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The Battle for Best Semi-Autonomous System: Tesla Autopilot vs. GM SuperCruise
- DonHopkins 9y ago"Head to head" is an unfortunate way to compare automobiles, like playing chicken. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxooLC9EwII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxooLC9EwII
- Animats 9y agoGM did a nice job there. They have a good solution to the "expecting the driver to watch and take over" problem. Their system watches the driver constantly to make sure they're in position to take over, but doesn't require a hand on the wheel. GM is also more careful about when to allow the control system to engage. Tesla's crashes on "autopilot" have mostly been in situations where the system should have detected an obstacle. Four times, a Tesla on autopilot has slammed into an obstacle partly blocking the left edge of a lane. All those crashes were in freeway situations, where Autopilot is supposed to be reliable. That's inexcusable. Tesla's radar has inadequate resolution for the job, the vision system doesn't really recognize fixed obstacles, and they don't have LIDAR. So they don't detect big things like fire trucks and street cleaning trucks that are mostly on the shoulder and partly into the lane.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y agoWhy aren't we using sonar for this sort of thing. Bats have nailed down the echo location thing in extremely heavy bat traffic, but I don't see that being something that has been vigorously pursued by tech companies.
- jasonjei 9y agoA lot of companies (such as Google/ABC Waymo) are actually looking into Lidar applications. Sonar is good, but Lidar is an order of magnitude faster. In fact, 1,000,000 times faster than speed of sound.
- metamet 9y agoHave they overcome the hacking/tricking issues they were having a few years ago yet? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/07/hackers-trick-self-driving-cars-lidar-sensor https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/07/hackers-t... Side note: I can't help but be reminded of Napoleon Dynamite's Liger whenever I see Lidar. Makes me smile.
- knodi123 9y agoHow timely. That's the very topic of today's xkcd. https://www.xkcd.com/1958/ https://www.xkcd.com/1958/ Short version: Regular cars are vulnerable to malicious actors, too, but luckily most people aren't murderers.
- screye 9y agoLidar kind of works the same way, but is a lot faster (speed of light vs speed of sound) I could also see sonar taking a lot more energy to use all the time as compared to Lidar.
- cr0sh 9y agoNo, it probably has more to do with your first point: speed. During the time it could take for a sonar (ultrasonic) sensor to send out a pulse and for it to return, the car may have travelled many feet depending on speed and road conditions. This would impact how long it would take to perform an evasive action and return to a safe state. That is just a guess, though - I haven't run the numbers to know if it is factual. Lidar, though, is much quicker, as you noted.
- mandevil 9y agoLIDAR has severe range limitations, such that it's basically unusable for highway speed driving (or at least did, <mumble> years ago when I worked on autonomous driving), which is why Tesla doesn't use LIDAR. Looking at Thrun et al.'s paper on Stanley (https://www-cs.stanford.edu/people/dstavens/jfr06/thrun_etal_jfr06.pdf https://www-cs.stanford.edu/people/dstavens/jfr06/thrun_etal...): "The effective maximum range at which obstacles can be detected with the laser mapper is approximately 22 m. This range is sufficient for Stanley to reliably avoid obstacles at speeds up to 25 mph. Based on the 2004 Race Course, the development team estimated that Stanley would need to reach speeds of 35 mph in order to successfully complete the challenge. To extend the sensor range enough to allow safe driving at 35 mph, Stanley uses a color camera to find drivable surfaces at ranges exceeding that of the laser analysis." They built a neural network to analyze terrain and find safe paths- and trained it driving at 25 mph across the environment with the LIDAR providing the control- and then let it work at higher speeds where the LIDAR would be able to panic stop but not much more.
- giobox 9y agoI may be way off base here, but hasn't the LIDAR field evolved enormously since 2006 (date of that paper)? Last I read prototype solid state LIDAR systems have ranges in the ~150m range, although I don't follow this field all that closely. Given that the major players like Waymo/Uber/Apple etc seem to be betting very heavily on LIDAR, one would assume these challenges are being resolved. I suspect the traditionally very high cost of LIDAR was likely a much bigger factor in Tesla's decision not to use, rather than any technical reason. Cameras plus radar is vastly cheaper to ship for now.
- dwighttk 9y agobats aren't traveling 70mph, are they?
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y agoNo but they're also flying in much closer tighter quarters.
- nharada 9y agoI think that's kinda the parent comment's point. Just because sonar is good for indoor localization doesn't mean it's got the range for highway speeds. In fact, ultrasound on cars is for exactly this: low speed, close quarters detection. This is why backup sensors or self parking systems rely on ultrasound.
- grkvlt 9y agoIs there the equivalent of Reynolds number for this? I'm guessing something based on a characteristic length and velocity? It looks like I want the Walking Froude Number [0] which is Fr = u^2 / g.l it seems... 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froude_number#Walking_Froude_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froude_number#Walking_Froude_n...
- Terretta 9y agoCloser relative to their size? Cars often travel in packs closer together than unit size.
- chromaton 9y agoThe article mentions Tesla's use of ultrasonic sensors.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoLIDAR is still expensive, so is used in the lab (or in test vehicles) but I don't think it has been used in a consumer vehicle yet, which I think are mostly using cheaper eye-like cameras.
- cr0sh 9y agoHigh-resolution, 3D lidar is expensive, not to mention mechanically complicated and large, so it doesn't fit well into car designs...no consumer is going to want a spinning top on their car (Waymo's Velodyne lidar). 2D lidar is less expensive, but still isn't cheap enough for the number of sensors that would be needed (multiple sensors would be needed for proper coverage, if the the sensors were incorporated into the car body); also, they are still mechanically complex (most rely on spinning mirrors or sensors). That leaves something like flash lidar, which isn't quite cheap enough (though it's dropped in price significantly in recent years), and I think it's resolution is still fairly low - but it does allow for 3D information about the scene, within it's field of view. I have always understood why Tesla took the route of using cameras only. In theory, it should work fairly well, since humans have been using a similar system for 100+ years for driving automobiles. It really comes down to a software problem (vision and deep learning, etc), more than anything. Camera sensors are inexpensive, and easy to incorporate into a vehicle. I tend to wonder if maybe augmentation with FLIR and other wavelength sensors might not improve things, but even standalone image sensors - in theory - should be completely workable.
- greglindahl 9y agoTesla doesn't use cameras only. They use cameras, radar, and ultrasound.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y agoAlso iirc current LIDAR hardware is rather large and needs to placed in a fairly open and visible position. The HN demographic may not appreciate this as much as they should but looks are really important when it comes to selling a car, a LiDAR set is unsightly. LiDAR-less maybe the only market viable option.
- jjtheblunt 9y agorain and wind would screw sonar up, no?
- bonestamp2 9y agoThey kind of do... Tesla uses 12 ultrasonic (sonar) sensors (and cameras). GM uses radar (and cameras).
- greglindahl 9y agoTesla also has a radar.
- astrojams 9y agoI’ve got a Tesla model X and I’ve been in situations where the autopilot screwed up and required me to take over to prevent an accident. Most recently the car was autonomously changing lanes on a highway and didn’t see a guy on a motorcycle who was following too closely to the car in front of him. It’s probably an edge case, but still makes me weary of using it more.
- bowmessage 9y agoAs someone who rides, this is scary. I'm going to begin giving semi-autonomous vehicles a wide berth. Whatever car company exec said that humans are going to "bully self driving cars" was very wrong. I'm very scared of them and I'm not going to mess around.
- another-one-off 9y agoThis is a very rehashed point; but just because these cars crash into things in stupid situations doesn't mean that they are less safe than what we already have. Shouldn't you already be giving semi-autonomous, fully-autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles wide berth? I assume you mean rides [a motorcycle], which is ~35x more dangerous than driving a car according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing driving a car is already the most dangerous thing people do in a day. They would be completely illegal if we worried more about safety than about cost-benefit ratios. Even if AutoPilot/SuperCruise vehicles are 10 times safer than regular drivers they are still going to take out the occasional motorcyclist.
- robotresearcher 9y agoWith human-driven vehicles there is often a chance to make eye contact to confirm that you see each other. Perhaps the robot cars need some equivalent. Interesting interface design problem.
- monkmartinez 9y agoEye contact doesn't insure the safety of either party.
- anonfunction 9y agoIn addition to your points I think GM also acted with more integrity in naming the feature. Tesla calling it autopilot is irresponsible and dangerous.
- drcross 9y agoTesla's autopilot is functionally identical to a boat or plane autopilot. If a pilot or skipper relied upon autopilot as a full self driving system they would most likely be dead before the end of their trip.
- gamblor956 9y agoTesla's autopilot function is horribly named and not at all identical to plane autopilot. Modern autopilots are actually fully capable of handling takeoff, flight, and landing without interaction from the pilot. However, pilots continue to handle takeoff and landing procedures to maintain skills in those areas as generally an autopilot failure during those times would not be recoverable.
- Piskvorrr 9y agoCapable of handling _each_ of the functions (NOT switching between the modes - "sit on tarmac, punch in destination, go take a nap"; plus I'm not entirely sure if the feature you describe as autotakeoff even exists outside Hollywood), exclusively on the happy path with strict minima, with pilots required to take over at once in case of any irregularity. Highly convenient, but not a self-flying miracle.
- gamblor956 9y agoThe features I have described are available in the Dreamliner and the Airbus 380, and have been more than a Hollywood fantasy for at least a decade... Self-flying isn't as difficult as people think it is. There are fewer obstacles and risks to deal with.
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- unclebucknasty 9y ago>They have a good solution to the "expecting the driver to watch and take over" problem I've always thought the model itself represents a fundamental design flaw. These systems should either be fully autonomous and responsible, or engage only as active safety measures in accident avoidance. Tesla has been particularly ambiguous and irresponsible in its messaging/positioning. Naming the product "Autopilot" and really playing up its capabilities, then disclaiming responsibility in the event that the system fails.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gtowey 9y agoAccording to the article GM has decided to simply restrict the domain of their semi-autonomous offering to only work on divided highways. The author says that the result is innovative and brilliant. But the problems they're trying to solve are not nearly as ambitious or challenging as those Tesla has decided to tackle. While it can be argued that GM should received kudos for releasing a feature that can work reliably, I don't see it as innovative. It kind of reinforces that traditional car makers are never going to offer anything revolutionary to the car market. They're going to use the work of others to incrementally add features to cars that they think will increase sales. They won't take risks with technology.
- simion314 9y ago>They won't take risks with technology. Better you say taking risks with human lives, this is not a framework or app where you risk crashes and upseting customers because they lost some work, this is about human life and expensive damages.
- gtowey 9y agoI think my point was that GM wouldn't have this product to sell in the first place unless someone else already took those risks. They want to sell the product that someone else made possible. Now, as others have pointed out there is a market for that, and a great many people prefer the feeling of reliability they get from GM's offering. I just wouldn't call that innovation.
- simion314 9y agoGoogle had worked on self driving cars on a while, the problem was probably the hardware was not ready. Tesla AI takes too many risks in my opinion because it is missing important sensors(IMHO) it crashes often with big trucks or buses proving the optimization they do are not safe enough and I prefer a company that is not risking my life by selling me a driver assistant that is not that good and is badly named autopilot. I have a feeling but I can be wrong that you think Tesla innovated the AI on self driving cars and GM or others are profiting for it, self driving AI was studied and worked on before Tesla, Tesla are in the group of companies that risk the life of others where others waited for the tech to be better. Also other companies like GM already had driving assist functions, they now upgrade them with new features
- thebluehawk 9y agoI'm really confused. When describing the "Operational Domain" The author explains that a Tesla he drove 18 years ago handled a sample drive on FDR with two disengagements, while the Cadillac wouldn't stay engaged when he tried the same drive. Then says the Cadillac wins by a hair. How does a brand new system that doesn't work reliably win over a system that's been working better for over 18 months?
- ramenmeal 9y agoI think the point of the whole article is that GM was able to make sure people only use the system when it was capable of working, where as Tesla's system can be used when it shouldn't be. He gets very distracted through out and accidentally mentions how good Tesla's self driving is. As an aside, I rather Tesla's strategy to GM's. In 10 years when the tech is there, will this Cadillac simply handle freeways better? Seems like the car is locked in to a specific subset of self driving for the life of the car.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- make3 9y agothe whole field of modern "ai" is about 6 years old (since AlexNet won ImageNet), so 18 months is quite a long time. More importantly, a review of flash performance is something that can be reasonable to perform, as another more long term reliability oriented one also can be.
- felippee 9y agoThis is a huge misconception. Modern AI is at least 30 years old, first convnets were conceived in 1980'ies, LSTM in early 90's. A lot of work went into deep learning before AlexNet eventually won the ImageNet. To some degree last years were not the "emergence" of deep learning but rather a culmination of many years of research and development.
- make3 9y ago
- xversilov 9y agoI'll be driving manually for a long time. I have no interest in beta testing anybody's autonomous systems at 70mph.
- undersuit 9y agoYou're part of the beta test if you're on the road with any car using autonomy.
- rubicon33 9y agoYea well, you're also beta testing some 16 year old's brain on 6 pints of beer, or some 90 year olds brain who missed their afternoon nap. You're beta testing a lot of shit on the road. I pray for the day when the only thing we're really testing, is the software, and not some idiot's brain.
- simion314 9y agoI see many people using this reason: Because there are people that drive drunk or text while driving or get distracted then we need the autopilot. I think this is wrong, we just need an AI or other tech that detects this bad drivers or distracted drivers and don't let them drive/start the car or for distraction like texting safely stop the car, maybe report the driver, there must be other solution then allowing bad rrivewrs or bad AI to drive around.
- dna_polymerase 9y agoPerfect, let's report all the drunk people! I'd love to live in a world where my car reports me to the authorities whenever I don't obey to its definition of good behaviour! \s
- simion314 9y agoWhy is not fair to have more ways to not allow drunk people to drive and depend on having policemen stopping you? Is your need to drive drunk more important then the life of others? Let's assume your car won't let you start if drunk, there will be a fail-safe mode, you activate that in case of emergency and start it and drive to a hospital because there is an emergency. In case the car is broken and it is reporting false positive we could have rules so you get compensated for this issue by the people at fault for the false positive. Your argument is like saying that forcing people to learn to drive is too much. My point is that the bad drivers problem has more solutions not only a less bad AI autopilot.
- dna_polymerase 9y agoMy argument is that people should stop and think before asking something like this. If the car is capable to detect drunk people and shut the car down it could do so for any reason the car manufacturer likes, or even worse, the manufacturer could sell access to that system to the NSA, your bank, your insurance, whatever. Did you really assume I'd like more drunk people driving around?
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- ibdf 9y agoSo I guess now we are settling for semi-autonomous vehicles. This would have been impressive 10 years ago (maybe more). They are just playing catch up while they could have been trying to be innovative all along.
- empath75 9y agoI think it's more that there is a big dangerous gap between semi-autonomous vehicles and fully self-driving cars, and car companies are trying to figure out where to draw the line. Tesla, I think, takes too many chances, and GM probably is erring so far on the side of caution that most people won't use it. Personally, I don't really have any use for a self driving car that makes me pay attention to the road. The primary 'cost' of driving isn't that i have to move the steering wheel a bit, it's that I can't do something else when i'm driving.
- abalone 9y agoIt's kind of a weird review. For example it rates Cruise's lane changing superior -- "as perfect as it gets" -- because it simply requires you to do it manually. (The "perfection" is in how the UI clearly communicates auto/manual transitions.) I mean say what you will but that's just a weird way to rate autonomous driving systems.
- Negitivefrags 9y agoIf you had used this feature on a Tesla you would understand. Cruise ranks 0 (it gets out the way) but the Telsa ranks -5. (actually dangerous to use). The Tesla dealership literally recommended leaving the feature turned off.
- abalone 9y agoFine, then give them both Fs, don't call 100% manual lane changing "perfect". The reviewer also experienced frequent highway disengagements by the SuperCruise system which you can observe in the video, yet still rated it higher than Tesla, citing only one Tesla accident. That's also weird!
- kwhitefoot 9y agoI have a 2015 Tesla S 70D with Autopilot and I use the lane changing feature. It works rather better than I expected when the lane markings are clear. Perhaps the fact that I did not expect it to be good and therefore went into using it rather carefully and sceptically helped me use it safely. The feature I was specifically interested when I specified the car was normal traffic aware cruise control. I always look in my mirrors and so on before triggering the lane change and when the markings are not clear I pay even more attention. I use it more on British motorways than Norwegian ones because the British ones have much clearer lane markings and both I and the car can see them better. The display of lane markings in the dash makes it very clear when the system is confident about the information it has and I bear that in mind when I trigger the lane change. I treat this feature as just another feature of the car, like anti-lock brakes, etc., good when used properly, dangerous when pushed beyond its limits. I remember when anti-lock brakes were introduced that some motoring commentators worried that people might allow themselves to get into more challenging situations than they would do without ABS and thus be at risk of going beyond what the automation could handle and lose control. It seems they worried unduly. Lane keeping, lane changing, etc., are features that any sensible driver can use to advantage when it is safe to do so. If the driver is not sensible then I'm not sure that they will be any better or worse when using or not using the feature.
- uptownfunk 9y agoMy driver has had to catch the wheel on more than one occasion. When we’re in the carpool lane and the lane opens up for others cars to merge in the autopilot doesn’t see the edge of the lane and so starts swerving into the other lane. Also we did a trip to lax from San Diego and the dividers come pretty close to the edge of the lane, we were always little nervous the car was going to hit it. Overall it rides so smoothly but those few glitches make me quite nervous sometimes. It is kind of surreal to be riding in an almost self driving car. Tesla is taking steps to add safety features. Lately my driver sped up to overtake a car and the autopilot disengaged and wouldn’t re engage until we put it on park.
- stephenbez 9y ago(Slightly off topic) Has anyone else been around the Cruise Automation self driving cars in SF? I have and I can't believe they are allowed on the road given how poorly they drive. While biking to work today, there was a Cruise car behind me, driving at about 7 mph and just randomly stopping in the middle of the road constantly for no reason at all. Lots of cars kept on constantly honking at the car the whole time. Last week I saw a Cruise car start to make a left hand turn at an intersection, but its sensors must have thought someone was in the crosswalk, so it stopped in the middle of the other lane of oncoming traffic causing other cars to abruptly stop and start honking. If this was a normal car, I'd call 911 to report a drunk driver. I wonder if I should just call 911 for a dangerous driver in this case. Is there any way I can report this behavior and get their cars off the road? In case anyone wants to do some investigative reporting, all their cars come out of a garage labeled Borden Decal Co. (https://goo.gl/maps/F85WPTwkmbQ2 https://goo.gl/maps/F85WPTwkmbQ2). If you follow them around you can probably observe similar behavior.
- cloudwalking 9y agoYes I always get a good laugh watching the Cruise cars trying to drive. They are not smooth and do weird things that a human driver would only do when drunk.
- username223 9y ago> I wonder if I should just call 911 for a dangerous driver in this case. That might actually be a good idea: call 911, or whatever the local number is for drunk drivers. See if the robo-taxi is able to pull off the road for the police.
- redcomplier 9y agoI'm not sure most readers know but SuperCruise has nothing to do with Cruise Automation. SuperCruise was a GM project long before Cruise was a company or acquired by GM. Different technology and teams all together.
- ucaetano 9y agoKinda of a pointless comparison when one of the vehicles compared isn't and never will be commercially available...
- umurkontaci 9y agoIt's already commercially available on Cadillac CT6. http://www.cadillac.com/sedans/ct6-sedan http://www.cadillac.com/sedans/ct6-sedan
- ucaetano 9y agoNot the Cadillac, the Tesla. The article compares the no-longer-available first version of the Autopilot, powered by MobilEye.
- ibson99 9y agosometimes i wonder how long it will take for these technologies to be available to poor people in Africa.