14 ms·

You have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an

• dstroot 7y ago
  > Cop directing traffic by hand at an intersection. That’s going to be really challenging. Good one!
  • bentcorner 7y ago
    Google (Waymo?) has been thinking through these exceptions: (around the 9:45 mark) https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...
  • mark-r 7y ago
    I ran into this on my commute just last night. Cop car in the left shoulder, lights flashing. Cop on the right side of the road, waving a flashlight. Oncoming traffic crossing over into my lane and blocking my way. Finally I figured out that the cop was directing traffic and I had to wait until something changed. Eventually the oncoming traffic dwindled, and the cop turned around so I had a harder time seeing the flashlight - I assumed that meant it was my turn to go. I approached very slowly. I never figured out what the problem was, this was in the middle of the road and not at an intersection. I was more concerned with doing the right thing than trying to determine the root cause.
  • pasttense01 7y ago
    The cop can carry a transmitting device which will communicate with cars telling them what to do.
    • bdamm 7y ago
      Who will pay for that?
      • pasttense01 7y ago
        A cop already carries thousands of dollars worth of equipment. For example you modify the police radio to transmit to nearby vehicles.
    • vardump 7y ago
      What could go wrong...
  • PeterisP 7y ago
    It should be possible for current technology to (a) detect a cop in the middle of intersaction; (b) stop safely before the intersection and (c) delegate control to a human - possibly someone in the car, possibly a remote one.
• ghaff 7y ago
  At a talk a few years back MIT prof John Leonard showed video he took on his commute back and forth to Brookline to highlight all the points where it was going to be really hard to get self-driving to handle. (He was very skeptical about getting to full autonomy before it was fashionable to be so.) It's not just cities but spend a few hours walking around Boston or Manhattan and just make a note of all the crazy things drivers do. (Sometimes by necessity.) (Unprotected lefts in busy traffic are one challenging area. There's a certain social aspect to it and the right decision in one set of circumstances is either way too aggressive or conservative to the point where you'll never turn in another.)
  • andrei_says_ 7y ago
    This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GarvfAPSWwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GarvfAPSWwo ...How do you write the code for "Always stop at a red light unless you see a police officer waving you through?"
    • ghaff 7y ago
      I think the one I saw was a talk he gave at CMU maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Don't see it immediately. But I'm sure it's the same basic idea. As I recall, he took a sabbatical to work on self-driving at Toyota. I'll check out that video from last year.
    • Piskvorrr 7y ago
      There's a standardized way for an officer to do this...alas, it will likely vary between states, and half of the officers will use some ad-hoc method anyway. A civilian trying to direct traffic around their broken down car...now that would be harder.
      • catalogia 7y ago
        > and half of the officers will use some ad-hoc method anyway. A quick tilt/shake of the head is one I've seen often. Easy enough for humans to read that sort of body language, but probably a harder problem for computers.
• dhosek 7y ago
  * Typical school pickup/dropoff situations where cars will line up, often in the parking lane, to get to the pickup/dropoff spot. Sometimes the line goes around a corner.
• grecy 7y ago
  And the amazing part is there are millions of drivers on the road right now that have absolutely no idea how to handle those cases, and do an exceedingly bad job of it. From the very new drivers, to people who simply don't drive often, to people who got their license in another country where the rules are entirely different (me!), to the very elderly who are losing their sight, reflexes and judgement and people playing with their cell phone or otherwise seriously distracted. It's a wonder only 35,000 people are killed on US roads every year.
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    > It's a wonder only 35,000 people are killed on US roads every year. vs > do an exceedingly bad job of it. No, they're doing an amazingly good job of it. Given the cumulative number of miles driven and the conditions driven in it should impress you rather than that you come to the conclusion they are doing a very bad job. If the current crop of AI would be unleashed in those same conditions the carnage would be unbelievable. Humans are very well suited to adapting to changing environments, it is the one thing that we have over the rest of the animal kingdom. From hanging from tree limbs to riding on the autobahn with the same software.
    • zarmin 7y ago
      Respectfully, it sounds like you've only read about driving and have never been in or driven a car. People are _terrible_ drivers. Cars are safer than they've ever been. The number of deaths is not the right metric to evaluate driver quality.
      • jacquesm 7y ago
        Respectfully, with about 30 years of driving experience and some years (fortunately long behind me) with crazy mileage, it sounds like you're wrong, and that experience includes Canada (including winter), a very large portion of the United States, Europe (both East and West) and Latin America. People are great drivers if you take into consideration the conditions that they drive in, and that traffic deaths include all vehicle types, not just cars. Yes, cars are safer than they've ever been. But there is also much more traffic than there ever was (both because there are more people, people are more affluent and some countries have been more or less designed around vehicle ownership), and infrastructure has not always kept up, and - again, in some countries - the car as a status symbol translates into 'right of way for the best protected', which leads to unnecessary accidents. The number of deaths is - indeed - not the right metric to evaluate driver quality, instead, the number of deaths per total number of miles driven is much better, and further breakdowns into occupants, pedestrians, motorcycles and so on should be made before drawing conclusions. And on that scale - again, taking into account the conditions that people drive in - they are doing very well indeed, some countries excepted. My own best tricks to avoid getting into accidents: don't drive when there is ice / snow / excessive wind, never drive when you're tired, stay away from countries where driving is a bloodsport, keep your car in excellent shape and never ever drive impaired, and that impairment includes cell phone usage. FWIW I'd be totally for a law that punishes cell phone usage while driving with immediate vehicle confiscation when spotted, as well as instant revocation of the driving license of the driver.
• derefr 7y ago
  IMHO cars are for getting between cities, or between places in non-cities; within a city, the economical long-term solution is to just replace the roads (save for cargo corridors) with some kind of pod rail network, i.e. self-driving four-seater trolleys. The exceptions become far fewer if there's nothing on the "road" but other rail-bound vehicles. In such a future, if you lived in a city but owned your own real car, there'd be no road to use to drive it from your house to the city limits; and so it'd have to live at the city limits in a garage—just as people with personal planes have to keep them in a rented hanger at an airfield. You'd take this fancy pod-transit to the City Common Car Park, summon your car down from storage, and then get right onto the highway.
  • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    > some kind of pod rail network, i.e. self-driving four-seater trolleys If you go that far, the problem is already trivial right? Just making roads specifically for self-driving vehicles would make the problem trivial. What the companies are trying to accomplish is self driving cars in current conditions.
    • derefr 7y ago
      My point was an economic one: • cities can afford to "change the problem" to fit the solution (as they already have huge transit-system and other public-works budgets, and extensions to cities are mostly centrally-planned.) Some cities in Europe have already entirely banned cars. • everywhere other than cities—e.g. small rural towns only connected via roads—doesn't have the resources to "change the problem." (But also, roads are optimal in this resource-constrained context, anyway: you can spend very little laying down massively-long stretches of road, pushing the costs onto the people who wants to drive on it in the form of vehicle maintenance.) But "everywhere other than cities" also doesn't pose nearly as complex a problem in the first place as cities do (at least in AI judgement terms, not in sensor-requirements terms.) Thus, it makes sense to choose a hybrid solution, where cities gradually de-car themselves, while self-driving cars get licensed to work everywhere except cities.
      • 7y ago
• taco_emoji 7y ago
  I honestly can't picture a self-driving AI that doesn't just amount to straight-up General Intelligence. Not only does driving involve predicting the trajectory of various moving objects (already very hard), it involves predicting the behavior of various other intelligent agents as well as communicating with them. Especially that last one -- nobody seems to consider how much we communicate while driving. Several types of communication require having a body: flagging someone on, waving "thank you", eye contact, LACK of eye contact ("they don't see me, I better [prepare to] brake/swerve"). Some involve subtle movements of the car: rolling forward after a stop sign ("I intend to go next"), or hugging one side of lane. Even something as apparently binary as beeping the horn can indicate probably a dozen or more different things depending on physical context and length of the beep, not to mention local culture.
  • clairity 7y ago
    i would love to see mechanical eyes on the front of self-driving cars to signal emotion/attention, like from the pixar cars movies. =)
• jcranmer 7y ago
  For a mundane situation that's surprisingly difficult: toll booths. The highway goes from N lanes to N5 (or more!) lanes and then back into N lanes, usually with the lane markings being completely absent in the process. You have to pick a lane to get into, with your choice being potentially impacted by such things as "are you a truck?", "exact change only", or "I have an EZ-Pass", not to mention the potential for some lanes to be outright closed. The signage is likely to be somewhat unique and potentially counterintuitive to normal meanings--the lane under the big yellow light is the kind of lane I usually want to take, especially since it's usually higher speed than the lane under the big green light. Drivers are going to be more erratic than usual ("oops, I don't have EZ-pass" SWERVE*). And they usually occur smack-dab in the middle of limited-access highways where people might want to use self-driving cars.
  • mkl 7y ago
    Put spaces around the * in "N * 5" to avoid the italics (or just write 5N).
  • tptacek 7y ago
    I'm a self-driving skeptic but the toll booth problem doesn't seem logistically all that daunting, since there are so few of them compared to overall road miles. It seems like they could be modeled individually and directly.
  • pasttense01 7y ago
    Self driving cars already use a map of the roads in the country--all you do is include the toll booths in the map. They could also include a transmitter to vehicles.
• KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
  I think you can reasonably expect a FSD to perform on the level of a human. Asking it to go above and beyond that is too much. When it comes to situations that give humans trouble you would rely on the same extra tools and processes that humans use. * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go around them? * Semi with its hazards on in a left turn lane. Do I make a left turn around it? You would err on the side of caution, but ultimately you would go with the help of 5G remote assistance so that the passenger can stay napping. * Stop sign that's been bent and it's no longer obvious which street it refers to. How would humans handle this? They would rely on previous knowledge of the area, aka maps could help. * Cop directing traffic by hand at an intersection. Not challenging at all imo, this should be trainable.