popular. https://m.imgur.com/K1w16U3 https://m.imgur.com/K1w16U3
- rcMgD2BwE72F 9y agoAlso: https://i.imgur.com/rQm66By.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rQm66By.jpg
- samueloph 9y agoThis happened in Brazil, for some time there was a hoax that a car did crash on that painting. The painting lasted less than 24 hours though. http://www.e-farsas.com/parede-desenhada-com-o-tunel-papa-leguas-causou-um-acidente.html http://www.e-farsas.com/parede-desenhada-com-o-tunel-papa-le...
- gus_massa 9y agoSnoopes' version of the link: http://www.snopes.com/road-runner-tunnel-crash-rumor/ http://www.snopes.com/road-runner-tunnel-crash-rumor/
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoApart from illusions, what about discriminating between genuine obstacles and things that can be safely driven over ? For example, a barrier vs some old snow. The car's software has never experienced the properties of materials by walking, jumping on, touching etc. It can't predict how materials will behave when driven over.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoYour car might not have run over snow before, but millions of other cars equipped with self driving senors will have.
- swiley 9y agoAnd this is why you don't want to be one of the first people riding self driving cars. Especially since there isn't even a way for you to manually inform the car about things like this.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoI wouldn't worry about that, millions of miles have been driven by them by now. By the time you get into the first mass produced truly self driving car you will not be able to compete with it.
- jsight 9y agoRight now, you manually inform the car by driving that part yourself. By the time that changes, these cars will have billions of miles of experience.
- vbuwivbiu 9y agoyeh thinking about it, cars could be updated with sensory experience via the internet from various robots around the world - so long as we find a way to transform those experiences into the sensorium of the car. For example, if a robot somewhere had felt snow with its feet and legs, it could send its experience to cars and they could transform that experience into what it would feel like under their wheels (which are the feet of cars)
- DashRattlesnake 9y agoI understand the argument, since car sensors are currently less robust than human eyes, so you need to use many different kinds of them to get near-human results. However, humans get by driving reasonable safely using just vision. I'm totally a computer vision layman, but couldn't you correctly interpret this situation with binocular vision?
- rimliu 9y agoYou could. But for that you need a good model of the world. Which I doubt any self-driving car AI has.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 9y agoA good set of stereoscopic cameras would tell the computer that those bicycles are not real, and even if they were, they are running at the speed limit so there's no need to break. Radar would do an even better job. There's no reason why cars shouldn't have radars and drive better than humans, but yes, they should be able to solve that by vision alone.
- unityByFreedom 9y ago> but yes, they should be able to solve that by vision alone. Not really. A purely vision-based system probably needs to see this example in training labeled as "the back of a car" in order to differentiate it from reality. A sensor-diverse system could detect the metal on the car and determine it is a car without ever having seen such an example during training. And, this is just one edge case. The number of edge cases is infinite. The point in the article is that a diverse sensor array is advantageous because it will cover more edge cases. A purely vision based system will always have limitations compared to a system with more kinds of sensors.
- marcosdumay 9y ago> Not really. A purely vision-based system probably needs to see this example in training labeled as "the back of a car" in order to differentiate it from reality. Have you take a look at depth based feature recognition? It will automatically recognize everything as a car, and will tell the error of the 2D feature extraction every time. It's also extremely CPU intensive, so people don't apply it as often. It's a clear example of AI being hold down due to limitations in computer power.
- jackcarter 9y agoAt first, I interpreted the image as a mockup of a self-driving car broadcasting warnings about upcoming hazards, so that cars to its rear could know about them before directly observing them. I wonder whether that will ever be possible across differing car brands.
- icebraining 9y agoBoth the Federal government and the EU are trying to force the industry to come up and accept standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle
- filereaper 9y agoI really hate to be that guy, but I think my biggest worry is how each of these car manufacturers will handle such edge cases. Each car manufacturers autonomous driving is a black box, we don't know whether said edge case is handled or not, or what action the car will take. Maybe now's not the time but it would be nice to see a deterministic rule book that says, for this edge case, the system will react this way. We can't account for all edge cases but some default fall back would be nice.
- swiley 9y agoI still like the argument that critical firmware should be open sourced by law. You're required to be given the chance to read contracts before you sign them, I don't see why software should be different.
- sqeaky 9y agoWhy is software like this allowed to be closed? We don't allow our plumbing, structure wiring, welding, or any other physical construction method to be closed away and hidden from view. Rather we demand these things be inspected, certified, documented and generally adhere to demonstrable codes and rules. Keeping you source hidden is saying "I have something to hide". Why should someone have something to hide in Pacemaker software, software driving vehicles or safety system on nuclear power plants or anything else where life could be lost?
- hanbura 9y agoI don't think I have any right to see the blueprint of every building I enter. Ensured certification is very different from open source
- sqeaky 9y agoI think in some municipalities you can walk down to the planning and get most the blueprints you would like. Where you can't it is partially because the analogy breaks down physical is slightly reduced by openness, its allows attackers of all kinds to plan better. More manpower can be focused to overcome and issue and a map is force multiplier. Security in information systems is strictly increased, because the flaws exist open or close, but when exposed in the open they are closed forever to all attacker regardless of manpower.
- raverbashing 9y agoThis happens to humans as well. Case in point: radio shows/ads that have car horn noises The decal is bad but the car doesn't risk doing anything that it shouldn't (like driving through it). If it was a decal of an empty road ahead it would have been more problematic
- codeulike 9y agoCar might brake suddenly because it thinks two bicycles are right infront of it?
- marcosdumay 9y agoAny car can break suddenly for any reason or no reason at all. It's not a tragic failure mode, instead, the desired situation is that all failures lead to this.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoBraking suddenly is a great way to cause a crash. Autonomous vehicle target being tailgated, operate device in front vehicle and autonomous vehicle slams on its brakes and gets rear-ended.
- undersuit 9y agoBut that's not special. Vehicle brakes all the time and they/we don't optimize for a tailgater. That's an optimization to be deferred to the tailgater.
- Grue3 9y agoThe decal might be deliberately constructed (using perspective tricks) to alter the behavior of an autonomous car following your van. The cyclists might appear either much closer or farther than the plane they're drawn on. If you install a video panel on the back of your van, there are even more possibilities. You might be able to play a video of an object rapidly moving towards the autonomous car, which will cause it to swerve to try to avoid it. And yes, some of this stuff will probably work on humans as well, but autonomous driving is supposed to be better than humans.
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- jacquesm 9y agoI have been deaf in one ear for a bit (a few weeks) a while ago (aftereffects of a flu), I did not realize before then how much I rely on my hearing during driving. Do self driving cars use audio sensors?
- asadjb 9y agoI think we rely on our hearing because we can only see in one direction. With an autonomous car, you can have sensors pointing in every direction, so visual/radar/lidar clues might be all you need.
- buro9 9y agoSound travels around corners. It not only reflects very well but the way some low frequencies spread out is enough to allow certain vehicles to be heard before they are visible (solid concrete could obscure the view).
- cesarb 9y agoAlso, sound can give early warning of an approaching train, or of an emergency vehicle nearby, or of a truck in reverse.
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- clairity 9y agothis almost throwaway line at the end caught my eye: "The safest bet, then, is for automakers to use an array of sensors, in order to build redundancy into their systems." experienced engineers know that redundancy is a double-edged sword. what do you do when the data from redundant systems disagree? having more data sources means dealing with more edge cases. a single reliable data source (as in the limitations and biases are well known) is better than two less predictable ones. i'm not saying that that's necessarily the case here, but it's not as obvious as this line suggests that the answer is just to add more kinds of sensors (and thereby add more diverse data sources).
- catbird 9y agoI disagree. In an autonomous system, more sensors is almost always better, provided you have enough computing power to process the data. Having two sensors that disagree gives you much more information than if you had a single sensor with a malfunction. In the first case, you know there's some kind of fault and can take steps to fix it. In the second, you're running off bad data and who knows what could happen. Three sensors are better than two—it's a common setup in flight control systems to have three identical computers running all calculations, and the majority opinion is taken as truth.
- clairity 9y agoyes, in a resource-unconstrained world, we could put every sensor on the car and add as much computing power as we'd like. in your 2-sensor scenario, how do you know which one is providing incorrect data?
- unityByFreedom 9y ago> what do you do when the data from redundant systems disagree? Self driving car systems' rules aren't directly decided by humans. The system is trained to come up with its own rules given sensor input. So ideally, you have more different types of input from diverse sources. Machine learning is a lot easier when you have a diverse dataset. > having more data sources means dealing with more edge cases. Yes, and that's a good thing. You want the system to be able to handle the edge case from the article, and a diverse array of sensors can do that. > a single reliable data source (as in the limitations and biases are well known) is better than two less predictable ones. Can you provide an example of a single vehicle sensor that would be preferable to two others? I can't see why this decision would be made, aside from attempts to lower cost. Two sensors provides more reliability than one.
- Pulcinella 9y agoDoes anyone have any good research or review articles into the current state of sensor fusion? To me as a layman, Car AI really seems like one of the most "intelligence" type of AI. Yes Alpha Go and Deep Blue are really good at something that was once thought "easy" for humans and hard for computers, but AI cars seems like trying to construct part of an animal's nervous system and sticking it into a vehicular body.
- unityByFreedom 9y agoPersonally I think medical diagnostics are the most interesting and useful AI. Radiology, and healthcare overall, is set to be improved rapidly if we can get some more labeled data. The hardware and software is already ready to start learning how to diagnose cancer and other health issues based on human-scan data. Not sure whether an "intelligence" rating is possible, given that AI systems are still designed to be domain-specific, i.e., self driving cars aren't detecting cancer.
- throw2016 9y agoWhen image processing and pattern matching driven by the need to identify pornographic images by social media companies masquerading as AI meets the real world. This just underlines what AI actually means and what is currently trying to pass for AI.
- unityByFreedom 9y agoNot sure why all the defense of "humans make this mistake too" in this thread. Isn't the point of SDC that they are better than humans? Shouldn't we support a diverse array of sensors to cover all the eventualities that we can? If some form of radar + camera solves this problem, what's the point of arguing humans would get confused by it too? To be clear, the article alludes to the existence of three types of cars in the wild, (1) Cars with many types of sensors (2) Cars with some types of sensors (3) Cars with no sensors All other things being equal, why are people voting for (2) rather than (1)?
- brreakdown 9y agoHow about when photons flood the camera/sensor ( the sun shines it's rays directly at you ) -- or - when photons cover the subject that the camera/sensor is supposed to be reading -- last this happened the rider died ( https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-driver-killed-autopilot-self-driving-car-harry-potter https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-dri... ) -- they're too many natural occurring factors at play to predetermine what a moving vehicle should or shouldn't do every second - for this reason - vehicles we travel in should be put in an environment first that blocks distractions - like Musk with his Boring machine - this controlled environment makes more sense - otherwise I need an alarm to wake me up when the sensors know they can't tell what's going on - I need to regain control of my vessel and guide it correctly through the photons - yes?
- hanbura 9y ago>How about when photons flood the camera/sensor First you try countermeasures, if that fails you remove yourself from traffic. At least that's what humans do in that situation. >or - when photons cover the subject that the camera/sensor is supposed to be reading -- last this happened the rider died A frequent problem for human drivers too. We just need good heuristics how to come to a safe stop, and be generally better than the average driver.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoSimilar to fog or heavy rain which can also readily obscure the road, and hazards. Not sure how well these things are currently managed by self-driving cars??
- GrinningFool 9y ago"When’s a pedestrian not a pedestrian? When it’s a decal" This sub-title is without context. Would be nice if the title here matched the article title, "This Image Is Why Self-Driving Cars Come Loaded with Many Types of Sensors"