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People obsess about weather conditions as a limiting factor for level 5 and it's bizarre. Bad weather conditions will favour robots over humans because the robo
by rmtech 7y ago
People obsess about weather conditions as a limiting factor for level 5 and it's bizarre. Bad weather conditions will favour robots over humans because the robot drivers have sensors that can penetrate fog and rain whereas humans have to rely on mk1 eyeballs that can't.
The real limiting factors for level 5 are less legible to humans. We understand the physical world via years of experience and good priors. Teslas crash straight into concrete lane separators and Ubers hit pedestrians that they know are there. In the latter case the actual reasons for the collision would strike a human as absolutely nuts - things like the algorithm not having a proper sense of object persistence or being terrible at commonsense reasoning. Yes, the Uber system was quite primitive, but the way that it broke gives us some insight into how AI drivers face a totally different set of challenges than what we would think of as "difficult conditions".
See: https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash
- thebruce87m 7y agoCan you link to some of these sensors? As far as I know, anyone who knows what they’re doing is using Lidar at the moment which has significant difficulties with weather.
- rmtech 7y agoRadar, ultrasonic. The radar can penetrate fog, rain, etc. https://navtechradar.com/features/autonomous-vehicles/ https://navtechradar.com/features/autonomous-vehicles/ Ultrasound works well up close for detecting a potential collision.
- rmtech 7y agoTesla will not use lidar apparently. They'll use cameras, radar and ultrasonic. In theory you could have all four.
- jefftk 7y agoMy interpretation of the Uber situation is that they were rushing in an incredibly reckless way. I think the Uber system described in the NTSB report is probably far worse than what Uber's more conservative competitors (Waymo, GM Cruise, etc) had at the time. (Disclosure: I work for Google which is a sibling of Waymo)