4 ms·

You DARPA Grand Challenge guys certainly built some impressive stuff back then, and it's hard to shake a stick at what those teams accomplished. The problem is

You DARPA Grand Challenge guys certainly built some impressive stuff back then, and it's hard to shake a stick at what those teams accomplished. The problem is, most of the industry has spent the last decade adding neat features and trying to improve their reliability...without much practical thought as to increasing controllability (in terms of accident avoidance) in the inevitability of a component failure. Controllability has basically been shortcut by keeping a driver behind the wheel. We've done pretty significant testing - regularly hauling freight on the highway while in self-driving, no-one behind the wheel in super unstructured environments, dealing with extreme edge cases w/o intervention. The big technical accomplishment that we're showing here, is that our system is controllable in the inevitable case of failure...without using a physically-present human as a crutch.

svantana 9y ago
> without much practical thought as to increasing controllability That's not fair, Waymo and others are using redundant backup systems and obviously try to think of every failure case they can. Besides, aren't the remote-control parts as likely to fail as any other? I sure as hell wouldn't want to drive a car over facetime...
Game_Ender 9y ago
It’s open secret in the SDV industry that all the top players have remote assistants systems, and that it is the to key removing operators from the vehicle. It’s a little disengenus to claim that Starsky is the sole player exploring this space. There are startups that provide full remote vehicle control [0], and GM’s acquisition of Cruise 1.5 years ago was in part driven by an especially good demo of their remote assistance tech. All that matters in the end is the safety and cost of the resulting system. Remote assistance operators and bandwidth are not cheap, and a system that has a high level of remote faults is most likely operating too far out of operational domain to be truly safe. [0] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/ces-2018-phantom-auto-demonstrates-first-remotecontrolled-car-on-public-roads https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
- Animats 9y ago
  Either you have a lot of remote drivers, or you get the "your call is important to us" wait.

svantana 9y ago

> without much practical thought as to increasing controllability That's not fair, Waymo and others are using redundant backup systems and obviously try to think of every failure case they can. Besides, aren't the remote-control parts as likely to fail as any other? I sure as hell wouldn't want to drive a car over facetime...

Game_Ender 9y ago

It’s open secret in the SDV industry that all the top players have remote assistants systems, and that it is the to key removing operators from the vehicle. It’s a little disengenus to claim that Starsky is the sole player exploring this space. There are startups that provide full remote vehicle control [0], and GM’s acquisition of Cruise 1.5 years ago was in part driven by an especially good demo of their remote assistance tech. All that matters in the end is the safety and cost of the resulting system. Remote assistance operators and bandwidth are not cheap, and a system that has a high level of remote faults is most likely operating too far out of operational domain to be truly safe. [0] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/ces-2018-phantom-auto-demonstrates-first-remotecontrolled-car-on-public-roads https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...

Animats 9y ago
Either you have a lot of remote drivers, or you get the "your call is important to us" wait.