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I have an XC90. The collision avoidance system has been helpful in a couple of instances (for sudden car stops, not pedestrians). However it also “misfires” a f

I have an XC90. The collision avoidance system has been helpful in a couple of instances (for sudden car stops, not pedestrians). However it also “misfires” a few times per month. Typically this occurs when I’m driving on a curving stretch of road with cars parked along the side: due to the curve, the system will sometimes interpret the vehicles on the side of the road as being obstacles in my path. When it does, I get an alarm and sudden unexpected braking. The first time(s) this happened I was genuinely terrified. I have no idea how this input would be interpreted by an autonomous driving system. However if I was designing such a system I would be pretty concerned about the potential safety impact. At very least I would want to add code to recognize these special braking events and then I would need to test this code... which of course would be impossible to do in simulation because Volvo’s system is probably closed source and likely exists as a hardware black box. At the end of the day I would probably be more comfortable designing my own collision avoidance system than relying on one that I couldn’t test easily, and that might spit unexpected inputs into my already-complex system. So no, I don’t see this is a simple question of “adding redundancy”. I think what Uber did here probably makes good sense. The fact that their own collision-avoidance systems didn’t fire is, however, a problem.

icc97 9y ago
As has been said elsewhere false positives of stopping suddenly are bad, but are better than false negatives of not stopping when there is something there. Also the collision-detection systems should be getting tested so that they improve too. You want your fall back systems to be more reliable than the regular system. So if you turn off the collision-detection systems never fix the false positives and false negatives then you'll always have these problems.
jacquesm 9y ago
You should file a bug on that. Someone coming up behind you might end up getting hurt due to the chain reaction of your car braking unexpectedly (and without a good reason to do so). There's a typical domino effect from one car braking where the reaction times compound and cars further back end up having to brake harder and harder to avoid a collision until one ends up being out of room and out of time.
cptskippy 9y ago
I would argue that AI systems should be able to handle sudden and unexpected events like system malfunction or failure. > At very least I would want to add code to recognize these special braking events and then I would need to test this code... which of course would be impossible to do in simulation Why? Does Volvos system raise events differently in context? I would imagine it's pretty simple to simulate an event by driving the car into a wall and capturing a dump of the CAN bus. The autonomous system could take the Volvo system firing as an event like anything else that it needs to reconcile in the system. If anything the autonomous system could be used to improve Volvo's system by capturing extensive data dumps of the events leading up to misfire events.

icc97 9y ago

As has been said elsewhere false positives of stopping suddenly are bad, but are better than false negatives of not stopping when there is something there. Also the collision-detection systems should be getting tested so that they improve too. You want your fall back systems to be more reliable than the regular system. So if you turn off the collision-detection systems never fix the false positives and false negatives then you'll always have these problems.

jacquesm 9y ago

You should file a bug on that. Someone coming up behind you might end up getting hurt due to the chain reaction of your car braking unexpectedly (and without a good reason to do so). There's a typical domino effect from one car braking where the reaction times compound and cars further back end up having to brake harder and harder to avoid a collision until one ends up being out of room and out of time.

cptskippy 9y ago

I would argue that AI systems should be able to handle sudden and unexpected events like system malfunction or failure. > At very least I would want to add code to recognize these special braking events and then I would need to test this code... which of course would be impossible to do in simulation Why? Does Volvos system raise events differently in context? I would imagine it's pretty simple to simulate an event by driving the car into a wall and capturing a dump of the CAN bus. The autonomous system could take the Volvo system firing as an event like anything else that it needs to reconcile in the system. If anything the autonomous system could be used to improve Volvo's system by capturing extensive data dumps of the events leading up to misfire events.