26 ms·

Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow

210 points by bookmtn 8y ago

Frye9876 8y ago
If you’ve used any sort of ADAS this is old news.
Spooky23 8y ago
Humans can barely handle these conditions!
- justtopost 8y ago
  The problem here, is that you are half-right. Its localized conditions. No country, much less worldwide, system can account for local anomolies. Where I learned to drive, most humans could 'see' black ice by predicting where water will pool, the recent weather, and subtle clues that abound, but are not easily expressable. Any out-of-town'er would surely be spun out or driving 10mph, white-knuckled, aghast at the "maniacs" flying by at normal speeds. While in my college city, I had to relearn everything, as it was rainy, and the drivers hyper agressive, and 15mph faster. The same model would struggle to encompass both modalities. Until AEB stops accidentally triggering constantly on colleagues cars, I have zero interest in trusting my life to an algo connected to a 300hp steel cage.
  - poulsbohemian 8y ago
    I've often wondered how much of this is hubris or fear vs. physics. What I mean is - are people in say, icy and snowy climates actually better drivers, able to adjust to the conditions, or are they fooling themselves? Likewise, the person going exceptionally slow and cautiously - are they misjudging the actual risk of inclement weather, relative to an actual scientific judgement? It certainly feels like humans become improved drivers through various weather / road condition experiences, but I sometimes find myself wondering whether my gut instincts would align with a scientific approach.
    - dbcurtis 8y ago
      I don’t think they are qualitatively “better drivers”. But they are more experienced at certain things. When I lived in Minnesota, I got lots of practice driving in snow and ice and rain. Now in NorCal, not so much :) Its a skill. You get better with practice. The person going slow probably just hasn’t had enough practice yet with the conditions. Going slow is probably a good choice for them. Am I a better driver overall for knowing how to handle ice? Probably not, but I might be the best person to do the driving under those conditions if everyone else in the car is from warmer climes. I remember standing in line at Minneapolis rental car counter one night when it was snowing an inch an hour with 4 inches on the ground already. Agent to the guys in front of me: “There are chains in the trunk if you need them.” Customer with heavy southern accent: “Chains? What the heck are chains?” I wonder to this day if those guys made it to their hotel.
      - justtopost 8y ago
        I think auto racing has priven there are most certainly qualitively 'better drivers' adjusted for training and experince.
        jerkstate 8y ago
        And learning to drive in the ice and snow is definitely a leg up; in racing (I have heard this in rally and F1) "If you want to win, hire a Finn"
        pps43 8y ago
        For some definition of 'better'. I know excellent race drivers who were in rather unfortunate and totally avoidable road accidents.
      - singingboyo 8y ago
        It's also local, not just general snow/ice/rain. I can figure out where ice will probably be here. If I go north into the interior where it's colder, not quite so humid, and snow collects over longer periods? Not a chance - I don't know the local weather, what patterns there are, what the road maintenance is like, etc. Same deal for where the rain will be bad, where I might need to worry about hydroplaning, etc.
musgrove 8y ago
Neither can most humans driving cars.
- SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
  That is clearly not the case.
  - munk-a 8y ago
    That clearly is the case, it was my experience growing up that even seasoned New England drivers couldn't take the weather seriously and ended up in a ditch on the side of the road.
    - jefft255 8y ago
      That's not really a good point. When New England/Canada drivers drive through a snowstorm, the vast majority of them get to where they were going just fine. In comparison, basically no self driving car could safely drive 100 ft during a snowstorm. Getting self driving cars to be as good as humans during harsh weather (which is not that good I'll give you that) will take 10 years in my opinion (I say this as a grad student in mobile robotics).
      - gmadsen 8y ago
        I'd say betting any tech 10 years down the line is a fools game. in 2008, people were saying the same thing about object detection, or literally 100s of other things that deep learning has done that people said was impossible. Autonomous cars are already safer on ice. being able to individually apply abs to each wheel in micro second speeds of detection of change in terrain is far more accurate than any human. As far as snowfall, for the vast majority of places, hi def maps and semantic knowledge of signage already exists, so as long as the car can localize, it can obey snow covered signs, and google and others are already working on filtering out weather "noise". The problem isn't as intractable as it seems
        8y ago
hooloovoo_zoo 8y ago
All the extra sensors that can be added to cars in addition to the suite of cameras make self-driving cars seem inevitable, yet no manufacturers appear to be close to bringing one to market.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  The problem isn’t sensing, it’s decision-making.
  - kxrm 8y ago
    The trolley problem is a tough one.
    - x3n0ph3n3 8y ago
      It has nothing to do with the trolley problem. The trolley problem is a headline-grabbing non-problem in the actual design of driverless cars.
      - imtringued 8y ago
        The real trolley problem: [ ] Let self driving cars kill people during development but try to make it up by saving thousands of lives after they are perfected. (Uber) [ ] Make self driving cars extremely safe from the start but more people end up dying from manual driving because development takes longer. (Waymo)
        Piskvorrr 8y ago
        The underlying assumption "general autonomous driving can be made much safer in a short timeframe [years]" is not granted. It may be that the first option could have a death toll higher than what it would prevent - but the thing is, we don't know, it's an unknown, an assumption "it will be much better once everybody drinks the koolaid."
    - spin 8y ago
viburnum 8y ago
Or construction, or detours, or cops directing traffic ...
- threeseed 8y ago
  I'm still curious about street signs. Can any self driving car read parking signs because it's not like there is some API for when/where you can park or drop passengers off.
  - bootlooped 8y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if something like that existed now or in the near future. There are APIs for speed limit, it would make sense to have them for other traffic rules as well.
    - taeric 8y ago
      My naive view is that a simple RFID standardization would solve that. Together with some regulations, of course. Though, this already has to be regulated. Not just anyone can put up a "only park during certain times" sign. (Right?)
      - Piskvorrr 8y ago
        Sure, put up a sign "do not park if moon full, no red cars at any time", on your own property. This only differs from the regulated road parking by attributes that are not visible on the ground (ownership). But worse: RFID makes for duplicate signage. What if the visible and data signage differ?
        trashtester 8y ago
        For the last part: If the cars, for the most part, actually are able to read signs (which they should), the RFID would serve as additional security. And in this case, any discrepancy would be reported back by any car passing by, so the error could be corrected quickly.
trhway 8y ago
>For the local breed of unflappable seagulls—which can stop autonomous cars by simply standing on the street, unbothered by NuTonomy’s quiet electric cars—engineers programmed the machines to creep forward slightly to startle the birds. seeing the fun my dog is having chasing the birds, i'd suggest that a Boston Dynamics dog would jump out of the car, scare the birds away, jump back (and continue to drive while watching electric sheep funny videos :)
gwern 8y ago
> Waymo, widely seen as leading the self-driving vanguard, says it has made progress teaching its software to better filter out “noise” from precipitation. The last Waymo leak claims that it is more than just 'progress', but that 'rain is solved', incidentally: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plans-autonomous-car-launch-leaked/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plan...
- athenot 8y ago
  Perhaps San Francisco rain is solved, but I doubt the downpours we get in the South East are solved. Zero visibility is just one thing, how about hydroplaning when there is over 1" of standing water on the road because it's coming down faster than gravity can drain it away? Or spotting that your lane is fine but the opposite one is flooded so that car coming the opposite direction is going to have to borrow your lane for a bit? These sound like edge cases but there are places where they occur very frequently and local human drivers, for all their faults, do have a way of dealing with them.
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    > hydroplaning when there is over 1" of standing water on the road because it's coming down faster than gravity can drain it away? I'd say that's pretty calculable, and has a solution, slow down to a speed that the tires can shed water. Perhaps most telling about your qualification is the misplaced risk; the light precipitation with a little oil slick is likely more dangerous, mostly because you don't slow down for it. Anecdotally, an even harder problem is when water exceeds 4", negotiating with traffic so you won't float away or get water in your intake.
    - Retra 8y ago
      Yes, it is trivial to calculate how to respond to known hazards. What is hard to calculate is what the hazards actually are in any given situation. Humans don't merely look at the road and compute how much standing water is there, they have prior experiences and a sense of what other drivers are doing on the road and why they are doing those things.
seibelj 8y ago
I’ve taken downvotes from HN optimists for years about self driving cars. The slightest bit of criticism would have comments calling me an idiot 20 different ways. Then a single dead pedestrian changes all the news articles and the opinions change. We are a very, very long way away from self driving taxi cabs. What a total PR scam that was - but it did help valuations.
- njarboe 8y ago
  In the current legal environment, self driving taxi cabs everywhere at all times will never exist. Waymo seems to think they can work in Arizona desert though. How many deaths per year would be acceptable? Like you mention, in the US, it seems that zero deaths per year, similar to commercial aviation, would be required. It is a bit of a shame that a tech that could save a million lives a year globally won't be deployed because it can't be made perfectly safe. On the other hand, I'm sure people in India or China will be happy to build and deploy them with much higher failure rates. Maybe we can import those to the US someday.
  - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
    > It is a bit of a shame that a tech that could save a million lives a year globally won't be deployed because it can't be made perfectly safe This is a bit of a generous assumption. It very well could turn out that self-driving cars are worse, or no better, than human drivers.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Right. So many arguments just start from the premise that self-driving cars must be safer and then ask why we aren't racing to replace human drivers with them. In reality the proposition that they are safer is far from proven.
      - a008t 8y ago
        Not to mention that the risk profile is going to be different. When you are driving your car, there is at least the illusion that you are in control of your risks. A careful driver at least believes that their risks are significantly lower than average. Getting into a self-driving car you have no control and are just playing Russian roulette. Not to mention that the failure modes of self-driving cars are likely to be very different from failure modes of humans, making it more difficult for other road users to predict what they would do in any given situation.
vaughnegut 8y ago
As a Canadian, it's the snow that's made me skeptical of self-driving cars. Seeing how much they depend on road markings to navigate in traffic properly is completely impossible in winter. Until that's solved, there's a lot of places that just can't use them for a lot of the year.
- cal5k 8y ago
  It seems plausible to me that LIDAR + radar could eventually outperform humans in white-out conditions. Here's an interesting bit of research on filtering out snow noise from a LIDAR point cloud: http://wavelab.uwaterloo.ca/?weblizar_portfolio=real-time-filtering-of-snow-from-lidar-point-clouds http://wavelab.uwaterloo.ca/?weblizar_portfolio=real-time-fi...
  - tlear 8y ago
    In those conditions maybe, problem is where is the road.. or lane. There are no markings of any kind when you have snow on the road. No marking you need to estimate where lanes are from what is near road and what other cars are doing. Exponentially harder problem
  - gugagore 8y ago
    But if snow occludes lane markings, which is what the parent was discussing, then no amount of sensing helps you see them, right? (You can have a map with lane markings and localize on that map, though)
    - jpindar 8y ago
      Except that many times when the lines are invisible, new lanes form that are in a different location. So your map will not match up with what the rest of the traffic is doing.
      - gugagore 8y ago
        I agree. I was just anticipating the common response to that challenge, or any other "static" perception challenge, which is "but there is a map"
scj 8y ago
Driving in dry / warm conditions is simple mechanics. Driving in snow and ice is an art. In snow and ice, variables that are typically constant or static become dynamic. Formally dynamic variables now become multi-variable equations. For example: travelling down a hill normally requires dynamically factoring for the extra speed due to the incline. Under blizzard conditions you have to factor ice/snow volume, as well as the incline. I don't want to share the road with self-driving cars in winter for a long time.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Variables I can think of that change: - Lane lines cease to be a thing, even if you can see them, you're better off not following them - Stoplights also mostly become a guideline, it's sometimes safer to run them than spin out - Signage or signalling may or may not be visible at all - Other cars or pedestrians may or may not be visible at all even in daylight - Your stopping distance can effectively change every few feet - A foot of snow accumulation may be transferred from the roof of the car in front of you to the windshield of your car with little to no warning
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    Of these, the following are attributable to "static variables become dynamic" (and highly nonlinear at that...): - Your stopping distance can effectively change every few feet - A foot of snow accumulation may be transferred from the roof of the car in front of you to the windshield of your car with little to no warning The following are hard planning problems: - Lane lines cease to be a thing, even if you can see them, you're better off not following them - Stoplights also mostly become a guideline, it's sometimes safer to run them than spin out But these are just damn hard and probably the true limiting factors: - Signage or signalling may or may not be visible at all - Other cars or pedestrians may or may not be visible at all even in daylight But I'm not an expert on perception so... maybe that's my bias showing.
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    Infrared vision seems to handle a lot of these, if not especially the last one
giacaglia 8y ago
That's because of LIDAR, rain and snow interfere with LIDAR. A simple Google search shows that https://www.quora.com/Autonomous-driving-how-good-is-LiDAR-under-heavy-rain-or-fog https://www.quora.com/Autonomous-driving-how-good-is-LiDAR-u...
- fake-name 8y ago
  To be fair, rain and snow interfere with millimetre wave radar too.
  - loeg 8y ago
    And visible spectrum light (human eyes).
    - furgooswft13 8y ago
      And humans have the unique ability to instantly and reliably differentiate between visual noise and objects on the road they wish to avoid. Lidar's record much less information than than 2 optical lenses (eyes). You got distance in 1, 2, or 2+1 dimensions, and intensity. Eyes can detect distance, wavelength, reflections, refraction, contrast, brightness etc. All with the assistance of the brain of course. If today's computers and software had the pattern matching capabilities of even a human child's brain (reasoning aside), a few moderate resolution video cameras would be all that is necessary for self driving. But we're not there yet so we employ sensors with limited detection that is simpler to interpret programmatically. I think even humans would have trouble interpreting the mess of lidar distance graphs in a rain/snow storm, though they'd still do better than current computers.
- hanoz 8y ago
  As LIDAR's pièce de résistance to date has been its ability to "see through" forest canopies to the terrain below, I don't understand how rain or snow should present an unsurmountable obstacle to seeing the road ahead.
  - 8y ago
clay_the_ripper 8y ago
I don’t see the fact that self driving cars can’t drive in all conditions as a reason not to still want one that can drive on the freeway in good weather. A lot of people spend a large portion of their driving time on freeways so if we could solve that to a standard of safety that is acceptable, that would be a huge win in my book. As soon as it starts raining, have the system disengage and I’ll take over. It seems to me that a lot of people commenting here are a bit obsessed about the edge cases, and if it has edge cases then it’s not a “true” self driving car. I disagree. I think a car that can self drive in some situations would still be amazing.
- grecy 8y ago
  The first cars ever couldn't drive in 100F+ heat, and wouldn't start below 0F. And even worse, there were virtually zero gas stations! Especially in rural areas! Does that mean they were useless? Absolutely not! Lately the mindset seems to be unless a product is all things to all people at all times then it's useless. In reality a product just has to fit a category really well and it will sell like hotcakes. Then it will evolve in iterations.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Sure. This is just pushback to the recent hype "it has full autonomy capabilities [small print: except not at all]". If the first cars had been marketed as "better in every aspect and in any conditions", you would have seen similar reactions.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    This reminds me of intel's optane. Yes they overhyped it and it doesn't perform 1000x faster than SSDs. But you have to consider that SSDs required decades of improvements to become viable and cheap. Even when Optane was a first generation product it was already better than SSDs in terms of latency and IOPS but despite that people thought it was a massive failure.
- graycat 8y ago
  The edge cases are a show stopper: You are talking about something like "driver assist" or upgraded cruise control. Thing is, still need a human right there. Much of the dream of self-driving is for no human driver there, for taxi cabs, school buses, 18 wheel trucks, local deliveries from pizza or Chinese carryout, USPS, UPS, or FedEx, etc. For that, for current technology, for current traffic, on current roads, there's no hope at all because the edge cases are way too common in practice (can't put up with mean time to destroying an 18 wheel truck of six months -- 5 million miles is more like it) and require full, wide awake, sober, mature human intelligence with full ability at reading, talking, understanding, natural language understanding, hand signals, flag signals, tough to read road signs, etc. Edge cases.
orasis 8y ago
An X-prize for autonomous racing on lubed up figure 8 tracks would solve this real quick.
golemiprague 8y ago
I think self driving cars should be used on dedicated roads as a more agile and flexible replacement to trains. There are many places in the world where they need to build new train lines. What if instead they just build a dedicated road with self driving cars roaming it and just stopping for people in designated bays instead of stations.
graycat 8y ago
My old summary has been that current driving on current roads with current traffic occasionally but too often for practice requires actual, full human intelligence, generally that of a prudent person over 16. So, the intelligence of a mouse, crow, parrot, dog, cat, monkey, elephant, dolphin, orca, etc. just is not enough. So, self driving cars requires essentially full AI for driving and nearly everything else in life. So, the self driving car problem is no easier than the full AI problem. Sure, there can be some special cases that are easier -- trucks in a huge, open pit copper mine, a tractor on a huge, flat farm in Missouri, some military battlefield situations, and the public roads if heavily reengineer them with lots of essentially electronic tracks, etc., uh, right, on roads in perfect condition, no big objects falling off trucks, no drunks, no tire blowouts, dry weather, daylight, perfect visibility, no alarms from an extensive monitoring system, and no rain, sleet, or snow. Then, sure, a "self-driving car"!!!!
bronco21016 8y ago
Waymo’s Michigan testing facility is very close to my home. I’m really curious to see how they do on snowy pothole ridden roads in Michigan. I’ve seen very few of them on the road this summer but if there’s supposed to be heavy testing and validation going on perhaps we’ll see an army of them on the roads here soon. I’m curious how self driving focused groups are solving lane detection and managing surrounding traffic on snow covered roads. It’s not uncommon for a multi lane highway to be completely covered with snow and multiple tracks for different ‘lanes’ that overlap. It’s also not uncommon to see cars just making their own lanes. This occurs even after the snow has stopped flying.
- umichguy 8y ago
  "I’m curious how self driving focused groups are solving lane detection and managing surrounding traffic on snow covered roads. It’s not uncommon for a multi lane highway to be completely covered with snow and multiple tracks for different ‘lanes’ that overlap. It’s also not uncommon to see cars just making their own lanes. This occurs even after the snow has stopped flying." Yep. As a Michigander, I totally agree. You see 6 to 12 lane roads reduced to "random" 2 lane roads when there is a good pileup of snow. And the snow drifts make it even worse!
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    Humans are good at improvising. Not using all the lanes when the lane markings are covered by snow, and the road is slippery, sounds like a reasonable strategy. And nobody ever told us that's what we should do. With autonomous vehicles, you need to plan every situation in advance. Our current AI technologies can't improvise. It seems to me that current AI is basically just a decision tree with some neural networks sprinkled on top.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      More like decision tree/rules engine with pattern recognizing neural networks underneath. You detect features and then take largely pre-programmed actions based on those features.
openloop 8y ago
Oh really? Tesla tested in michigan winters. I find it hard to believe this is not possible.
openloop 8y ago
Plow it bitch.
openloop 8y ago
Snow plowing = jobs. And yeah you could make autonomous plows but not yet.
stevewilhelm 8y ago
I think the real game changer will be when self-driving cars also communicate with each other in some kind of mesh network sharing road surface, weather, and obstacle information.
purplezooey 8y ago
Well boys, looks like it'll be another couple of decades
- trashtester 8y ago
  Or it could start taking off 2-3 years after the bubble bursts. Amazon lost 90% of its value between 2000 and 2002, and many of the big players today entered the market between 2002 and 2005, when confidence in the "new economy" was at a minimum.
Animats 8y ago
The article is kind of vague. What they seem to be doing is operating a ground penetrating radar under the vehicle so that underground details can be used as positional references. This is useful only if you have a map which includes that data. At best, this tells you where you are. It tells you nothing about what's ahead. LIDAR units that return "first and last" returns are helpful in dealing with rain and fog. The first return (nearest thing seen) will be noisy in rain, but last (most distant thing in that direction) should be stable if it's from a solid object. "First and last" is used with aerial LIDAR surveying; "first" gives you the treetops, "last" gives you the ground. Range gated imagers for seeing through fog and dust have been available for over a decade. These are active devices which allow filtering out anything that's outside a narrow image range gate. You can adjust the gate and get images layer by layer. This technology is used by the military and seems to be somewhat restricted.[1][2][3] In addition to fog, it can show what's behind a camouflage net, objects concealed by brush, and such. The submillimeter radar people are slowly making progress, too.[4] Automotive radars are currently running at 77GHz, which is low resolution compared to LIDAR. The resolution gets better with frequency. There are now systems in the 300GHz range. So the sensors needed are available now, in expensive forms, and can get cheaper. [1] http://www.dvsmil.com/PDF/Imaging_Lidar_Seeing_Through_Cloud.pdf http://www.dvsmil.com/PDF/Imaging_Lidar_Seeing_Through_Cloud... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTo-6jXOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTo-6jXOYo [3] http://www.sensorsinc.com/applications/military/laser-range-gating http://www.sensorsinc.com/applications/military/laser-range-... [4] http://consortis.eu/ http://consortis.eu/
- apcragg 8y ago
  Small nitpick. The range resolution improves with increasing pulse/chirp/waveform bandwidth, not increasing carrier frequency. It's true that at higher carrier frequencies there is more bandwidth available and thus better range resolution is possible but the relationship is slightly different than "delta_r ~ frequency"
  - rademacher 8y ago
    The relationship is cT/2, where c is the speed of light, and T is the pulse length, if the waveform is CW. Note that in this case T can limit the minimum range you can detect. Or you can use c/(2B) where B is the bandwidth of the signal as you stated. I believe the limit is wavelength/2 for resolution though.
paulmd 8y ago
Nor glom of nit
skookumchuck 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if these problems proved intractable enough that the solution will be adding electronic guides to the roads themselves. Things like burying a wire that can be followed, embedding RFID devices in the pavement (along with an online database that gives their precise location and any updates on road conditions), etc. It would be conceptually similar to all the ground based systems that guide aircraft. Of course, these would be deployed only on high value roads like freeways first, and you could at least let the autodrive work on the freeways, and do the last mile yourself.
yogrish 8y ago
Not to be Cynical,Somehow the article sounded like a sales pitch for "Wavesense". They too want to have pie out in the self driving race. As mentioned in the article, each sensor(Radar,Lidar,Camera) has a limitation on its own. But, Self driving cars depend not just on one sensor but on Fused output of sensor. Also, they use V2V, HD maps and GPS/DR for localisation. Wavesense is another sensor that can solve localisation problem. They too might have difficulty in cases where there are fallen metal objects that reflect different signatures, causing trouble. More the sensors, more the confidence for Self driving. Edit: Grammar & some terminology
w_t_payne 8y ago
This is one of the times where I am glad to be working in maritime autonomy and not (any longer) in automotive -- we have the considerable benefit of being able to modify the operating procedures for our autonomous vessels to restrict operations or modify operating procedures in environmental conditions where normal operation is no longer safe.
tiagoafpereira 8y ago
I still cannot comprehend the current push for automated driving. We, collectively, not just the US, have a problem with too many cars and instead of reducing said number of cars we want to make them self crashing? Instead of investing heavily on public transit systems we keep feeding this fable that somehow, in the near future, cars driven by computers will do at least as good a job of driving as sentient, sober people. I can't get my smartphone to understand my language and do simple things by voice commands and yet we seem to think that there's (nearly) available technology to make a car drive by itself... These companies must not exist in the real world, that's the only possible explanation.
- krapp 8y ago
  > I still cannot comprehend the current push for automated driving. Google and Uber believe they can make an insane amount of money with the transition to automated driving. This is being sold to the public as the solution to a public safety crisis with the narrative that human controlled cars are death machines which need to be taken off the roads as soon as possible.
  - tiagoafpereira 8y ago
    I wonder how long will it take them to realize that it won't happen before someone cracks the artificial general intelligence problem... I don't know what ticks me off the most, people believing that these companies can easily solve the automated driving problem or these companies stubbornly pushing for it.
    - krapp 8y ago
      I'm sure plenty of engineers actually working on the problem are aware of how difficult it is... but they're not the ones doing the pushing or making the grandiose claims.
      - tiagoafpereira 8y ago
        Fine by me, research is research. I'm just utterly surprised by how so many people think this is a fixable problem in the near future, it's not. How long until people realize that? The next AI winter won't come soon enough.
petterih 8y ago
Sensible 4 (http://sensible4.fi/ http://sensible4.fi/) uses bunch of various sensors including LIDAR, IR and normal camera. Seems to do ok in typical winter environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWrngWvcnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWrngWvcnU
- dmix 8y ago
  That's awesome, they also have some old videos from 1990-1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7jxensSdhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7jxensSdhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMlz5tAKmUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMlz5tAKmUs They've been working on this problem for a very long time. Which explains the progress they've made. I don't know how people can say this is an unsolvable problem when some high end research applications have made such progress. Plus there's Microsoft's 2016 announcement with Ford about algorithms that can work within snow/rain by identifying raindrops and snowflakes then 'ignoring' them: https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navigate-in-rain-or-snow/ https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navi...
golergka 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx08yRsR9ow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx08yRsR9ow
Quanttek 8y ago
> The cluster of sensors, bolted underneath a chassis like a skid plate, can scan 10 feet beneath the ground to reveal soil, water, roots, and rocks. Once WaveSense has scanned an entire roadway, it creates a map of the subsurface strata that can determine the location of a vehicle within a few centimeters. nononono! Even assuming you can create sufficient map data as soon as there is any kind of roadworks - or even only the winter cracking the asphahlt - your data will be useless. They don't even need to change the layout of the road. I'll never understand companies that focus so much on maps as priamry source of data. Every day, massive - temporary (construction site) or permanent - changes are occurring to the road network. Also, the centimeter-precise location of the vehicle doesn't matter that much. The actual situation on the road matters much more: You may need to drive a meter more to the left because of a parked truck, a vehicle may obscure signs, a tree branch hangs down into the road, some car is parked too close to intersection, etc.
- SECProto 8y ago
  Any time I drive a new road, I have to drive much more slowly - lanes unexpectedly turn into turning lanes resulting in quick merges, or a manhole has subsided a half foot making for an unpleasantly bumpy ride if I'm not used to it. Or in a rural environment, I have to spend more focus keeping an eye on the road surface for any number of reasons. If I then drive the road and there's been some changes (traffic cones, lane closures, heavier traffic than normal, dark so I need to watch out for animals more closely....) I adjust my speed for the circumstances I don't see why gathering surface information would be any different. Gather info, compare to previous fleet-gathered info, adjust driving to compensate. Seems reasonable to me (as ONE source of info for decision-making). And as fleet size increases, info gets gathered more quickly - look at how quickly google maps can inform you of traffic slowdowns in busy urban areas.
- chooseaname 8y ago
  > I'll never understand companies that focus so much on maps as priamry source of data. Maybe they don't really care about the product. Maybe the execs only care about making money, so they'll find funding for anything - whether it will pan out or not. Self-driving cars are hot and for now there's a lot of money available. I think things will cool down when the hard part starts - like when they really do have to figure out how to make them drive in less than ideal conditions.
xbryanx 8y ago
I wonder how self-driving cars will handle highway lanes in active snow. Here in Minnesota four-lane highways regularly turn to three and two lane highways when the snow covers the roadway markers and people just start making their own general paths. Will the software just follow the crowd, or will the software car be the one weird vehicle ignoring the conditions and following the lane that no one can see.
btbuildem 8y ago
Honestly, it seems like a more workable solution would be to improve the roadways with built-in beacons to indicate where a road is, and where it isn't. The cars would work only on the improved infrastructure, but they would work. I suppose there is a danger of nefarious actors spoofing beacons to make you drive off a bridge, but it seems far-fetched.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  it could be more easily done for limited access roads and lanes. like HOV and Express lanes. They are already heavily marked. Still in the end it requires a combination of changes to how we mark roadways, indicate construction, detours and the like. Think of it like the ADA but for cars.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    I would think of it less as an "accommodation" and more as an evolution. The way that roads are marked right now is a direct consequence of the fact that the markings need to be consumed by humans moving at high speed. When highways were for oxen, horses, and pedestrians, they didn't need guardrails, explicit breakdown lanes, and exit ramps with highly reflective signs. In the same way, when the majority of the piloting entities using the road have other input options besides visible light, to support them we can/should take advantage of those other channels.
- PopeDotNinja 8y ago
  To me that removes the "self" in self-driving car. A car that stays on the road because there are magic beacons is like bowling with thise giant bumpers in the gutters. It'd be more like cars with uber cruise control.
  - macintux 8y ago
    Don't we want driving to be more like bowling with bumpers in the gutters? Safer is better, no matter how we get there.
jfoster 8y ago
Recent Waymo leak suggests rain is solved and snow looking good to be solved next year. https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plans-autonomous-car-launch-leaked/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plan...
IBCNU 8y ago
It's pretty funny how we're running into AI-winter at the same time the autonomous vehicle VC boom is moving all their money to scooters.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
The Uber car failed in Dark of Night too.
- dmix 8y ago
  It didn't fail because it was dark though.
gbersac 8y ago
It sounds like a post created by the public relation department of the company creating the underground sensor.
skywhopper 8y ago
"robots sophisticated enough to [...] improve on lackluster human perception" This underlying misapprehension is at the root of the self-driving car hubris. Humans have remarkable perception of physical environments. The fact that electronic systems can beat humans handily on a few metrics has led to an entire industry built on the misconception that those few metrics are all that matter. But those were just the trivial bits. The more sophisticated perceptual tasks--even the basic ones involved in the simplest self-driving task of traveling down a restricted access freeway--like correctly interpreting the behavior of other cars; interpreting whether the debris in the road constitutes a dangerous obstacle or something easily driven over; or even knowing which objects speeding toward you are moving and which are stationary--require more than just raw sensory input. There's a mountain of implicit cultural awareness embedded into all of those perceptual tasks that we haven't begun to form an idea how to represent in a software system. And again, this is the easy stuff!
- oihoaihsfoiahsf 8y ago
  > This underlying misapprehension is at the root of the self-driving car hubris. I will basically guarantee you that no one working on self-driving cars thinks human perception is lackluster or an easily matched capability. Journos interpreting their work might impute that belief to self-driving engineers, but nobody could work on the problem for even the shortest amount of time without realizing that it is an incredibly hard problem.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
zerop 8y ago
A basic question: What would we achieve if make successful self-driving cars. And can we achieve the same without building the self-driving cars.

210 points by bookmtn 8y ago

Frye9876 8y ago

If you’ve used any sort of ADAS this is old news.

Spooky23 8y ago

Humans can barely handle these conditions!

justtopost 8y ago
The problem here, is that you are half-right. Its localized conditions. No country, much less worldwide, system can account for local anomolies. Where I learned to drive, most humans could 'see' black ice by predicting where water will pool, the recent weather, and subtle clues that abound, but are not easily expressable. Any out-of-town'er would surely be spun out or driving 10mph, white-knuckled, aghast at the "maniacs" flying by at normal speeds. While in my college city, I had to relearn everything, as it was rainy, and the drivers hyper agressive, and 15mph faster. The same model would struggle to encompass both modalities. Until AEB stops accidentally triggering constantly on colleagues cars, I have zero interest in trusting my life to an algo connected to a 300hp steel cage.
- poulsbohemian 8y ago
  I've often wondered how much of this is hubris or fear vs. physics. What I mean is - are people in say, icy and snowy climates actually better drivers, able to adjust to the conditions, or are they fooling themselves? Likewise, the person going exceptionally slow and cautiously - are they misjudging the actual risk of inclement weather, relative to an actual scientific judgement? It certainly feels like humans become improved drivers through various weather / road condition experiences, but I sometimes find myself wondering whether my gut instincts would align with a scientific approach.
  - dbcurtis 8y ago
    I don’t think they are qualitatively “better drivers”. But they are more experienced at certain things. When I lived in Minnesota, I got lots of practice driving in snow and ice and rain. Now in NorCal, not so much :) Its a skill. You get better with practice. The person going slow probably just hasn’t had enough practice yet with the conditions. Going slow is probably a good choice for them. Am I a better driver overall for knowing how to handle ice? Probably not, but I might be the best person to do the driving under those conditions if everyone else in the car is from warmer climes. I remember standing in line at Minneapolis rental car counter one night when it was snowing an inch an hour with 4 inches on the ground already. Agent to the guys in front of me: “There are chains in the trunk if you need them.” Customer with heavy southern accent: “Chains? What the heck are chains?” I wonder to this day if those guys made it to their hotel.
    - justtopost 8y ago
      I think auto racing has priven there are most certainly qualitively 'better drivers' adjusted for training and experince.
      - jerkstate 8y ago
        And learning to drive in the ice and snow is definitely a leg up; in racing (I have heard this in rally and F1) "If you want to win, hire a Finn"
      - pps43 8y ago
        For some definition of 'better'. I know excellent race drivers who were in rather unfortunate and totally avoidable road accidents.
    - singingboyo 8y ago
      It's also local, not just general snow/ice/rain. I can figure out where ice will probably be here. If I go north into the interior where it's colder, not quite so humid, and snow collects over longer periods? Not a chance - I don't know the local weather, what patterns there are, what the road maintenance is like, etc. Same deal for where the rain will be bad, where I might need to worry about hydroplaning, etc.

musgrove 8y ago

Neither can most humans driving cars.

SheinhardtWigCo 8y ago
That is clearly not the case.
- munk-a 8y ago
  That clearly is the case, it was my experience growing up that even seasoned New England drivers couldn't take the weather seriously and ended up in a ditch on the side of the road.
  - jefft255 8y ago
    That's not really a good point. When New England/Canada drivers drive through a snowstorm, the vast majority of them get to where they were going just fine. In comparison, basically no self driving car could safely drive 100 ft during a snowstorm. Getting self driving cars to be as good as humans during harsh weather (which is not that good I'll give you that) will take 10 years in my opinion (I say this as a grad student in mobile robotics).
    - gmadsen 8y ago
      I'd say betting any tech 10 years down the line is a fools game. in 2008, people were saying the same thing about object detection, or literally 100s of other things that deep learning has done that people said was impossible. Autonomous cars are already safer on ice. being able to individually apply abs to each wheel in micro second speeds of detection of change in terrain is far more accurate than any human. As far as snowfall, for the vast majority of places, hi def maps and semantic knowledge of signage already exists, so as long as the car can localize, it can obey snow covered signs, and google and others are already working on filtering out weather "noise". The problem isn't as intractable as it seems
      - 8y ago

hooloovoo_zoo 8y ago

All the extra sensors that can be added to cars in addition to the suite of cameras make self-driving cars seem inevitable, yet no manufacturers appear to be close to bringing one to market.

rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
The problem isn’t sensing, it’s decision-making.
- kxrm 8y ago
  The trolley problem is a tough one.
  - x3n0ph3n3 8y ago
    It has nothing to do with the trolley problem. The trolley problem is a headline-grabbing non-problem in the actual design of driverless cars.
    - imtringued 8y ago
      The real trolley problem: [ ] Let self driving cars kill people during development but try to make it up by saving thousands of lives after they are perfected. (Uber) [ ] Make self driving cars extremely safe from the start but more people end up dying from manual driving because development takes longer. (Waymo)
      - Piskvorrr 8y ago
        The underlying assumption "general autonomous driving can be made much safer in a short timeframe [years]" is not granted. It may be that the first option could have a death toll higher than what it would prevent - but the thing is, we don't know, it's an unknown, an assumption "it will be much better once everybody drinks the koolaid."
  - spin 8y ago

viburnum 8y ago

Or construction, or detours, or cops directing traffic ...

threeseed 8y ago
I'm still curious about street signs. Can any self driving car read parking signs because it's not like there is some API for when/where you can park or drop passengers off.
- bootlooped 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if something like that existed now or in the near future. There are APIs for speed limit, it would make sense to have them for other traffic rules as well.
  - taeric 8y ago
    My naive view is that a simple RFID standardization would solve that. Together with some regulations, of course. Though, this already has to be regulated. Not just anyone can put up a "only park during certain times" sign. (Right?)
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Sure, put up a sign "do not park if moon full, no red cars at any time", on your own property. This only differs from the regulated road parking by attributes that are not visible on the ground (ownership). But worse: RFID makes for duplicate signage. What if the visible and data signage differ?
      - trashtester 8y ago
        For the last part: If the cars, for the most part, actually are able to read signs (which they should), the RFID would serve as additional security. And in this case, any discrepancy would be reported back by any car passing by, so the error could be corrected quickly.

trhway 8y ago

>For the local breed of unflappable seagulls—which can stop autonomous cars by simply standing on the street, unbothered by NuTonomy’s quiet electric cars—engineers programmed the machines to creep forward slightly to startle the birds. seeing the fun my dog is having chasing the birds, i'd suggest that a Boston Dynamics dog would jump out of the car, scare the birds away, jump back (and continue to drive while watching electric sheep funny videos :)

gwern 8y ago

> Waymo, widely seen as leading the self-driving vanguard, says it has made progress teaching its software to better filter out “noise” from precipitation. The last Waymo leak claims that it is more than just 'progress', but that 'rain is solved', incidentally: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plans-autonomous-car-launch-leaked/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plan...

athenot 8y ago
Perhaps San Francisco rain is solved, but I doubt the downpours we get in the South East are solved. Zero visibility is just one thing, how about hydroplaning when there is over 1" of standing water on the road because it's coming down faster than gravity can drain it away? Or spotting that your lane is fine but the opposite one is flooded so that car coming the opposite direction is going to have to borrow your lane for a bit? These sound like edge cases but there are places where they occur very frequently and local human drivers, for all their faults, do have a way of dealing with them.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  > hydroplaning when there is over 1" of standing water on the road because it's coming down faster than gravity can drain it away? I'd say that's pretty calculable, and has a solution, slow down to a speed that the tires can shed water. Perhaps most telling about your qualification is the misplaced risk; the light precipitation with a little oil slick is likely more dangerous, mostly because you don't slow down for it. Anecdotally, an even harder problem is when water exceeds 4", negotiating with traffic so you won't float away or get water in your intake.
  - Retra 8y ago
    Yes, it is trivial to calculate how to respond to known hazards. What is hard to calculate is what the hazards actually are in any given situation. Humans don't merely look at the road and compute how much standing water is there, they have prior experiences and a sense of what other drivers are doing on the road and why they are doing those things.

seibelj 8y ago

I’ve taken downvotes from HN optimists for years about self driving cars. The slightest bit of criticism would have comments calling me an idiot 20 different ways. Then a single dead pedestrian changes all the news articles and the opinions change. We are a very, very long way away from self driving taxi cabs. What a total PR scam that was - but it did help valuations.

njarboe 8y ago
In the current legal environment, self driving taxi cabs everywhere at all times will never exist. Waymo seems to think they can work in Arizona desert though. How many deaths per year would be acceptable? Like you mention, in the US, it seems that zero deaths per year, similar to commercial aviation, would be required. It is a bit of a shame that a tech that could save a million lives a year globally won't be deployed because it can't be made perfectly safe. On the other hand, I'm sure people in India or China will be happy to build and deploy them with much higher failure rates. Maybe we can import those to the US someday.
- fucking_tragedy 8y ago
  > It is a bit of a shame that a tech that could save a million lives a year globally won't be deployed because it can't be made perfectly safe This is a bit of a generous assumption. It very well could turn out that self-driving cars are worse, or no better, than human drivers.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Right. So many arguments just start from the premise that self-driving cars must be safer and then ask why we aren't racing to replace human drivers with them. In reality the proposition that they are safer is far from proven.
    - a008t 8y ago
      Not to mention that the risk profile is going to be different. When you are driving your car, there is at least the illusion that you are in control of your risks. A careful driver at least believes that their risks are significantly lower than average. Getting into a self-driving car you have no control and are just playing Russian roulette. Not to mention that the failure modes of self-driving cars are likely to be very different from failure modes of humans, making it more difficult for other road users to predict what they would do in any given situation.

vaughnegut 8y ago

As a Canadian, it's the snow that's made me skeptical of self-driving cars. Seeing how much they depend on road markings to navigate in traffic properly is completely impossible in winter. Until that's solved, there's a lot of places that just can't use them for a lot of the year.

cal5k 8y ago
It seems plausible to me that LIDAR + radar could eventually outperform humans in white-out conditions. Here's an interesting bit of research on filtering out snow noise from a LIDAR point cloud: http://wavelab.uwaterloo.ca/?weblizar_portfolio=real-time-filtering-of-snow-from-lidar-point-clouds http://wavelab.uwaterloo.ca/?weblizar_portfolio=real-time-fi...
- tlear 8y ago
  In those conditions maybe, problem is where is the road.. or lane. There are no markings of any kind when you have snow on the road. No marking you need to estimate where lanes are from what is near road and what other cars are doing. Exponentially harder problem
- gugagore 8y ago
  But if snow occludes lane markings, which is what the parent was discussing, then no amount of sensing helps you see them, right? (You can have a map with lane markings and localize on that map, though)
  - jpindar 8y ago
    Except that many times when the lines are invisible, new lanes form that are in a different location. So your map will not match up with what the rest of the traffic is doing.
    - gugagore 8y ago
      I agree. I was just anticipating the common response to that challenge, or any other "static" perception challenge, which is "but there is a map"

scj 8y ago

Driving in dry / warm conditions is simple mechanics. Driving in snow and ice is an art. In snow and ice, variables that are typically constant or static become dynamic. Formally dynamic variables now become multi-variable equations. For example: travelling down a hill normally requires dynamically factoring for the extra speed due to the incline. Under blizzard conditions you have to factor ice/snow volume, as well as the incline. I don't want to share the road with self-driving cars in winter for a long time.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Variables I can think of that change: - Lane lines cease to be a thing, even if you can see them, you're better off not following them - Stoplights also mostly become a guideline, it's sometimes safer to run them than spin out - Signage or signalling may or may not be visible at all - Other cars or pedestrians may or may not be visible at all even in daylight - Your stopping distance can effectively change every few feet - A foot of snow accumulation may be transferred from the roof of the car in front of you to the windshield of your car with little to no warning
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  Of these, the following are attributable to "static variables become dynamic" (and highly nonlinear at that...): - Your stopping distance can effectively change every few feet - A foot of snow accumulation may be transferred from the roof of the car in front of you to the windshield of your car with little to no warning The following are hard planning problems: - Lane lines cease to be a thing, even if you can see them, you're better off not following them - Stoplights also mostly become a guideline, it's sometimes safer to run them than spin out But these are just damn hard and probably the true limiting factors: - Signage or signalling may or may not be visible at all - Other cars or pedestrians may or may not be visible at all even in daylight But I'm not an expert on perception so... maybe that's my bias showing.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  Infrared vision seems to handle a lot of these, if not especially the last one

giacaglia 8y ago

That's because of LIDAR, rain and snow interfere with LIDAR. A simple Google search shows that https://www.quora.com/Autonomous-driving-how-good-is-LiDAR-under-heavy-rain-or-fog https://www.quora.com/Autonomous-driving-how-good-is-LiDAR-u...

fake-name 8y ago
To be fair, rain and snow interfere with millimetre wave radar too.
- loeg 8y ago
  And visible spectrum light (human eyes).
  - furgooswft13 8y ago
    And humans have the unique ability to instantly and reliably differentiate between visual noise and objects on the road they wish to avoid. Lidar's record much less information than than 2 optical lenses (eyes). You got distance in 1, 2, or 2+1 dimensions, and intensity. Eyes can detect distance, wavelength, reflections, refraction, contrast, brightness etc. All with the assistance of the brain of course. If today's computers and software had the pattern matching capabilities of even a human child's brain (reasoning aside), a few moderate resolution video cameras would be all that is necessary for self driving. But we're not there yet so we employ sensors with limited detection that is simpler to interpret programmatically. I think even humans would have trouble interpreting the mess of lidar distance graphs in a rain/snow storm, though they'd still do better than current computers.
hanoz 8y ago
As LIDAR's pièce de résistance to date has been its ability to "see through" forest canopies to the terrain below, I don't understand how rain or snow should present an unsurmountable obstacle to seeing the road ahead.
- 8y ago

clay_the_ripper 8y ago

I don’t see the fact that self driving cars can’t drive in all conditions as a reason not to still want one that can drive on the freeway in good weather. A lot of people spend a large portion of their driving time on freeways so if we could solve that to a standard of safety that is acceptable, that would be a huge win in my book. As soon as it starts raining, have the system disengage and I’ll take over. It seems to me that a lot of people commenting here are a bit obsessed about the edge cases, and if it has edge cases then it’s not a “true” self driving car. I disagree. I think a car that can self drive in some situations would still be amazing.

grecy 8y ago
The first cars ever couldn't drive in 100F+ heat, and wouldn't start below 0F. And even worse, there were virtually zero gas stations! Especially in rural areas! Does that mean they were useless? Absolutely not! Lately the mindset seems to be unless a product is all things to all people at all times then it's useless. In reality a product just has to fit a category really well and it will sell like hotcakes. Then it will evolve in iterations.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Sure. This is just pushback to the recent hype "it has full autonomy capabilities [small print: except not at all]". If the first cars had been marketed as "better in every aspect and in any conditions", you would have seen similar reactions.
- imtringued 8y ago
  This reminds me of intel's optane. Yes they overhyped it and it doesn't perform 1000x faster than SSDs. But you have to consider that SSDs required decades of improvements to become viable and cheap. Even when Optane was a first generation product it was already better than SSDs in terms of latency and IOPS but despite that people thought it was a massive failure.
graycat 8y ago
The edge cases are a show stopper: You are talking about something like "driver assist" or upgraded cruise control. Thing is, still need a human right there. Much of the dream of self-driving is for no human driver there, for taxi cabs, school buses, 18 wheel trucks, local deliveries from pizza or Chinese carryout, USPS, UPS, or FedEx, etc. For that, for current technology, for current traffic, on current roads, there's no hope at all because the edge cases are way too common in practice (can't put up with mean time to destroying an 18 wheel truck of six months -- 5 million miles is more like it) and require full, wide awake, sober, mature human intelligence with full ability at reading, talking, understanding, natural language understanding, hand signals, flag signals, tough to read road signs, etc. Edge cases.

orasis 8y ago

An X-prize for autonomous racing on lubed up figure 8 tracks would solve this real quick.

golemiprague 8y ago

I think self driving cars should be used on dedicated roads as a more agile and flexible replacement to trains. There are many places in the world where they need to build new train lines. What if instead they just build a dedicated road with self driving cars roaming it and just stopping for people in designated bays instead of stations.

graycat 8y ago

My old summary has been that current driving on current roads with current traffic occasionally but too often for practice requires actual, full human intelligence, generally that of a prudent person over 16. So, the intelligence of a mouse, crow, parrot, dog, cat, monkey, elephant, dolphin, orca, etc. just is not enough. So, self driving cars requires essentially full AI for driving and nearly everything else in life. So, the self driving car problem is no easier than the full AI problem. Sure, there can be some special cases that are easier -- trucks in a huge, open pit copper mine, a tractor on a huge, flat farm in Missouri, some military battlefield situations, and the public roads if heavily reengineer them with lots of essentially electronic tracks, etc., uh, right, on roads in perfect condition, no big objects falling off trucks, no drunks, no tire blowouts, dry weather, daylight, perfect visibility, no alarms from an extensive monitoring system, and no rain, sleet, or snow. Then, sure, a "self-driving car"!!!!

bronco21016 8y ago

Waymo’s Michigan testing facility is very close to my home. I’m really curious to see how they do on snowy pothole ridden roads in Michigan. I’ve seen very few of them on the road this summer but if there’s supposed to be heavy testing and validation going on perhaps we’ll see an army of them on the roads here soon. I’m curious how self driving focused groups are solving lane detection and managing surrounding traffic on snow covered roads. It’s not uncommon for a multi lane highway to be completely covered with snow and multiple tracks for different ‘lanes’ that overlap. It’s also not uncommon to see cars just making their own lanes. This occurs even after the snow has stopped flying.

umichguy 8y ago
"I’m curious how self driving focused groups are solving lane detection and managing surrounding traffic on snow covered roads. It’s not uncommon for a multi lane highway to be completely covered with snow and multiple tracks for different ‘lanes’ that overlap. It’s also not uncommon to see cars just making their own lanes. This occurs even after the snow has stopped flying." Yep. As a Michigander, I totally agree. You see 6 to 12 lane roads reduced to "random" 2 lane roads when there is a good pileup of snow. And the snow drifts make it even worse!
- jakobegger 8y ago
  Humans are good at improvising. Not using all the lanes when the lane markings are covered by snow, and the road is slippery, sounds like a reasonable strategy. And nobody ever told us that's what we should do. With autonomous vehicles, you need to plan every situation in advance. Our current AI technologies can't improvise. It seems to me that current AI is basically just a decision tree with some neural networks sprinkled on top.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    More like decision tree/rules engine with pattern recognizing neural networks underneath. You detect features and then take largely pre-programmed actions based on those features.

openloop 8y ago

Oh really? Tesla tested in michigan winters. I find it hard to believe this is not possible.

openloop 8y ago

Plow it bitch.

openloop 8y ago

Snow plowing = jobs. And yeah you could make autonomous plows but not yet.

stevewilhelm 8y ago

I think the real game changer will be when self-driving cars also communicate with each other in some kind of mesh network sharing road surface, weather, and obstacle information.

purplezooey 8y ago

Well boys, looks like it'll be another couple of decades

trashtester 8y ago
Or it could start taking off 2-3 years after the bubble bursts. Amazon lost 90% of its value between 2000 and 2002, and many of the big players today entered the market between 2002 and 2005, when confidence in the "new economy" was at a minimum.

Animats 8y ago

The article is kind of vague. What they seem to be doing is operating a ground penetrating radar under the vehicle so that underground details can be used as positional references. This is useful only if you have a map which includes that data. At best, this tells you where you are. It tells you nothing about what's ahead. LIDAR units that return "first and last" returns are helpful in dealing with rain and fog. The first return (nearest thing seen) will be noisy in rain, but last (most distant thing in that direction) should be stable if it's from a solid object. "First and last" is used with aerial LIDAR surveying; "first" gives you the treetops, "last" gives you the ground. Range gated imagers for seeing through fog and dust have been available for over a decade. These are active devices which allow filtering out anything that's outside a narrow image range gate. You can adjust the gate and get images layer by layer. This technology is used by the military and seems to be somewhat restricted.[1][2][3] In addition to fog, it can show what's behind a camouflage net, objects concealed by brush, and such. The submillimeter radar people are slowly making progress, too.[4] Automotive radars are currently running at 77GHz, which is low resolution compared to LIDAR. The resolution gets better with frequency. There are now systems in the 300GHz range. So the sensors needed are available now, in expensive forms, and can get cheaper. [1] http://www.dvsmil.com/PDF/Imaging_Lidar_Seeing_Through_Cloud.pdf http://www.dvsmil.com/PDF/Imaging_Lidar_Seeing_Through_Cloud... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTo-6jXOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOTo-6jXOYo [3] http://www.sensorsinc.com/applications/military/laser-range-gating http://www.sensorsinc.com/applications/military/laser-range-... [4] http://consortis.eu/ http://consortis.eu/

apcragg 8y ago
Small nitpick. The range resolution improves with increasing pulse/chirp/waveform bandwidth, not increasing carrier frequency. It's true that at higher carrier frequencies there is more bandwidth available and thus better range resolution is possible but the relationship is slightly different than "delta_r ~ frequency"
- rademacher 8y ago
  The relationship is cT/2, where c is the speed of light, and T is the pulse length, if the waveform is CW. Note that in this case T can limit the minimum range you can detect. Or you can use c/(2B) where B is the bandwidth of the signal as you stated. I believe the limit is wavelength/2 for resolution though.

paulmd 8y ago

Nor glom of nit

skookumchuck 8y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if these problems proved intractable enough that the solution will be adding electronic guides to the roads themselves. Things like burying a wire that can be followed, embedding RFID devices in the pavement (along with an online database that gives their precise location and any updates on road conditions), etc. It would be conceptually similar to all the ground based systems that guide aircraft. Of course, these would be deployed only on high value roads like freeways first, and you could at least let the autodrive work on the freeways, and do the last mile yourself.

yogrish 8y ago

Not to be Cynical,Somehow the article sounded like a sales pitch for "Wavesense". They too want to have pie out in the self driving race. As mentioned in the article, each sensor(Radar,Lidar,Camera) has a limitation on its own. But, Self driving cars depend not just on one sensor but on Fused output of sensor. Also, they use V2V, HD maps and GPS/DR for localisation. Wavesense is another sensor that can solve localisation problem. They too might have difficulty in cases where there are fallen metal objects that reflect different signatures, causing trouble. More the sensors, more the confidence for Self driving. Edit: Grammar & some terminology

w_t_payne 8y ago

This is one of the times where I am glad to be working in maritime autonomy and not (any longer) in automotive -- we have the considerable benefit of being able to modify the operating procedures for our autonomous vessels to restrict operations or modify operating procedures in environmental conditions where normal operation is no longer safe.

tiagoafpereira 8y ago

I still cannot comprehend the current push for automated driving. We, collectively, not just the US, have a problem with too many cars and instead of reducing said number of cars we want to make them self crashing? Instead of investing heavily on public transit systems we keep feeding this fable that somehow, in the near future, cars driven by computers will do at least as good a job of driving as sentient, sober people. I can't get my smartphone to understand my language and do simple things by voice commands and yet we seem to think that there's (nearly) available technology to make a car drive by itself... These companies must not exist in the real world, that's the only possible explanation.

krapp 8y ago
> I still cannot comprehend the current push for automated driving. Google and Uber believe they can make an insane amount of money with the transition to automated driving. This is being sold to the public as the solution to a public safety crisis with the narrative that human controlled cars are death machines which need to be taken off the roads as soon as possible.
- tiagoafpereira 8y ago
  I wonder how long will it take them to realize that it won't happen before someone cracks the artificial general intelligence problem... I don't know what ticks me off the most, people believing that these companies can easily solve the automated driving problem or these companies stubbornly pushing for it.
  - krapp 8y ago
    I'm sure plenty of engineers actually working on the problem are aware of how difficult it is... but they're not the ones doing the pushing or making the grandiose claims.
    - tiagoafpereira 8y ago
      Fine by me, research is research. I'm just utterly surprised by how so many people think this is a fixable problem in the near future, it's not. How long until people realize that? The next AI winter won't come soon enough.

petterih 8y ago

Sensible 4 (http://sensible4.fi/ http://sensible4.fi/) uses bunch of various sensors including LIDAR, IR and normal camera. Seems to do ok in typical winter environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWrngWvcnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWrngWvcnU

dmix 8y ago
That's awesome, they also have some old videos from 1990-1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7jxensSdhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7jxensSdhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMlz5tAKmUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMlz5tAKmUs They've been working on this problem for a very long time. Which explains the progress they've made. I don't know how people can say this is an unsolvable problem when some high end research applications have made such progress. Plus there's Microsoft's 2016 announcement with Ford about algorithms that can work within snow/rain by identifying raindrops and snowflakes then 'ignoring' them: https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navigate-in-rain-or-snow/ https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navi...

golergka 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx08yRsR9ow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx08yRsR9ow

Quanttek 8y ago

> The cluster of sensors, bolted underneath a chassis like a skid plate, can scan 10 feet beneath the ground to reveal soil, water, roots, and rocks. Once WaveSense has scanned an entire roadway, it creates a map of the subsurface strata that can determine the location of a vehicle within a few centimeters. nononono! Even assuming you can create sufficient map data as soon as there is any kind of roadworks - or even only the winter cracking the asphahlt - your data will be useless. They don't even need to change the layout of the road. I'll never understand companies that focus so much on maps as priamry source of data. Every day, massive - temporary (construction site) or permanent - changes are occurring to the road network. Also, the centimeter-precise location of the vehicle doesn't matter that much. The actual situation on the road matters much more: You may need to drive a meter more to the left because of a parked truck, a vehicle may obscure signs, a tree branch hangs down into the road, some car is parked too close to intersection, etc.

SECProto 8y ago
Any time I drive a new road, I have to drive much more slowly - lanes unexpectedly turn into turning lanes resulting in quick merges, or a manhole has subsided a half foot making for an unpleasantly bumpy ride if I'm not used to it. Or in a rural environment, I have to spend more focus keeping an eye on the road surface for any number of reasons. If I then drive the road and there's been some changes (traffic cones, lane closures, heavier traffic than normal, dark so I need to watch out for animals more closely....) I adjust my speed for the circumstances I don't see why gathering surface information would be any different. Gather info, compare to previous fleet-gathered info, adjust driving to compensate. Seems reasonable to me (as ONE source of info for decision-making). And as fleet size increases, info gets gathered more quickly - look at how quickly google maps can inform you of traffic slowdowns in busy urban areas.
chooseaname 8y ago
> I'll never understand companies that focus so much on maps as priamry source of data. Maybe they don't really care about the product. Maybe the execs only care about making money, so they'll find funding for anything - whether it will pan out or not. Self-driving cars are hot and for now there's a lot of money available. I think things will cool down when the hard part starts - like when they really do have to figure out how to make them drive in less than ideal conditions.

xbryanx 8y ago

I wonder how self-driving cars will handle highway lanes in active snow. Here in Minnesota four-lane highways regularly turn to three and two lane highways when the snow covers the roadway markers and people just start making their own general paths. Will the software just follow the crowd, or will the software car be the one weird vehicle ignoring the conditions and following the lane that no one can see.

btbuildem 8y ago

Honestly, it seems like a more workable solution would be to improve the roadways with built-in beacons to indicate where a road is, and where it isn't. The cars would work only on the improved infrastructure, but they would work. I suppose there is a danger of nefarious actors spoofing beacons to make you drive off a bridge, but it seems far-fetched.

Shivetya 8y ago
it could be more easily done for limited access roads and lanes. like HOV and Express lanes. They are already heavily marked. Still in the end it requires a combination of changes to how we mark roadways, indicate construction, detours and the like. Think of it like the ADA but for cars.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  I would think of it less as an "accommodation" and more as an evolution. The way that roads are marked right now is a direct consequence of the fact that the markings need to be consumed by humans moving at high speed. When highways were for oxen, horses, and pedestrians, they didn't need guardrails, explicit breakdown lanes, and exit ramps with highly reflective signs. In the same way, when the majority of the piloting entities using the road have other input options besides visible light, to support them we can/should take advantage of those other channels.
PopeDotNinja 8y ago
To me that removes the "self" in self-driving car. A car that stays on the road because there are magic beacons is like bowling with thise giant bumpers in the gutters. It'd be more like cars with uber cruise control.
- macintux 8y ago
  Don't we want driving to be more like bowling with bumpers in the gutters? Safer is better, no matter how we get there.

jfoster 8y ago

Recent Waymo leak suggests rain is solved and snow looking good to be solved next year. https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plans-autonomous-car-launch-leaked/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/09/14/waymo-plan...

IBCNU 8y ago

It's pretty funny how we're running into AI-winter at the same time the autonomous vehicle VC boom is moving all their money to scooters.

fjsolwmv 8y ago

The Uber car failed in Dark of Night too.

dmix 8y ago
It didn't fail because it was dark though.

gbersac 8y ago

It sounds like a post created by the public relation department of the company creating the underground sensor.

skywhopper 8y ago

"robots sophisticated enough to [...] improve on lackluster human perception" This underlying misapprehension is at the root of the self-driving car hubris. Humans have remarkable perception of physical environments. The fact that electronic systems can beat humans handily on a few metrics has led to an entire industry built on the misconception that those few metrics are all that matter. But those were just the trivial bits. The more sophisticated perceptual tasks--even the basic ones involved in the simplest self-driving task of traveling down a restricted access freeway--like correctly interpreting the behavior of other cars; interpreting whether the debris in the road constitutes a dangerous obstacle or something easily driven over; or even knowing which objects speeding toward you are moving and which are stationary--require more than just raw sensory input. There's a mountain of implicit cultural awareness embedded into all of those perceptual tasks that we haven't begun to form an idea how to represent in a software system. And again, this is the easy stuff!

oihoaihsfoiahsf 8y ago
> This underlying misapprehension is at the root of the self-driving car hubris. I will basically guarantee you that no one working on self-driving cars thinks human perception is lackluster or an easily matched capability. Journos interpreting their work might impute that belief to self-driving engineers, but nobody could work on the problem for even the shortest amount of time without realizing that it is an incredibly hard problem.
deleted 8y ago
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zerop 8y ago

A basic question: What would we achieve if make successful self-driving cars. And can we achieve the same without building the self-driving cars.