6 ms·

Self-Driving Truck Encounters the Unexpected, Then Reaches a Milestone

38 points by edward 9y ago

subroutine 9y ago
On one hand, it's great that the Semi truck was able to slow and stop without hurting anyone, after losing connection with the control center. On the other, how does this bode for an autonomous fleet of trucks that all suddenly stop somewhere along a highway? The traffic disruption could be nightmarish. And what if there was no lead vehicle to go fetch said truck in a timely manner? Also i feel like there is a lesson to learn here about how it's not just hacked servers and software that could produce these events, but a hacked or disrupted (lightening striking a utility pole) power supply could also have immediate real-world impact on these transport systems. Particularly if you dont have backup control that is distributed and redundant (or onboard the vehicle itself).
- IanCal 9y ago
  That all rather depends on why the connection was required, if it's a fundamental part of the planned way it'll work in the future, sure. If it's a current safety requirement while testing, it's less of an issue.
- Moru 9y ago
  This is the tradeoff we get with technology. It gets increasingly better with every iteration but the consequences of failure gets worse and worse. What happens with humanity if a big solarstorm comes again?
  - ehnto 9y ago
    We are incredibly eager to introduce technology dependencies it seems. The idea of robustness via simplicity seems to be a mantra for individual bits of software, but we are happy to stack it all together in a teetering jenga tower of dependencies. We rave about how great it is to have a good ecosystem in a platform or language, but the word ecosystem is synonymous with complex dependency trees (ha!). Nature is definitely a more robust architect than us though. As for what I would do when it all falls apart, I would barter for a sailing boat and some paper books on how to sail, and live the life of an ocean vagabond until I inevitably perish on some island or at sea.
titzer 9y ago
So, it lost its umbilical to the great brain in the sky and came to gentle halt on the highway. Color me unimpressed. Sorry for my snark, but, donkeys do better. If only they could travel at 70mph :/ We are making incremental progress towards this autonomous vehicle goal, but hey, let's get some perspective and not let our techno-fetishism get us overexcited. Trains and stuff.
- ddalex 9y ago
  So you're advocating taking a donkeys' brain and hook it up to a truck and let it drive?
  - titzer 9y ago
    I hope you're being facetious. I am not particularly advocating anything, other than to point out, you know, we could have invested in freight trains for the past century and this would be less of a problem.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I wonder if modern lifesupport systems could keep such a constellation running for long enough to deliver goods...
  - simion314 9y ago
    Maybe an insect brain is enough, the ones that fly are very fast in reactions.
    - smallstepforman 9y ago
      My windscreen would disagree with you ;)
      - simion314 9y ago
        You hit the insects with your car, also you need to consider distances relative to the insect size.
PhantomGremlin 9y ago
Oh Fuck No. The "safest decision of all" is most definitely not to stop "in its lane of travel". That's insanely dangerous in any real-world scenario. At least have the vehicle pull over onto the shoulder. What makes them so "special" that they think they should just stop in the middle of a highway? If that's the state-of-the-art of self-driving, then those vehicles simply aren't yet ready to be on the road.
- dvh 9y ago
  Some time ago there asked people how should self driving car react in various situations if collision is unavoidable (e.g. should they run over old man or young girl) but the actual algorithms are much much simpler: stay in your lane, if you see obstacle break.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    In the context of this story, “break” is an amusing homonym for the word you probably meant (brake).
- sandos 9y ago
  It should actually not be "insanely" dangerous to stop at any point, if you have sane drivers and laws. You should always be able to stop before the visible part of the road ahead of you, or before the vehicle in front of you, right? But yeah stopping on the shoulder of course is a no-brainer. How to do that, though, is maybe not so simple. In winter judging where the road ends and a ditch begins can be very hard if there is no rail.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    > You should always be able to stop before the visible part of the road ahead of you, or before the vehicle in front of you, right? ...unless you consider that "how about winter" part you used to explain that pulling to the road's side is not that simple.
  - mantas 9y ago
    > You should always be able to stop before the visible part of the road ahead of you, or before the vehicle in front of you, right? You're following another vehicle at safe following distance. Which is much shorter than distance you can stop at if that car stopped in 0s. Car suddenly changes lanes, revealing obstacle in your line. If you can't change lanes as quickly for some reason, you've a massive problem...
smallstepforman 9y ago
The article keeps iterating how they’ve tested for every conceivable condition they can think of, and yet the narrative says that they were stunned to experience a communications loss which they never tested/conceived of. It’s not reassuring when someone claims 100% test coverage and 100% pass, when they only have a limited number or tests in their script. A comms loss was unthinkable?!? What is this, amatuer hour?
- ccozan 9y ago
  They say that the truck/system is autonomous? Because, yes, if loss of connectivity is a major fault and put it into a safe mode, then no, is not autonomous driving.
  - titzer 9y ago
    Agree. It is "automated" driving, not "autonomous" driving.
- shusson 9y ago
  My thought exactly, I'm sure Boeing doesn't consider a loss of communication unexpected when they develop Auto-pilot systems.
- VMG 9y ago
  100%. I hope they spun it as "unthinkable" for PR reasons, which would be slightly less bad.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  The article is very thick in drama and linkbait, it really could've been written much shorter - "autonomous truck stops because the server went down, welp guess they didn't test for that". Except that they probably did because the truck stopped safely.
  - retSava 9y ago
    It went into "safe mode", which sounds like a catch-all for every conceivable and inconceivable error they don't explicitly handle in any other way.
ThePhysicist 9y ago
Honestly, I do not consider stopping squarely in the middle of the highway and blocking one of the lanes as the "correct" way to handle this situation. I'd rather expect that the truck at least knows how to stop in a safe manner, i.e. by moving to the shoulder first. A large number of accidents (probably even the majority) here in Europe are caused by drivers crashing into stopped vehicles on highways, so having AI-controlled cars stop in the middle of the road is clearly not acceptable.
- ainiriand 9y ago
  Cannot agree more. Another possible improvement should be stopping in the next gas station or resting area, so the truck always keeps enough internal data to move up to the nearest safe place to stop. Sort of a buffer that allows the truck to be minimally operational, maybe also a significant decrease of speed.
- aaronm14 9y ago
  Agreed, but I would imagine a meaningful population of people would do the same thing in that situation
  - rco8786 9y ago
    Maybe. But the promise of autonomous cars is that they can be safer than human drivers.
  - dwighttk 9y ago
    “That situation” was loss of contact with a control center. What is the equivalent for people?
    - dronescanfly 9y ago
      fainting. I do believe braking and stopping is better than swerving and crashing...
      - dwighttk 9y ago
meigwilym 9y ago
> the truck inexplicably slowed and stopped in the middle of the road. This scenario caused a fatal crash in England which is now finishing up in court. 8 people dead. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-43227167 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-432271...
- ainiriand 9y ago
  I wonder if these vehicles are performing advances regarding other vehicles they encounter. If that is the case, this particular truck could stop in the middle of the left lane, can you believe that?
rco8786 9y ago
This is eerily like the common sci-fi movie plot of killing the “brain” to eradicate the entire fleet of bad guys. (Independence Day, Star Wars Ep 1, etc) Imagine what this would be like at scale. Besides the danger of having thousands of trucks suddenly stop on the highway, now whatever those trucks were actually shipping is also stuck.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Should autonomous cars have multiple self driving systems, so if one service is DDOS'd, they can failover to another?
littlepinkpill 9y ago
But autonomous vehicles are not autonomous (as in "without dependencies on a complex chain of tech with human operators in it"), and all I can think is “hackable."
cafard 9y ago
Odd how thoroughly the original meaning of "milestone" has been lost.

38 points by edward 9y ago

On one hand, it's great that the Semi truck was able to slow and stop without hurting anyone, after losing connection with the control center. On the other, how does this bode for an autonomous fleet of trucks that all suddenly stop somewhere along a highway? The traffic disruption could be nightmarish. And what if there was no lead vehicle to go fetch said truck in a timely manner? Also i feel like there is a lesson to learn here about how it's not just hacked servers and software that could produce these events, but a hacked or disrupted (lightening striking a utility pole) power supply could also have immediate real-world impact on these transport systems. Particularly if you dont have backup control that is distributed and redundant (or onboard the vehicle itself).

IanCal 9y ago
That all rather depends on why the connection was required, if it's a fundamental part of the planned way it'll work in the future, sure. If it's a current safety requirement while testing, it's less of an issue.
Moru 9y ago
This is the tradeoff we get with technology. It gets increasingly better with every iteration but the consequences of failure gets worse and worse. What happens with humanity if a big solarstorm comes again?
- ehnto 9y ago
  We are incredibly eager to introduce technology dependencies it seems. The idea of robustness via simplicity seems to be a mantra for individual bits of software, but we are happy to stack it all together in a teetering jenga tower of dependencies. We rave about how great it is to have a good ecosystem in a platform or language, but the word ecosystem is synonymous with complex dependency trees (ha!). Nature is definitely a more robust architect than us though. As for what I would do when it all falls apart, I would barter for a sailing boat and some paper books on how to sail, and live the life of an ocean vagabond until I inevitably perish on some island or at sea.

titzer 9y ago

So, it lost its umbilical to the great brain in the sky and came to gentle halt on the highway. Color me unimpressed. Sorry for my snark, but, donkeys do better. If only they could travel at 70mph :/ We are making incremental progress towards this autonomous vehicle goal, but hey, let's get some perspective and not let our techno-fetishism get us overexcited. Trains and stuff.

ddalex 9y ago
So you're advocating taking a donkeys' brain and hook it up to a truck and let it drive?
- titzer 9y ago
  I hope you're being facetious. I am not particularly advocating anything, other than to point out, you know, we could have invested in freight trains for the past century and this would be less of a problem.
- zaarn 9y ago
  I wonder if modern lifesupport systems could keep such a constellation running for long enough to deliver goods...
- simion314 9y ago
  Maybe an insect brain is enough, the ones that fly are very fast in reactions.
  - smallstepforman 9y ago
    My windscreen would disagree with you ;)
    - simion314 9y ago
      You hit the insects with your car, also you need to consider distances relative to the insect size.

PhantomGremlin 9y ago

Oh Fuck No. The "safest decision of all" is most definitely not to stop "in its lane of travel". That's insanely dangerous in any real-world scenario. At least have the vehicle pull over onto the shoulder. What makes them so "special" that they think they should just stop in the middle of a highway? If that's the state-of-the-art of self-driving, then those vehicles simply aren't yet ready to be on the road.

dvh 9y ago
Some time ago there asked people how should self driving car react in various situations if collision is unavoidable (e.g. should they run over old man or young girl) but the actual algorithms are much much simpler: stay in your lane, if you see obstacle break.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  In the context of this story, “break” is an amusing homonym for the word you probably meant (brake).
sandos 9y ago
It should actually not be "insanely" dangerous to stop at any point, if you have sane drivers and laws. You should always be able to stop before the visible part of the road ahead of you, or before the vehicle in front of you, right? But yeah stopping on the shoulder of course is a no-brainer. How to do that, though, is maybe not so simple. In winter judging where the road ends and a ditch begins can be very hard if there is no rail.
- dozzie 9y ago
  > You should always be able to stop before the visible part of the road ahead of you, or before the vehicle in front of you, right? ...unless you consider that "how about winter" part you used to explain that pulling to the road's side is not that simple.
- mantas 9y ago
  > You should always be able to stop before the visible part of the road ahead of you, or before the vehicle in front of you, right? You're following another vehicle at safe following distance. Which is much shorter than distance you can stop at if that car stopped in 0s. Car suddenly changes lanes, revealing obstacle in your line. If you can't change lanes as quickly for some reason, you've a massive problem...

smallstepforman 9y ago

The article keeps iterating how they’ve tested for every conceivable condition they can think of, and yet the narrative says that they were stunned to experience a communications loss which they never tested/conceived of. It’s not reassuring when someone claims 100% test coverage and 100% pass, when they only have a limited number or tests in their script. A comms loss was unthinkable?!? What is this, amatuer hour?

ccozan 9y ago
They say that the truck/system is autonomous? Because, yes, if loss of connectivity is a major fault and put it into a safe mode, then no, is not autonomous driving.
- titzer 9y ago
  Agree. It is "automated" driving, not "autonomous" driving.
shusson 9y ago
My thought exactly, I'm sure Boeing doesn't consider a loss of communication unexpected when they develop Auto-pilot systems.
VMG 9y ago
100%. I hope they spun it as "unthinkable" for PR reasons, which would be slightly less bad.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
The article is very thick in drama and linkbait, it really could've been written much shorter - "autonomous truck stops because the server went down, welp guess they didn't test for that". Except that they probably did because the truck stopped safely.
- retSava 9y ago
  It went into "safe mode", which sounds like a catch-all for every conceivable and inconceivable error they don't explicitly handle in any other way.

ThePhysicist 9y ago

Honestly, I do not consider stopping squarely in the middle of the highway and blocking one of the lanes as the "correct" way to handle this situation. I'd rather expect that the truck at least knows how to stop in a safe manner, i.e. by moving to the shoulder first. A large number of accidents (probably even the majority) here in Europe are caused by drivers crashing into stopped vehicles on highways, so having AI-controlled cars stop in the middle of the road is clearly not acceptable.

ainiriand 9y ago
Cannot agree more. Another possible improvement should be stopping in the next gas station or resting area, so the truck always keeps enough internal data to move up to the nearest safe place to stop. Sort of a buffer that allows the truck to be minimally operational, maybe also a significant decrease of speed.
aaronm14 9y ago
Agreed, but I would imagine a meaningful population of people would do the same thing in that situation
- rco8786 9y ago
  Maybe. But the promise of autonomous cars is that they can be safer than human drivers.
- dwighttk 9y ago
  “That situation” was loss of contact with a control center. What is the equivalent for people?
  - dronescanfly 9y ago
    fainting. I do believe braking and stopping is better than swerving and crashing...
    - dwighttk 9y ago

meigwilym 9y ago

> the truck inexplicably slowed and stopped in the middle of the road. This scenario caused a fatal crash in England which is now finishing up in court. 8 people dead. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-43227167 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-432271...

ainiriand 9y ago
I wonder if these vehicles are performing advances regarding other vehicles they encounter. If that is the case, this particular truck could stop in the middle of the left lane, can you believe that?

rco8786 9y ago

This is eerily like the common sci-fi movie plot of killing the “brain” to eradicate the entire fleet of bad guys. (Independence Day, Star Wars Ep 1, etc) Imagine what this would be like at scale. Besides the danger of having thousands of trucks suddenly stop on the highway, now whatever those trucks were actually shipping is also stuck.

stephengillie 9y ago
Should autonomous cars have multiple self driving systems, so if one service is DDOS'd, they can failover to another?

littlepinkpill 9y ago

But autonomous vehicles are not autonomous (as in "without dependencies on a complex chain of tech with human operators in it"), and all I can think is “hackable."

cafard 9y ago

Odd how thoroughly the original meaning of "milestone" has been lost.