11 ms·

A more realistic route to autonomous driving

80 points by dsr12 8y ago

ivan_ah 8y ago
I like the simplifying-the-problem approach a lot! Roads in the US/California are so good that I can see it happen, and with clear labelling this could totally "ship" in a few years (i.e. remove the safety driver). The next step would be 1h-out-of-town commuters + close-suburbia to specific dropoff points in downtown or wherever jobs tend to be. Again, stay on big roads that have good signalling, and keep the bright colors so other drivers will know to stay out of your way in the carpool lane. It's basically what the big tech companies in the Valley are doing with their commuting busses, but smaller and for everyone. The min-busses with flexible routes are a common mode of transportation in certain Eastern European countries, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
- ghaff 8y ago
  > The min-busses with flexible routes are a common mode of transportation in certain Eastern European countries, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka They are. But that makes me wonder why we don't already see a lot of this type of thing in the US. My instinct would be the cost of a minimum wage-ish driver isn't the difference between this mode of transportation working and it not. Of course, it does exist in a sense with Lyft Line and Uber Pool although those don't get a lot of attention.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    A similar service is quite common in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#Un... Lower costs there can perhaps lead to a virtuous cycle of increased service and use.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      The vast majority of such systems in the US are limited to people with disabilities.
      - maxerickson 8y ago
        This is not the impression I have. The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom. I guess you could sample 10 or 100 of them and see how many impose restrictions on rider eligibility.
        vonmoltke 8y ago
        "Vast majority" may have been too strong, but I stand behind "majority". The two programs on that Wiki page that actually have links are for disabled passengers only. Looking at the three systems that have covered areas I have lived, Broward County Transit and New Jersey Transit offer DRT only to those with disabilities, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit has very limited DRT service for non-disabled customers. > The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom. If it is running a loop it isn't DRT, it's a jitney.
        maxerickson 8y ago
        I imagine the urban systems tend to be more restrictive than the rural ones.
    - petra 8y ago
      ridewithvia.com is a recent startup, doing "demand responsive transportation", for regular people, very successfully - multiple us cities, and various (new) global partnerships.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ashraymalhotra 8y ago
IMHO this is how self driving applications should start. Driving on the US freeways (say between LA and SF) isn't about your driving skills. It's mostly just about trying not to fall asleep. And machines are way better than humans at this! Even outside the US, there are many areas (like UAE), which have amazing highways, sparse traffic and there isn't rail/air connectivity to some places. Self driving "shuttles" seem perfect for those applications.
- ghaff 8y ago
  In general, highways seem like a pretty logical starting point. There are some potential complications like car accidents and debris but they seem far more tractable than random pedestrians, cyclists, and all the complex driving behavior on city streets resulting from traffic lights, trucks stopped to make deliveries, etc. etc. It doesn't enable end-to-end autonomous taxis, so you need a sober, licensed driver in the driver's seat even if they don't need to be able to take over on a second's notice. Handling long distance highway driving would actually be a big win. It just doesn't stir imaginations the same way that completely eliminating a driver door-to-door does--especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership and driving entirely.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership I have brought this up before and I still do not understand how or why this idea is so tightly coupled to fully autonomous vehicles. I don't see how removing a human driver from a car service is going to change the dynamics enough to drive legions of people who own cars to get rid of them if they haven't done so already. The only friction a human driver adds right now is cost, but I don't see the cost savings of removing the driver being high enough to move the needle.
    - bumholio 8y ago
      If the technology becomes commoditized, the cost reduction would be massive. A $30000 vehicle can drive 200K miles for the price of fuel and occasional cleaning. That's in the 30 - 50 cent/mile area, almost a full order of magnitude. Insurance premiums will depend on how safe they are - so they will be very low if self driving cars are to be allowed in any way on the road.
Eridrus 8y ago
This is certainly more cautious, but it's not clear that this is any more realistic than Waymo's plan which involves limiting vehicles to a predefine area, mapping in great detail, etc.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  It's clearly more realistic. They don't have to deal with roadworks, they have preset pickup points (no need to figure out finding a safe space to stop), they are relying on other drivers being cautious around a bright orange vehicle rather than trying to act like a real car, they have explicit screens for communication with pedestrians rather than trying to do it implicitly like we would (I.e. slow down to let a car out vs having a screen say "after you" or whatever). Much easier (though still very hard).
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    Have they significantly reduced the challenge though? I don't think the core task of driving is significantly easier than these problems that they have elided. I know it is a bit of a fallacy to say "we can fly to the moon, so we should be able to have a self-driving car", but it's also not clear that the tools we have (ML, simulators, planning algorithms, etc) are not up to the tasks that have Drive.ai have engineered around. It's a reasonable strategy to elide things you can and focus on the "core" hard task, but if solving these other difficult problems is also meaningful product-wise (and it clearly is meaningful), there's no reason you can't have people working on both. And given Waymo seems to be gearing up for a large launch, I have a hard time believing that these additional tasks are as hard as Drive.ai want to make out.
kuroguro 8y ago
https://outline.com/5k67MD https://outline.com/5k67MD
al_ramich 8y ago
Going a bit controversial here but will self-driving cars be disrupted before they even take off. The big factor that I feel will impact how autonomous travel will evolve in the future is drone taxies/cars. Providing there is a change in the regulation to support self-driving flying cars/drones, the big advantage is that there would be no existing rules created for human driving (road signs, traffic lights...) to adhere to. A centralized system could calculate the best route to fly someone from A to B without the complexities that self-driving cars have to solve. And flying would clearly be much faster as well. Dubai, for example, is already testing, what comes after will be interesting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399406 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399406
- kayoone 8y ago
  i doubt having hundreds or thousands of heavy vehicles flying above peoples heads is a good idea and will probably not go well with authorities.
  - al_ramich 8y ago
    agree but it would have to be regulated with virtual/dedicated road lines relatively high up to prevent noise/light blocking issues. if centrally managed, the issues you describe could be minimized.
- friendly_chap 8y ago
  Given that we are probably heading into an economy where energy will get more and more expensive (at least temporarily, due to a potential oil crunch coming), not sure how flying will be an economical way of transport.
  - samsonradu 8y ago
    Can you elaborate? Why might a oil crunch be coming?
    - deathhand 8y ago
panarky 8y ago
Building a vehicle that can handle a busy street, with cyclists, pedestrians, roadworks and emergency vehicles, is a tall order. You can try to simplify the problem by limiting your routes to major highways and making the vehicle ultra-visible so other drivers give you a wide berth. But at some point there will be construction, or a car wreck, or debris in the roadway. Eventually you'll need to exit the highway and drive on city streets. Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still need to deal with it. If you can't handle everything, you're not safe to be on the road.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I agree with you that even limiting the operational environment that these things work in doesn't reduce the number of situations it needs to be able to handle by that much. But I wouldn't be too quick to interpret a single sentence from a piece of short-form popular journalism as a precise specification of what their cars are and are not designed to handle.
- trocadero 8y ago
  >Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still need to deal with it. I think the minimum required to deal with it is to have the car pull over when it identifies a situation it can't handle. Even an onramp to exit car that pulls over if it sees construction will be extremely valuable to anyone routinely doing highway driving.
carapace 8y ago
What I want is a self-driving golf cart that can take my mother to the doctor and back. It doesn't have to go fast. I make this point every time I can: kinetic energy is the killer and it goes up with the square of velocity. Half-speed is quarter-deadly. A golf cart-like machine, limited to a maximum speed not much faster than walking, light-weight, and festooned inside and out with airbags (and other anti-collision/-injury stuff), could be built today, I think it would work just fine, and I bet you could sell a lot of them. ("Baby Boomers" he says under his breath...) Trying to go straight to robot cars is hubris, it's biting off more than you can chew and then trying to talk past the food in your mouth. Also, can we please call them "auto-autos"?
- mannykannot 8y ago
  I have had the same thought, and I have sometimes wondered if this approach has not been widely pursued because it is potentially too disruptive a technology - disruptive of the current patterns of vehicle ownership and use, that is.
  - falcolas 8y ago
    I’d say it’s not profitable enough to justify the R&D costs. You can’t sell a $50,000 golf cart and expect the government to give additional incentives.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Or shuttles like this: https://trl.co.uk/news/prev/35671 https://trl.co.uk/news/prev/35671 The last mile if far more interesting at the moment, with shuttles, Ofo bikes, e-bikes and scooters and "baby boomers" on their mobility devices. What it really needs though is more infrastructure to support it, ideally dedicated lanes.
- tim333 8y ago
  You'd have the issue of the golf cart blocking the traffic on the way to the docs and possibly getting hit by cars / trucks.
fenwick67 8y ago
> In March a pedestrian was killed in Tempe, Arizona when a self-driving Uber vehicle failed to spot her as she wheeled her bicycle across an empty road at night Wrong, the car did spot her, but the emergency braking systems were turned off.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Of course no mention in the article that the pedestrian was crossing unsafely.
  - fenwick67 8y ago
    It's a brief mention, so I'll forgive missing details, but it's just flat-out wrong to say "the car didn't see her".
  - 8note 8y ago
    isn't that the promise of a self driving car though? it can respond faster to dangerous situations?
jnurmine 8y ago
Everyone is talking about autonomous cars but what about autonomous trains? The problematics of autonomous trains are vastly simpler than autonomous cars. Trains move in restricted paths (tracks), trains should stop only at specific places, trains meet other trains in such a few possible places, and so on.
- bgorman 8y ago
  Almost all trains have unions. Unions will fight tooth and nail to keep their jobs
- jl2718 8y ago
  Honestly those ‘features’ of trains have all been achieveable on pneumatic tires for decades. The advantages of trains are all limitations actually. On the other hand, limitations are good from a design perspective, improves focus and prevents feature bloat.
  - Yoric 8y ago
    Also, I seem to remember that trains tend to be vastly more energy-efficient than cars, even if you factor in the occasional cost of a nearly-empty train.
- Yoric 8y ago
  In Paris, I commute every day with autonomous train. So, I think that it should be feasible :)
jl2718 8y ago
This could have been built in the 70s, and I think actually was by Disney in the 80s for park transportation (somewhere I recall had me at a very early age on an autonomous vehicle that ran a planned route and would stop for anything out of the ordinary and announce things.) However, it is exactly as it should be. I applaud them for daring to be dumb and focusing on the easy parts of the problem first. I think this will catch on and get better slowly.

80 points by dsr12 8y ago

I like the simplifying-the-problem approach a lot! Roads in the US/California are so good that I can see it happen, and with clear labelling this could totally "ship" in a few years (i.e. remove the safety driver). The next step would be 1h-out-of-town commuters + close-suburbia to specific dropoff points in downtown or wherever jobs tend to be. Again, stay on big roads that have good signalling, and keep the bright colors so other drivers will know to stay out of your way in the carpool lane. It's basically what the big tech companies in the Valley are doing with their commuting busses, but smaller and for everyone. The min-busses with flexible routes are a common mode of transportation in certain Eastern European countries, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

ghaff 8y ago
> The min-busses with flexible routes are a common mode of transportation in certain Eastern European countries, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka They are. But that makes me wonder why we don't already see a lot of this type of thing in the US. My instinct would be the cost of a minimum wage-ish driver isn't the difference between this mode of transportation working and it not. Of course, it does exist in a sense with Lyft Line and Uber Pool although those don't get a lot of attention.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  A similar service is quite common in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport#Un... Lower costs there can perhaps lead to a virtuous cycle of increased service and use.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    The vast majority of such systems in the US are limited to people with disabilities.
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      This is not the impression I have. The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom. I guess you could sample 10 or 100 of them and see how many impose restrictions on rider eligibility.
      - vonmoltke 8y ago
        "Vast majority" may have been too strong, but I stand behind "majority". The two programs on that Wiki page that actually have links are for disabled passengers only. Looking at the three systems that have covered areas I have lived, Broward County Transit and New Jersey Transit offer DRT only to those with disabilities, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit has very limited DRT service for non-disabled customers. > The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom. If it is running a loop it isn't DRT, it's a jitney.
        maxerickson 8y ago
        I imagine the urban systems tend to be more restrictive than the rural ones.
  - petra 8y ago
    ridewithvia.com is a recent startup, doing "demand responsive transportation", for regular people, very successfully - multiple us cities, and various (new) global partnerships.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ashraymalhotra 8y ago

IMHO this is how self driving applications should start. Driving on the US freeways (say between LA and SF) isn't about your driving skills. It's mostly just about trying not to fall asleep. And machines are way better than humans at this! Even outside the US, there are many areas (like UAE), which have amazing highways, sparse traffic and there isn't rail/air connectivity to some places. Self driving "shuttles" seem perfect for those applications.

ghaff 8y ago
In general, highways seem like a pretty logical starting point. There are some potential complications like car accidents and debris but they seem far more tractable than random pedestrians, cyclists, and all the complex driving behavior on city streets resulting from traffic lights, trucks stopped to make deliveries, etc. etc. It doesn't enable end-to-end autonomous taxis, so you need a sober, licensed driver in the driver's seat even if they don't need to be able to take over on a second's notice. Handling long distance highway driving would actually be a big win. It just doesn't stir imaginations the same way that completely eliminating a driver door-to-door does--especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership and driving entirely.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > especially among people who really want to get out of car ownership I have brought this up before and I still do not understand how or why this idea is so tightly coupled to fully autonomous vehicles. I don't see how removing a human driver from a car service is going to change the dynamics enough to drive legions of people who own cars to get rid of them if they haven't done so already. The only friction a human driver adds right now is cost, but I don't see the cost savings of removing the driver being high enough to move the needle.
  - bumholio 8y ago
    If the technology becomes commoditized, the cost reduction would be massive. A $30000 vehicle can drive 200K miles for the price of fuel and occasional cleaning. That's in the 30 - 50 cent/mile area, almost a full order of magnitude. Insurance premiums will depend on how safe they are - so they will be very low if self driving cars are to be allowed in any way on the road.

Eridrus 8y ago

This is certainly more cautious, but it's not clear that this is any more realistic than Waymo's plan which involves limiting vehicles to a predefine area, mapping in great detail, etc.

IshKebab 8y ago
It's clearly more realistic. They don't have to deal with roadworks, they have preset pickup points (no need to figure out finding a safe space to stop), they are relying on other drivers being cautious around a bright orange vehicle rather than trying to act like a real car, they have explicit screens for communication with pedestrians rather than trying to do it implicitly like we would (I.e. slow down to let a car out vs having a screen say "after you" or whatever). Much easier (though still very hard).
- Eridrus 8y ago
  Have they significantly reduced the challenge though? I don't think the core task of driving is significantly easier than these problems that they have elided. I know it is a bit of a fallacy to say "we can fly to the moon, so we should be able to have a self-driving car", but it's also not clear that the tools we have (ML, simulators, planning algorithms, etc) are not up to the tasks that have Drive.ai have engineered around. It's a reasonable strategy to elide things you can and focus on the "core" hard task, but if solving these other difficult problems is also meaningful product-wise (and it clearly is meaningful), there's no reason you can't have people working on both. And given Waymo seems to be gearing up for a large launch, I have a hard time believing that these additional tasks are as hard as Drive.ai want to make out.

kuroguro 8y ago

https://outline.com/5k67MD https://outline.com/5k67MD

al_ramich 8y ago

Going a bit controversial here but will self-driving cars be disrupted before they even take off. The big factor that I feel will impact how autonomous travel will evolve in the future is drone taxies/cars. Providing there is a change in the regulation to support self-driving flying cars/drones, the big advantage is that there would be no existing rules created for human driving (road signs, traffic lights...) to adhere to. A centralized system could calculate the best route to fly someone from A to B without the complexities that self-driving cars have to solve. And flying would clearly be much faster as well. Dubai, for example, is already testing, what comes after will be interesting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399406 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399406

kayoone 8y ago
i doubt having hundreds or thousands of heavy vehicles flying above peoples heads is a good idea and will probably not go well with authorities.
- al_ramich 8y ago
  agree but it would have to be regulated with virtual/dedicated road lines relatively high up to prevent noise/light blocking issues. if centrally managed, the issues you describe could be minimized.
friendly_chap 8y ago
Given that we are probably heading into an economy where energy will get more and more expensive (at least temporarily, due to a potential oil crunch coming), not sure how flying will be an economical way of transport.
- samsonradu 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? Why might a oil crunch be coming?
  - deathhand 8y ago

panarky 8y ago

Building a vehicle that can handle a busy street, with cyclists, pedestrians, roadworks and emergency vehicles, is a tall order. You can try to simplify the problem by limiting your routes to major highways and making the vehicle ultra-visible so other drivers give you a wide berth. But at some point there will be construction, or a car wreck, or debris in the roadway. Eventually you'll need to exit the highway and drive on city streets. Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still need to deal with it. If you can't handle everything, you're not safe to be on the road.

bunderbunder 8y ago
I agree with you that even limiting the operational environment that these things work in doesn't reduce the number of situations it needs to be able to handle by that much. But I wouldn't be too quick to interpret a single sentence from a piece of short-form popular journalism as a precise specification of what their cars are and are not designed to handle.
trocadero 8y ago
>Even if you manage to reduce the hard stuff to 1 mile out of 200, you still need to deal with it. I think the minimum required to deal with it is to have the car pull over when it identifies a situation it can't handle. Even an onramp to exit car that pulls over if it sees construction will be extremely valuable to anyone routinely doing highway driving.

carapace 8y ago

What I want is a self-driving golf cart that can take my mother to the doctor and back. It doesn't have to go fast. I make this point every time I can: kinetic energy is the killer and it goes up with the square of velocity. Half-speed is quarter-deadly. A golf cart-like machine, limited to a maximum speed not much faster than walking, light-weight, and festooned inside and out with airbags (and other anti-collision/-injury stuff), could be built today, I think it would work just fine, and I bet you could sell a lot of them. ("Baby Boomers" he says under his breath...) Trying to go straight to robot cars is hubris, it's biting off more than you can chew and then trying to talk past the food in your mouth. Also, can we please call them "auto-autos"?

mannykannot 8y ago
I have had the same thought, and I have sometimes wondered if this approach has not been widely pursued because it is potentially too disruptive a technology - disruptive of the current patterns of vehicle ownership and use, that is.
- falcolas 8y ago
  I’d say it’s not profitable enough to justify the R&D costs. You can’t sell a $50,000 golf cart and expect the government to give additional incentives.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Or shuttles like this: https://trl.co.uk/news/prev/35671 https://trl.co.uk/news/prev/35671 The last mile if far more interesting at the moment, with shuttles, Ofo bikes, e-bikes and scooters and "baby boomers" on their mobility devices. What it really needs though is more infrastructure to support it, ideally dedicated lanes.
tim333 8y ago
You'd have the issue of the golf cart blocking the traffic on the way to the docs and possibly getting hit by cars / trucks.

fenwick67 8y ago

> In March a pedestrian was killed in Tempe, Arizona when a self-driving Uber vehicle failed to spot her as she wheeled her bicycle across an empty road at night Wrong, the car did spot her, but the emergency braking systems were turned off.

jimmaswell 8y ago
Of course no mention in the article that the pedestrian was crossing unsafely.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  It's a brief mention, so I'll forgive missing details, but it's just flat-out wrong to say "the car didn't see her".
- 8note 8y ago
  isn't that the promise of a self driving car though? it can respond faster to dangerous situations?

jnurmine 8y ago

Everyone is talking about autonomous cars but what about autonomous trains? The problematics of autonomous trains are vastly simpler than autonomous cars. Trains move in restricted paths (tracks), trains should stop only at specific places, trains meet other trains in such a few possible places, and so on.

bgorman 8y ago
Almost all trains have unions. Unions will fight tooth and nail to keep their jobs
jl2718 8y ago
Honestly those ‘features’ of trains have all been achieveable on pneumatic tires for decades. The advantages of trains are all limitations actually. On the other hand, limitations are good from a design perspective, improves focus and prevents feature bloat.
- Yoric 8y ago
  Also, I seem to remember that trains tend to be vastly more energy-efficient than cars, even if you factor in the occasional cost of a nearly-empty train.
Yoric 8y ago
In Paris, I commute every day with autonomous train. So, I think that it should be feasible :)

jl2718 8y ago

This could have been built in the 70s, and I think actually was by Disney in the 80s for park transportation (somewhere I recall had me at a very early age on an autonomous vehicle that ran a planned route and would stop for anything out of the ordinary and announce things.) However, it is exactly as it should be. I applaud them for daring to be dumb and focusing on the easy parts of the problem first. I think this will catch on and get better slowly.