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> 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

• 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.
      • throwaway76543 8y ago
        Self driving cars also have prior experiences and a sense of what other drivers are doing and why. That's sort of the point of machine learning. In fact, they will have a lot more prior experience than any human driver in the world.
        • MortenK 8y ago
          Unfortunately in the realm of machine learning, quantity does not equate quality.
          • killjoywashere 8y ago
            The parent of any teenage driver can also attest to this.
        • zaarn 8y ago
          Machine Learning still confuses Elephants for Cats. While it's quite fun if you pin up a cat dressed up in an elephant costume and surely amuses a few colleagues, a self-driving car is not something that should confuse an Elephant for a Cat. ML is IMO not reliable enough for use in self-driving cars, in complicated situations the driver should take over.
          • throwaway76543 8y ago
            It's not reliable enough now, sure. Similarly, my 6 year old is also not reliable enough to pilot a car. Both will change as they mature.
            • Piskvorrr 8y ago
              Sure, multiple decades sounds about right (as opposed to current confusing statements like "has full self driving capabilities").
        • Retra 8y ago
          They have a lot more experience driving, but humans do not only use their driving experiences as priors.
  • mdhen 8y ago
    Those conditions sound like you wouldn't be driving. So, solved. Pull over and stop
    • wool_gather 8y ago
      This; arguing that a computer can't drive safely in conditions where a human can't either isn't an argument against computer drivers. Just because humans sometimes get away with it doesn't make it a good idea.
      • skookumchuck 8y ago
        Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        It's not always possible to pull over. If it's snowing so heavily that driving has become dangerous there probably is no shoulder to pull over to, much less a shoulder you can safely pull over to. Source: I've been in these conditions. You do the best you can.
        • bluGill 8y ago
          you should pull over before then. There is in my experience plenty of warning to find a hotel first.
    • archagon 8y ago
      While probably true, "then don't do that" almost never works as an excuse to convince new adopters of your technology.
      • ben509 8y ago
        I'm not so sure that's true. Or, maybe, "that's user error" is what works because it seems like it's far too easy to convince users to blame themselves.
• sna1l 8y ago
  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/08/29/waymos-self-driving-cars-struggle-turn-left-dont-understand/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/08/29/waymos-sel... Surprising that Waymo has figured out rain but not things like left turns. Different problem spaces I'd imagine, but still surprising.
  • romed 8y ago
    That Waymo has not solved left turning is not really a conclusion supported by that article. A supportable conclusion is that the impatient meatbags are angry that the Waymo van won't dangerously veer out into oncoming traffic.
    • dasil003 8y ago
      LOL, yes, the meatbags. Waymo exists to serve Waymo's purpose, it is a higher entity beholden only to its funding source not to petty meatbag concerns.
      • visarga 8y ago
        Well, yes, companies are self replicators, just like living things.
      • imtringued 8y ago
        Waymo's purpose is to not kill the meatbags. Unlike Uber, Waymo has been very successful at this. Also the claim was that the car cannot turn left on its own which is completely wrong. There is merely a very high safety margin so that the car will only drive when it is sure that no collision will occur.
      • dirkgently 8y ago
        YN is so full of Google FUD. How is this comment not voted down to oblivion is beyond me.
  • hef19898 8y ago
    Can that be that in US cities there is not trmendous amount of left turns? At least that was the rwason I heard why the Amazon Logistocs routes in Europe were planned without any left turns driving everybody crazy and adding a lot of wasted time.
• amluto 8y ago
  From that article: > Also snow seems to be solvable, as there will probably similar patterns that the sensors get in their signals. Real snow is not just a software problem. Fancy rear facing sensors near bumper? I hope they function through a couple inches of frozen muddy spray. Front windshield? Sometimes needs scraping. Lidar on roof? Does it work through the big heap of snow on it?
  • krolley 8y ago
    As it is now, sometimes ice needs to be scraped off the windshield before you can drive. It may be the same with the cars external sensors.
    • brandonjm 8y ago
      Also mud spray and other road debris covering sensors can be solved with hardware (wipers, sprayers etc.) so it's probably not at the top of Waymo's long list of difficulties.
  • alkonaut 8y ago
    I have a hunch that as cars get more sophisticated, they also need to have more sophisticated treatment. The reason I leave my car out to have a foot of snow on it is because it works anyway. If the car wouldn't actually work without the windscreen clear and sensors ice-free, I would either use a garage every night or have a less sophisticated car. And I suspect that once autonomous vehicles get good enough, people will actually want to ride in them - so will keep them indoors more than they do with their normal cars. Effctively then, the rugged cars have become machines we treat like fragile fighter jets. Still, for a wide range of weather conditions the autonomous car will just say a big NOPE and refuse to drive anywhere. Which is why it must always have manual controls. The autonomous car that could take me to the city through the worse conditions I experience every winter, won't have to take me in it because that car is probably clever enough to do my job as a software developer too.
    • EADGBE 8y ago
      There's real irony in this statement, when the people who develop the technology and commend home garaging are also the garage-free, commute-free kind type of people who vehemently tear down the idea of a suburban home/garage setup. But I guess when it's your product; you change your mind. *This is not an attack to alkonaut.
• hef19898 8y ago
  I'm by no means an expert for self driving cars or auto-pilots, so take it is just my personal impression. It seems that developers for self driving cars are dealing with a very different, and in some ways more difficult, environment than aircraft auto-pilots. While cars only have to deal with two dimensions instead of three and cars are still less complex machines compared to planes there are a lot more challenges. Unregulated and not controlled environment, traffic ranging from cars to trucks to motorbikes to bikes to pedestrians to playing children. Less room for sensors in the car, changing road condiitions, animals, you name it. Not a simple problem to solve. And with a near perfect track record of similar systems in the aerospace sector the bar for acceptance hangs pretty high. Add to that the fact that pilots are trained in the use of these systems while the average joe / jane in a car is not. And the car should be able to drive without driver in the end.
  • make3 8y ago
    obstacle density is really extremely sparse in the skies compared to the ground
  • nradov 8y ago
    Dealing with failures is far more complex for aircraft. When a car gets a flat tire or suffers an engine failure the driver can just pull over and stop. But an autonomous aircraft carrying passengers or flying over populated areas would have to cope with broken sensors, uncontained engine failures, loss of cabin pressure, stuck control surfaces, etc.
    • hef19898 8y ago
      Sure, thing is these issues are extremely rare (and not just over populated areas) And that is why you still have pilots, and redundant systems, so yes as a system an aircraft is a lot more complex. The traffic environment is not, the high level of control of air traffic and its standardization is making sure of that. And the latter is making i easier for aircraft because they have to deal with a lot less randomness. So, I could imagine developers of self-driving cars could learn a thing or two from aerospace. But that is just my opinion.
    • 8y ago