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Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit
- srcmap 9y agoPersonally, I prefer to see Google/Waymo start deport 1-2 thousand self driving cars/minivans in Silicon Valley near Google and FB's headquarters. The near team (in 1-2 years) goal should be getting 20, 50, 95% of their own employees off the personal cars for the daily commute. Their parking lot should be empty after 2 years.
- notyourwork 9y agoI feel like this is too short sighted. That will inherently happen if they are able to tackle different terrain in different weather conditions. Google has offices in more than just Silicon Valley.
- secfirstmd 9y agoYeah, I really want to see them handle the mess of Dublin roads and traffic!
- wtvanhest 9y agoWhere would the cars go once they drop people off?
- srcmap 9y agoBecome Uber car and start make $. Or charge themselves if it is really idle.
- cbhl 9y agoGetting tech employees off cars doesn't need self-driving cars. Google is perfectly happy to have shuttle buses, and pay for them, provided that housing is sufficiently dense, and there is a place where the buses can legally pick up and drop off employees.
- barrkel 9y agoProbably the biggest problem with using mass transit is latency; having to wait around doing nothing until your transport arrives. It's a constraint on your schedule and adds a certain amount of stress to your day. And if your desired departure or arrival time don't coincide closely with the schedule, you're going to waste a bunch of time even if the transport is quick. Subways solve this problem by running every couple of minutes. Buses generally don't solve this problem well because traffic and alighting / loading delays cause them to bunch up. But on-demand self-driving cars can solve this problem, as long as there are enough of them close enough. (It's also the problem Uber solved.)
- darethas 9y agoStreet cars and trains. I don't know why we ever stopped building them.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe level of service that can be justified in low population density areas is abysmal and can't compete with relatively inexpensive personal vehicles.
- askvictor 9y ago*Inexpensive if you don't factor in the costs of building and maintaining roads.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- waqf 9y ago> Subways solve this problem by running every couple of minutes. Similarly, in many transport corridors intercity rail runs several times an hour (not so much in the US) and shuttle flights run every hour or two. Which are also sufficient in those contexts, in that it becomes reasonable to show up at the station/airport without checking the timetable.
- lhorie 9y agoI'd much rather they figure out snow conditions. Driving in a snowstorm is challenging even for experienced human drivers, and I'd feel far safer in a autonomous car that has been shown to handle snow well than one that merely dogfoods with employees in sunny California.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoWhy? If the cars never leave the Bay Area why would you feel safer knowing they have snow capabilities? I’d rather they get them working maximally safely in a confined environment than pretend to be universally safe when they’re obviously not.
- lhorie 9y agoBecause snow conditions are inherently more dangerous and more likely to yield data for the cases we really care about, i.e. accidents and near accidents. Getting commute data in California is likely to just give you a ton of boring repeat data going to and from googleplex and a few locations. As far as I understand, the technology is already good enough to handle that sort of 80% reliability stuff. It's the last 20% - the hard stuff - that needs to be hammered on from now on.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> snow conditions are ... likely to yield data for the cases we really care about That’s not intuitive to me. I don’t see why snow conditions would teach us about likely accidents in Pali Alto.
- lhorie 9y agoSomeone had a good example in this thread, for example, you're more likely going to run into issues with clogged sensors in detroit than you are in palo alto. Another thing that happens way more in snow is automatic torque rebalancing in 4WD systems. Rainy days aren't nearly as common in Palo Alto as snowy days are in Detroit but both share the property of poorer visibility and an increase in pedestrian distraction levels. Etc, etc. A lot of technology only exists because their original problem set was extreme in nature (e.g. things out of NASA or military research). I think a lot of "easier" problems in autonomous driving could benefit from a breakthrough solution that got discovered in the course of solving a harder problem.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoPersonally, I'd like to see these self driving cars routinely tackle more challenging climates than those that you can suntan in for the majority of the year. The snow covered streets of Detroit should yield some interesting data.
- linkregister 9y agoThis sounds like a nightmare. Employees who would have walked, biked, or bused would now be added to traffic. It sounds way more convenient to be picked up by a company car than to bike, especially if it’s raining. Google having full parking lots doesn’t harm Mountain View and Sunnyvale traffic as much as extra trips do.
- meatmodule 9y agoTech companies in the Bay Area already have minorities of their employees driving to work alone. Only the last of your goals would be relevant at Google.
- stretchwithme 9y agoHopefully, at night and where there are no street lights as well. The more corner cases, the better. I still would like to see more races. In the snow too. https://electrek.co/2017/02/18/self-driving-car-race-crash-buenos-aires-formula-e-eprix/ https://electrek.co/2017/02/18/self-driving-car-race-crash-b...
- CabSauce 9y agoHave no fear, there aren't any working street lights in Detroit.
- robotnixon 9y agoDetroit is the largest city in the US fully lit by LED streetlights with over 65,000 installed since 2014. Its easily recognizable from space: https://twitter.com/astro_kimbrough/status/821361989230456832 https://twitter.com/astro_kimbrough/status/82136198923045683...
- rmason 9y agoThat's old news my friend. All the streets in Detroit have functioning streetlights now, LED's no less.
- goda90 9y agoAnd heavy rain, heavy rain at night with street lights reflecting off the pavement right into the cameras, black ice, fog, giant snowflakes, high wind snowstorm, etc etc.
- bjl 9y agoAnd blind corners, and police directing traffic.
- stretchwithme 9y agoA cop wearing a parka directing traffic in a snow storm at night. And what about criminals tricking cars into doing things? It will be a long time before smart people trust automated vehicles to take their kids without adult supervision. Cars will have to be able to interpret our actions and intent better than we can. Or at least be able to defend their cargo, record evidence and alert authorities.
- neom 9y agoI'm curious to see if we'll see the Dubai style autonomous drone taxi service thing come to the US at some point. At least in major cities. Personally I'm in favour of less cars and more walkable/bikeable urban spaces. https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/10/03/flying-taxis-dubai/ https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/10/03/flying-taxis-du...
- skywhopper 9y agoIt would need to actually exist first. A hovering drone is not exactly a taxi service.
- stephengillie 9y agoSelf-driving cars feel like they are still in the early Alpha stage, while self-driving robots are already in production in Amazon's warehouses. Why are companies going through the great expense of constructing full-size mock-ups if the domain problems haven't been solved on smaller mock-ups? Is there a fundamental difference between a 400 lb self-driving robot and a 2-ton self-driving robot - beyond the advertising novelty of being inside the car? Edit: If both robots are outside on a driving track, not in the Amazon warehouse. And if "snow-vision" and other problems have been solved with smaller robots, or in other domains, why do news articles like this treat the topic as though it's entirely foreign and to be feared, instead of helping readers associate these concepts with existing concepts to drive acceptance?
- gervase 9y agoI think there are two separate issues that you raise that are essentially independent: 1. What evaluation metrics should we use to measure the advancement of self-driving technology? 2. How can we measure the public's level of acceptance for these technologies, and what impact does media coverage (positive or negative) have in that respect? For example, I would not personally gauge that SDCs are in early alpha. However, I live in a suburb of Phoenix, where Uber, Waymo, and Cruise [0] are all conducting extensive testing; I usually observe between 15 and 30 distinct SDCs during my 20-minute commute. I expect this familiarity has (by design, I'm sure) made me more comfortable with SDCs than most. I also assume that the environment is somewhat simpler than other metro areas, as we have very little precipitation and a mostly grid-like street layout. My judgement of these cars is that they approximate the behavior of an extremely stodgy, overly conservative, but ultimately very alert driver. For example, they respond well to being cut off, dealing with late light changes, or unpredictable pedestrian behavior, while dealing poorly with things which require decision-making, such as making a right on red, or preemptively changing lanes to avoid the frequent stops of a bus. In other words, they've been optimizing for safety, and not trip efficiency; I think that this is probably the right order of priorities at this stage of development. Given this, I would be comfortable taking driverless trips around town, on surface streets; I would therefore classify the current state of development as early beta more so than early alpha. However, this is a subjective assessment, not based on any objective metric. At the same time, I read the news too, and I think we are observing the clash of two competing agendas. On one hand, you have the tech companies painting an overly-rosy picture of development, probably to soften up the market to increase (eventual) penetration. On the other hand, you have overly-pessimistic outlets preaching various types of doom (job loss, trolley problem, etc) in order to drive clicks through fear, or (cynically) to poison the market and buy time for later technical entries to catch up to the leaders. Both of these tactics will have varying levels of receptivity with different groups, roughly corresponding (I expect) to the Rogers adoption curve [1]. Therefore, I expect we'll continue to see both optimistic and pessimistic coverage for quite some time. [0]: In this order of development progress, in my opinion [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
- 0xbear 9y agoExciting. Test it in rainy Seattle and freezing Alaska, too. If this works, this would show real, tangible leadership in the field. No one can do this yet, and autonomous driving tech is not to useful if it craps out in inclement weather.
- stephengillie 9y agoSeattle can have "grey-out" conditions, where spray from other cars combines with the rainfall to dramatically limit visibility. It's rather terrifying to drive through, where you can only see for about 20 feet in any direction. Autonomous driving that entirely relies on computer vision will fail just as poorly as human eyes - multiple sensor types are necessary. How many types of sensor does this car have? I wish the article would have gone into that detail.
- gyc 9y agoAnd maybe some kind of communication/message passing between vehicles maybe useful. For example, if a vehicle senses black ice in a certain part of the road, it can pass that information to other cars so they know to slow down when going over the same part of the road. So something like Waze but for road conditions.
- stephengillie 9y ago> And maybe some kind of communication/message passing between vehicles maybe useful. I've made this suggestion before, but all commenters remarked about the risks of trusting another car, trusting another signal, hackers, script kiddies, and other malicious agents. The safest inter-car communication was determined to be adaptive cruise control.
- randyrand 9y agoWe trust traffic lights without much issue. What's the difference?
- akgerber 9y agoDetroit still seems like an easier environment than Uber/CMU's Pittsburgh, home of barely-maintained brick roadways with blind corners on 20%+ grades and icy winters.
- j-walker 9y agoDon't forget the 'Pittsburgh Left'! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left
- tomschlick 9y agoThat is actually a pretty decent explanation of the practice and the reasoning behind it. Thankfully, the PGH left is starting to die off as they install newer traffic light systems with dedicated turning lights/lanes.
- meddlepal 9y agoStill very common elsewhere. As noted by the article this is a widespread phenomenon in the Northeast... I see it all the time in Boston and Worcester.
- tomschlick 9y agoTIL, I haven't seen it outside of the greater PGH area.
- 9y ago
- meatmodule 9y agoI get a chuckle out of these threads. Humans are _unbelievably_ bad at driving in the snow. If the only thing a self-driving car does in a whiteout snow storm is come to a halt, it will already be dramatically safer than human drivers. You can just hard-wire the car to not do stupid things. Taking human judgement out of the loop has many wonderful outcomes. https://youtu.be/rhZCyQ3emQg?t=121 https://youtu.be/rhZCyQ3emQg?t=121
- benaiah 9y agoThis is a bit aside from your main point, but stopping on a road in a whiteout snow storm is _incredibly_ dangerous due to the cars behind you being unable to see you until it is much too late to stop. I grew up driving two-lane highways in Alaska with frequent semi traffic, several times in blizzard conditions (to the point where the only way to follow the road was to drive on the flat part of the just-fallen snow). You could pull over to the side of the road, but you may not be able to get back on the road depending on your vehicle and the snow level (and in remote, cold areas this may be deadly itself). You could say "just don't drive in blizzards", but on a long drive you may often end up in a blizzard when you started in clear weather. Frequently this happens in areas where there are no safe places to stop for miles. I'm not an expert on self-driving car sensors, but it's not hard to imagine that they could be made much less weather-dependent than the human eye. Driving through blizzard conditions is incredibly disorienting and terrifying, so the potential of better-than-vision detection of roads and traffic is IMO the most promising way for self-driving cars to handle snowy conditions.
- tomkarlo 9y agoPotentially, a self-driving car (or even Google Maps nav and a regular driver) would not have this problem - it would simply not drive itself into a situation where it's both in heavy snow and a place that's not safe to stop. I've had a few times in California where I started a long drive in sun and warm weather and ended up stuck in a snow-storm mid-drive (hello Sierra passes)... it would have been nice if either my car or my map software warned me this was likely before we set off.
- excalibur 9y agoSo you're saying we should keep an eye on Craigslist in Detroit for rare gift opportunities this Christmas.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoHere's my bet. Their software designed to drive conservatively and likewise it will be way too hair trigger with the brakes for use in the snow without bringing a lot of changes of pants. That's assuming they can deal reasonably well with the reduced visibility and change in behavior of other drivers. They'll probably also slide on a few right turns before they get the settings fully dialed in.
- hawski 9y agoCould the camera use the clear view screen [1] instead of counting on windshield and wipers? Maybe it does already, I don't know. Clear view screen is a round window that is usually located on a normal window. This window rotates at ~1500 RPM, thanks to that it will not be covered by snow or rain. It is used on ships and in locomotives. It looks like this: https://youtu.be/uIwWnWvikkQ?t=24s https://youtu.be/uIwWnWvikkQ?t=24s [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_view_screen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_view_screen
- cbhl 9y agoOne of the biggest challenges with self-driving cars in snow is the snow in the environment -- for example, how do you see the lane markers so that you stay in your lane?
- eco 9y agoI imagine they'll just have to do what humans do. Follow existing tire tracks if available. If not, just intuit where the road using your best judgement. It's not terribly unlike driving on dirt roads (though harder, surely) which autonomous cars already did surprisingly well in the first two Grand Challenges (no lane markers there either).
- mannykannot 9y agoThe first two grand challenges also lacked oncoming traffic. In general, however, I agree that doing what a prudent driver would do in the situation is probably not an insurmountable problem.
- freeone3000 9y agoThis is also a human challenge. You follow the tire tracks. If there are no tire tracks, guess. You can have a margin of error of half a lane and be within human parameters.
- tjoff 9y ago
- myself248 9y agoAbout time. I build autonomous/ADAS testbed cars in Detroit and it's astonishing the stuff that the California cars get flustered by. LIDAR is baffled by snow, RADAR sensors get packed with slush if they're mounted too low, etc.
- falcolas 9y agoAnd that doesn't even cover the complete variability of traction from one yard of pavement to the next in winter, or the legibility of road markers. There's a lot of challenges, and I'm glad they're finally getting to it.
- gt_ 9y agoI expect traction to eventually be one of their strong suits. Machine learning on weather conditions and traffic patterns should work. I’ve got a unique amount of snow-driving experience in most every region of the globe (many years working for a snowboarding magazine) and my hunch is a computer could do this wonderfully. Much of these things should be very predictable with delicate sensory input, and roads have predictable problem spots. One particularly problematic variable that will undermine weather calculations and traction will be the complications of road de-icer. In high-altitude inland regions, de-icer is not used, with a few exceptions after storms are long gone and the temperature has warmed. These regions should be a piece of cake for autonomous vehicles. Detroit in mid-winter probably resembles this for a few months due to low temps but humidity will destabilize de-icer during early and later winter. And, temp fluctuations resulting from humidity, coupled with high snowfall, necessitates the use of de-icer to prevent the city from getting buried in. In coastal regions like CA, de-icer more predictably melts and cleans the roads. In regions like Chicago, de-icer will hve every effect imaginable, both creating ice and melting it multiple times a day. But if a road is not de-iced the traction will follow a different pattern. I can’t imagine how a self-driving car could determine this. To further complicat things, de-icer can often create ice and be counterintuitive in only shaded parts of the road. De-icer is used so differently, an so often foolishly in different regions.
- maxerickson 9y ago
- smelterdemon 9y agoTime to find out how well autonomous cars will deal with potholes
- helipad 9y agoI was just thinking how they'll need to make use of gyroscopes. * Car has detected only 3 wheels touching road * Car is on Woodward * Proceed as normal
- ilaksh 9y agoIs Waymo still planning to launch soon in Phoenix? They were going to start offering rides to the public this fall without the employee in the car. Or did they change their mind? If anyone has ridden in those vans I am curious to know how well their early rider program is performing in terms of not needing the human driver to intervene. I check the news for a Waymo launch every day, because it will be one of the most significant events in the history of self driving cars.
- faitswulff 9y agoFrom the article: > Starting in April, Waymo began testing a free service with select passengers in Phoenix, using some of its 600 minivans from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.
- rhino369 9y agoBut right now there is a driver in the car ready to take over. If they can do it without drivers being in the car, then driverless cars are just around the corner. I'm skeptical.
- ilaksh 9y agoYeah that's old news. I am referring to recent articles from a few weeks ago where someone suggested that there was at least a rumor that they might launch without any actual driver to the general public in Phoenix this fall sometime.
- Fricken 9y agoThe rumour traces back to a single anonymous source reported on by the Information. I hope it turns out to be true, because in 2012 I made a 5 year prediction for it and it's always nice to be correct about things, but we'll have to see. From the outside looking in, they look to be pretty close, but only the people at Waymo really know how close they are to doing it.
- dpandya 9y agoThis is pretty damn amazing. HN is a pretty critical place most of the time but sometimes it's valuable to take a step back. The challenges associated with building a car that can drive itself are pretty insanely difficult (even something as straightforward as "how do we get the training data?") and the fact that we're now at a point where there's a possibility of self-driving cars working in snowy conditions is pretty awesome.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wil421 9y agoI would be hesitant to consider it a self driving car if it can’t drive in adverse conditions.
- jdashg 9y agoI would gladly take it if it only worked on one of the 300 days of clear skies I get a year. 90% of the way to true "self driving" is plenty to revolutionize things.
- usrusr 9y agoDo you intend to drive on those other days, without any fair weather routine? Automation unlearning is a problem with airline pilots, despite all efforts like continuous flight reviews that drivers don't have.
- mannykannot 9y agoThat is a reasonable question, though we already have the situation where people are driving in snow with little current, or even previous, experience of those conditions. The biggest problem is going to be with people who have never driven.
- sobani 9y ago
- brailsafe 9y agoI feel like this is a nice start, but Canada and more mountainous regions of the PNW will be the real proving ground. North Dakota, Minnesota and so on. At least in terms of generalized technical achievement, not in serving the most people in most situations. Winnipeg is a hellscape for driving in the best of times. Driving through the prairies in a snowstorm was one of the scariest experiences of my life, as well as the rockies with a thin layer of ice, intense grades, little to no road markings. As a recognized tangent to that tangent, there's a big problem up here in the real North ( where basic necessities of life are ludicrously expensive. In part, at least possibly, due to transport costs. Would be amazing if self-driving vehicles could regularly deliver goods up there with no human risk on ice-roads. May be a pipe dream though.
- rambleraptor 9y agoI'm curious if we'll see the Detroit economy take off as a result of more self-driving car work in the area. It seems like Metro Detroit hasn't seen many of the tech gains that the coastal tech hubs have seen.
- dswalter 9y agoMichigan is a great location to test self driving cars, because the lake effect makes the temperature fluctuate around freezing. This means we go from icy to wet frequently. It also helps that we get a decent amount of snow, giving us a much wider range of driving conditions than the Bay Area.
- QAPereo 9y agoThere’s also the benefit of roads in every state of repair, from pristine to essentially abandoned by the government.
- benatkin 9y agoThe singularity is near.
- purplezooey 9y agoLived in Detroit for several years and spun my car many times even as an experienced snow driver. Should be fun.
- sbrin 9y agoits impressive to see this coming full circle back to Detroit
- wiremine 9y ago> "Having lived through fourteen Michigan winters, I’m confident that there are few better places that will prepare our self-driving cars for winter conditions" Lived in Michigan for 30+ years myself, on the West side of the state. We get a lot of lake effect, and it's only 3 hours from Detroit. It's also 6 hours from the middle of the U.P., where they get _real_ snow. And if they really want to, they can go into Canada. Should be a good set of real-world tests.
- lukejduncan 9y agoI lived in Downtown Detroit for a two years. Unless things have changed since 2011, there aren't many streets outside of a narrow strip of Mid Town where the city actually plows the streets. I'm curious how examples of government mismanagement like this get highlighted. I can see the headline in the Detroit Free Press now "Snow No-Go Zone: Waymo won't drive East Jefferson until the city plows it."
- joosebox 9y agoUhh yeah, things have changed since 2011. http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/02/07/detroit-mayor-announces-new-way-to-report-snow-covered-streets/amp/ http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/02/07/detroit-mayor-announc...
- lukejduncan 9y agoThat's pretty nice!
- orf 9y agoAs a society, are we ready for self driving cars? It seems to signal the start of the next industrial Revolution, with truckers and taxi drivers going extinct, with more industries to follow. Machine learning has so far been kind of in the background, with this it's very front and center and will directly impact millions of people. Also, I've always wondered, if self driving car crashes who is legally liable? Is it the programmer or the occupant?
- Waterluvian 9y agoI'm not an expert in perception or autonomy, but I've always had a loose sense that winter driving would be an order of magnitude more complicated for autonomous vehicles. It had me worried: what if technology presents a future where the world is split up into industry regions based on climate? You have some serious costs associated with doing business in a region that has winter. "Available in Canada (summer only)" "Shipping to winter regions is far more expensive because we need to use human drivers half the year. So we generally avoid focusing on them." Not a new problem. Geography has always strongly impacted industry. But interesting to think of it from this perspective. I'm excited to see attempts to tackle the truly difficult form of autonomous driving.
- mrtron 9y agoThe rules for driving in snow are pretty simple. Go slow, pump the brakes, give a bigger safety cushion for obstacles. The problem is likely around vision. A lot of winter driving is done at an unsafe level of visibility. It is probably better having non static rules for roads. Snow should reduce speed limits, and white out conditions should be used for emergency travel only. Unless you can utilize radar to obtain better visibility than human drivers, in which case you could probably drastically reduce the number of winter accidents.
- dghughes 9y agoContext is a major part of driving it worries me when you see these videos of self-driving cars slamming on brakes a metre or two from a pedestrian. A human driver would see the person at the side of the road whether it's a marked crosswalk or not. There are visual cues we humans know which mean "I'm going to cross the street now" such as a pedestrian turning their head towards the driver to make eye contact first, holding out one arm while looking both ways. Slamming on the brakes at the very last moment isn't what I'd call a success. As a Canadian who lives in the very snowy Maritimes I have a lot of experience with driving in the winter. I started driving at age 14 and my job as a teen, 20s and 30s required me to drive in all conditions. Winter driving has to be instinctive there is no time to think and as noted above also depends on context. If a pedestrian walks out from the side of the road and that road has a curve maybe even a downhill curve what now? Slamming on the brakes even ABS may not help. The inertia and being on an angle may (my guess is will) cause the vehicle to slip towards the outside part of the curve. If the vehicle is in the right lane it would slide into oncoming traffic. Counter-steering at the very instant your vehicle starts to fishtail is a learned skill that has to be instinctive. And when to use that technique or when not to use it. Slush is I think one of the most dangerous things a winter driver will face. A driver who drives into a line of slush that may be left on the center line can easily have their vehicle jerk violently to the left. It can be a situation where you have less than half a second to react. Brakes on a curve has to be one of the most common problems with inexperienced winter drivers. I see it all the time even with drivers who I know have been living here all their lives. Who will scrape off all the optical sensors in the morning? I've had ice so thick and so hard to get off you'd swear it was concrete glued to your windshield. Not to mention the slush, snow, dirt-salt-water mix constantly splashing up. Anyone with a backup camera knows it's a constant battle to keep it clean or it's useless. It will be interesting to see the results but I think there is far more to self-driving in the winter than on clear, dry roads in warmer climates.
- venturis_voice 9y agoThe problem with self driving cars is that you can never rely on a human to take over at a moments notice. Google perfected the self driving car over a decade ago but found that once on the motorway (Freeway for my transatlantic cousins) they literally switched of, rummaged around in the back did everything other than be able to take over the wheel at a moments notice. So google had to go back to the drawing board and design a car that could drive literally everywhere! We covered the topic in part of our recent podcast. If you'd like to listen debate or disagree! Skip ahead to 23.03 minutes. http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/tech-teams-productivity/ http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/tech-teams-productivity...