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The CEO of Ford Motor Company, Jim Hackett, has claimed this: for autonomous vehicles to work resiliently at scale they require 1. vehicle-centered sensors 2.
by OliverJones 7y ago
The CEO of Ford Motor Company, Jim Hackett, has claimed this: for autonomous vehicles to work resiliently at scale they require
1. vehicle-centered sensors
2. a way for vehicles to share their sensors with nearby vehicles,
3. detailed models of the cities in which they operate, and
4. wireless networks capable of transporting all this data to where it's needed.
He calls all this the "mobility operating system."
In the interview I heard (I wish I could remember where, sorry) Mr. Hackett said he believes the defensible intellectual property for autonomous cars will be those detailed city models.
So, I am delighted to hear that municipalities are getting ahead of this issue with respect to city models.
- mc32 7y agoIsn’t an issue with no. 2 that bad actors could spoof or inject bad data and cause problems for cars reading this data in good faith. You can discard one abnormal data point but not if it’s coordinated.
- Jtsummers 7y agoYes. But that’s why you need the model and the car-centric sensors. “Trust but verify.”
- NullPrefix 7y agoTrust but verify
- Jtsummers 7y agoThanks. I was on the phone and autocorrect got me.
- mc32 7y agoIf they need to verify, why do they need to talk to peer-vehicle sensors? Ideally what would happen is a car a quarter mile ahead gives the cars behind a heads up that something is different (construction, ladder or junk, stalled car ahead, icy conditions, etc.) but if this look ahead dats isn’t reliable of at least can’t be trusted, what are you verifying it against? Not your own sensors cuz then why even get this fleet data to begin with?
- luminiferous 7y agoIt can at least bias your priors ahead of time. When you (as a human) are using Waze or Google maps and you see a speed trap ahead of you, or a traffic jam, or construction or whatever, obviously you can't blindly trust that. But you can slow down and prepare, and if and when that occurrence comes to pass, you're better prepared to deal with it.
- syn0byte 7y agoDo you worry about some random asshole kid hurling a re-bar in to rush hour traffic? REing automotive tech, setting up transmitters, and spoofing traffic data to throw a virtual re-bar in to rush hour traffic could become a pandemic unless we figure out a way to fight such attacks.
- TremendousJudge 7y agorelevant: https://xkcd.com/1958/ https://xkcd.com/1958/
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoThe difference between these two scenarios is that the asshole kid throwing rebar is easily detectable and to do it has to be at the location of the crime. The asshole spoofing traffic data, depending on how the transmitters are set up could potentially do it from a long distance away, and may actually be hard to detect.
- cheriot 7y agoEmergency vehicles in some cities can emit a signal that changes lights from red to green. It's a felony to spoof those devices, but people still get caught doing it. I'm sure a system can be made resilient to a single bad actor, but, yes, those attack vectors will have to be thought through.
- OliverJones 7y agoForgetting to use your turn signal, or leaving it on, or running at night without headlights, is "injecting bad data" into the present system.
- jsty 7y agoAre those not two different kinds of models though? For self-driving cars, the most important city models and those to which the Ford CEO was referring would surely be high-precision records of the physical layout of the city. Whereas the models in the article are simulating how people / cars / ... move around the city.
- dasloop 7y agoThe ideal is a high precision representation and then let that each model use what it requires. Better aggregated than extrapolated. This is the central idea of our modeling platform at Aimsun.
- OliverJones 7y agoHackett said the city models were likely to be slowly-changing stuff. Human drivers also gather data from nearby vehicles. That's the point of brake lights, turn signals, and rearview mirrors, for example. And, yes, human drivers also spoof that data: mostly by forgetting to use those signals correctly.
- epc 7y agoMaybe this post? https://www.vox.com/2018/1/9/16865384/smart-vehicles-cars-ford-cities-streets-disruption-sharing-smart-ces-ai-mobility https://www.vox.com/2018/1/9/16865384/smart-vehicles-cars-fo...
- Waterluvian 7y agoI just read point 3 and had an awful moment of thinking, "sorry I can't drive in Toronto. I didn't get the DLC subscription for its map data and I never learned to drive."
- jon_richards 7y agoIt's very strange that we're able to drive without 2, 3, and 4.
- OliverJones 7y agoWe can't drive without 2, 3, and 4. We already have them. 2. a way for vehicles to share their sensors with nearby vehicles, The sensors are the driver's senses. Turn signals, brake lights, and horns relay the consequences of those sensors to other drivers. 3. detailed models of the cities in which they operate, and Most drivers in any given place have a detailed mental model of the streets they use. Signage contributes a lot to the model. Traffic lights contribute temporal information, as do orange barrels and other ways of noting temporary alterations to the model. And, consider London taxi drivers. They have the "knowledge," a detailed model of their city. 4. wireless networks capable of transporting all this data to where it's needed. Sight and sound are generally reliable transport-layer network media.