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Predicting is absolutely key. If you've been around the Waymo cars they horribly manage simple situations. They're VERY safe because they take no risk, but that

Predicting is absolutely key. If you've been around the Waymo cars they horribly manage simple situations. They're VERY safe because they take no risk, but that won't work at scale. "What's that? Stop wait..., what's that? stop... wait wait wait" They're very jerky at intersections where there's even a mild amount of uncertainty and really only go when it's very clear. It reminds me of lots of first time drivers reacting to new situations where safe is the best way forward. But if we had pure first time drivers, we'd be a gridlock at even a mild amount of traffic that enters and leaves the roadway. Looking forward to this next set of 5 years. Hopefully us drivers will get replaced in 10? maybe?

kemotep 7y ago
I truly believe my children (not born yet) are going to buy their first car and it will be fully autonomous. Too many people my age and older will be apprehensive about giving up control, despite it likely being safer. So I think it is fair to say that in 20 years there will be many people who learned to "drive" with a self driving car and their parents and grandparents will refuse to give up driving themselves.
- smileysteve 7y ago
  Insurance and police enforcement are two reasons why the decision will be removed from law abiding citizens and won't happen linearly. Once proven safe (or if a manufacturer directly insures the product) the cost to adequately insure a vehicle (as prices of what you hit continue to increase), especially an older vehicle, will increase. With income inequality where it is (and state minimums lagging) it has already become common to have underinsured drivers (and the upper middle class are already paying more through uninsured motorist protection). When it comes to police enforcement, but especially jurisdictions that use traffic stops to find or create crime to fundraise; the expense of having traffic police in a world where > 50% of cars can do no wrong flips the model. Finally, there is a large group of people who will not drive a car that's 7 years old or has over 100k miles; combining with less trained ability to do maintenance on more computerized cars. These people claim to be in control, but at one check engine light away from doing whatever a dealer tells them.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Insurance premiums are calculated based on loss rates. In some hypothetical future where level 5 autonomous vehicles are available, there is no reason to expect that the remaining human drivers will have more collisions than they do today. Rather the reverse, considering the increased availability of advanced driver assistance systems. There's nothing wrong with driving a newer car and relying on the dealer service. Sure it's expensive, but if you can afford it then so what.
    - smileysteve 7y ago
      If you always drive a newer car and rely on a dealer for service, you no longer control what you drive when those dealers only sell self driving cars. (Or when the service model shifts as electrics have fewer service items and the service department closes)
      - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
        The myth that electric cars require less service needs to die. Maintenance needs in any modern car mostly comes back to value engineering. It's literally someone's job to optimize "how cheaply can we make this part, that it breaks just often enough that people won't complain". The exact same thing is already happening for electric cars, and you'll need to spend exactly the same amount of time and money on service. Furthermore, almost none of the service on a modern car is related to the combustion engine itself. It's mainly electronics, linkages, wheel beqrings, shocks, suspension, rust damage, tires etc. If you think about it, a car that's done 200 000 miles at EOL has only been running for around 200 days continuously. A generator, or the engine on a ship, train, airplane etc. runs more than a full order of magnitude longer.
        sokoloff 7y ago
        I drive an electric (LEAF) for a little over 5 years and also maintain my wife’s characteristically low maintenance car (Honda CR-V). Despite being very low maintenance, her car is much more maintenance intensive than my car. In five years, I’ve filled the washer fluid several times, changed the wiper blades, and plugged one flat tire. On her car, oil changes alone have taken more time, to say nothing of the brakes, power steering pump, valve adjustment, exhaust gasket change, and a handful of other jobs (all small). In my case, the “myth” very much matches my experience.
- megablast 7y ago
  Hopefully they don’t buy any car.
weego 7y ago
My belief is that we'll be replaced when vast swathes of roads are replaced with ones designed for automated vehicle transport, which is a fair way out of my lifetime I'd imagine.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  As in...railroads?
  - njarboe 7y ago
    If I could drive my car onto a railroad track in SF and then not drive again until I drove off the tracks in LA, that would be great.
  - reciprocornous 7y ago
    Hyperloops :P
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    Speaking of, why are we talking about self-driving cars when trains and trams still have drivers, and those are much more constrained problem spaces?
    - numpad0 7y ago
      Simply because it has been a control theory challenge. Weight on the wheels change, frictions change and drivers are expected to stop the train within inches on average, and a feet at worst. That requires some R&D to implement. Yurikamome trams in Tokyo runs in L4-L5 and Tsukuba Express runs in L2, in SDC levels term. There was also a L4 PoC in Yamanote line so that’ll probably come by the end of this decade. Elevators had been L4 for like half a century as well, by the way.
    - rainyMammoth 7y ago
      because the cost of a train/bus driver is negligible compared to the train/bus and its riders.
    - deleted 7y ago
nradov 7y ago
Based on the actual rate of progress so far (not the misleading demos), we are a lot more than 10 years away from true level 5 autonomous vehicles.
- DebtDeflation 7y ago
  I remember 3-4 years ago when we were told they were 2-3 years away. I think even 10 years is optimistic if we expect them to handle "edge cases" like driving in the rain or snow, dealing with mis-painted lane lines, and differentiating between a plastic shopping bag and a tire in the road.
  - smileysteve 7y ago
    Self driving has potential on finding the lanes (in rain, snow, mis paint) with infrared. The key component to driving in rain or snow is to slow down and increase following distance, something humans, but especially outliers, are relatively poor at. Slowing down is also the best option for a tire tread or a shopping bag. The bag being less safe than you imply if it is filled with a box of nails or happens to wrap around a driveshaft or exhaust manifold.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    A friend of mine with a Model 3 says it sometimes works better in rain than he does. Agree there are edge cases and probably 10 years is optimistic. But, of course, plastic shopping bags and tires on the road are a challenge for humans as well.
    - FireBeyond 7y ago
      And Tesla recently released a _marketing video_ touting their identification system, that showed their car running a clear stop sign!
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      I live in a rainy area and I drive a Model 3. The other day it got into a high risk situation on autopilot, because it doesn't have any ability to consider rain intensity, big puddles, or rain-filled ruts. It is far more dangerous than an average driver. And don't even get me started on the "automatic" windshield wipers.
scep12 7y ago
It's too bad we can't rip the band-aid off and just go straight to full autonomy for every car using Waymo (or similar). The problem you identified becomes a non-issue if 1) it's the norm and 2) the passengers inside aren't paying enough attention to the road to care about the quirks. It's probable in my estimation that roads filled with only automated drivers become safer, more efficient, and more predictable, which acts as a flywheel for the prediction in the cars to get better. Would be really interesting if Waymo could prove this out somehow.
- barrkel 7y ago
  People, bicycles, motorcycles, pets: all unpredictable on the road. What you suggest only works - barely - on motorways.
  - scep12 7y ago
    Waymo is at the point of being able to deal with those pretty well, right? Either way, I'm suggesting that the impatience OP experienced as a result of being a human driver proximal to a Waymo car would be obviated if all cars were driven by Waymo. If you're not driving the car that's behind the tentative Waymo car, do you really care? You're probably focused on the work you're doing in the car or the TV you're watching.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      Sure, they say so, and have been for years! That obviously means they haven't been exaggerating then and aren't now; in that case, I have a very nice bridge here that might be of interest to you!
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    That boy chasing that ball out onto a crowded street has much better chances with an automated car vs one driven by a human. Heck, any of those situations human drivers perform very poorly in already, the bar is low.
    - 7y ago
jacquesm 7y ago
I actually prefer the Waymo approach over the Tesla and Uber approach. When there are lives on the line you simply do not cross certain lines and in the longer term Waymo will be the only player left whose reputation is still in one piece. That more than anything will decide whether self driving vehicles gain long term acceptance. Anything else will lead to a 'self driving winter'.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  I’m not sure what brightlines exist in society for when lives are on the line. Lives are already on the line for human driving, so what is the moral story one would extract from the big picture of how people relate to driving today? The only story I see is politics and complexity, as opposed to moral clarity.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It's quite simple, actually: a self driving vehicle should be a monotonous improvement on non-self driving. In other words, all situations that are currently handled by regular drivers should be handled just as well or better for self driving to be socially acceptable. A statistical argument based on a reduction of overall fatalities including a number of new kinds of accidents will not be accepted. People (and the media) are going to focus on the accidents that would not have happened if self driving did not exist.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - timerol 7y ago
      The problem with your statement is that some people view handling a situation better as getting more cars through a bottleneck in a certain amount of time, and other people view better as making sure that all humans in the area stay safe.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
elicash 7y ago
Reminds me of when two people walking towards each other struggle with who is passing on the left vs right and go back and forth at the same time. The best strategy for a resolution isn't to be accommodating. It's to physically shift your entire body to one side and make no eye contact to make it absolutely clear to the other person which side of them you'll be walking on.
- gilbetron 7y ago
  That works well when one person does it - but if everyone had that strategy, then it wouldn't work either! (I've spent way too much time thinking about this).
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    That's basic game theory, and the game of Chicken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Look into how wifi transmission is solved among the many clients (although I'm sure its quite complex now). You might be able to use a random back off time to settle races like this.
blackrock 7y ago
I knew it. I suspected the Waymo cars were literally driving on eggshells. They’ve been peddling that these Level 5 Waymo cars were just around the corner. But they refused to disclose how the cars actually worked, and kept saying that their black box is so mysterious, that their scientists themselves couldn’t understand it, so there was no point in having the rest of us, mere mortals, try to understand it. Lies. We are a long ways away from being able to trust a robotic car with our lives. But to their credit, at least they realize that requiring a human to take over vehicle controls in a microsecond, is unrealistic. Ahem! Looking at another car company that thinks this is acceptable.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Of course we're 5 years from L5. Always have been, since the 1970 lane-keeping Mercedes. You just need to understand that this is a codeword for "we have no idea what interesting and hard problem pops up next week, this research is SO EXCITING!" If you are expecting actual L5, in production, five years from any given date...you're gonna have a bad time.
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  Whether or not Waymo has been sufficiently forthcoming about how their tech works or not is subjective. Objectively though they have started performing rides with no drivers in AZ. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully-driverless-car-self-driving-ride-hail-service-phoenix-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully-driv...
- Fricken 7y ago
  Waymo has only ever peddled level 4 vehicles.
skywhopper 7y ago
Not a chance. One thing I found interesting in this article was the graph of successful object identification in images. The author made much of progressing from 50% to 88% in the last ten years (I believe this uncited data comes from [0]), but the great majority of that progress happened in the first five years, and the predictable slowdown of improvement is clearly evidenced by the graph. We should also be very clear that 88% success rate given for object detection and identification is against a relatively fixed set of static images[1]. And as far as I can tell from the paper[2], there's no indication of how long it takes to come to a conclusion on any single image, and no description of how much hardware was used to reach this rate of success, which to be honest, I'm surprised is so low. Given all of that, it does not seem reasonable to assume that this 88% success rate has anything to do with how well object detection works in real-time using on-board computing power while the car is in motion. So, don't start planning to throw out your driver's license anytime soon. [0] https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imagenet https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imag... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet [2] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/self-training-with-noisy-student-improves https://paperswithcode.com/paper/self-training-with-noisy-st...
m3kw9 7y ago
Also sometimes you need to move your car to affect the environment, for example if your car is stopped at a parking lot type intersection, and there is a large crowd of people passing, they would keep crossing unless you start to move your car a little indicating, that’s it for you let some cars through
- jonas21 7y ago
  You mean like those drivers who aggressively creep into the intersection to scare pedestrians into letting them through, even when the pedestrian has the right of way? I can't wait for Waymo cars to get them off the road.
  - pas 7y ago
    OP might be referring situations like a festival, where there's a trickle of cars and a lot of people. And usually cars have to slowly inch forward, some people will stop and let them through, some people won't. The driver of course has to stop, but also not just wait forever to have a clear lane. Or, another example, a big parking lot with a few buses, people unloading their stuff from the buses (let's at the end of a long trip), relatives/parents/friends pick them up at the parking lot. Relatively dense, many people moving, but still cars come and go. Plus a lot of packs/luggage here and there. Usually in these cases more cars want to enter the parking lot to pick up others, but of course people want to continue unloading, so some kind of balance forms.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      This also applies to "living streets": pedestrians are the primary users, but cars are allowed through at lower speeds (20 kph?). "Wait until everyone clears the path" means "forever", a typical livelock; the car needs to signal intent "I wish to move forward" while still yielding to pedestrians.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        Years ago I was trying to get through a huge crowd leaving a concert once, because I worked nights in a building on the same block, and while I was edging around the corner, a cop on foot thought I was being too aggressive and started banging on my window hard. I rolled it down and explained to him where I was going and why, but later my power window mechanism failed and it might have been related. I wonder how that should be handled with a hypothetical self-driving car?

kemotep 7y ago

I truly believe my children (not born yet) are going to buy their first car and it will be fully autonomous. Too many people my age and older will be apprehensive about giving up control, despite it likely being safer. So I think it is fair to say that in 20 years there will be many people who learned to "drive" with a self driving car and their parents and grandparents will refuse to give up driving themselves.

smileysteve 7y ago
Insurance and police enforcement are two reasons why the decision will be removed from law abiding citizens and won't happen linearly. Once proven safe (or if a manufacturer directly insures the product) the cost to adequately insure a vehicle (as prices of what you hit continue to increase), especially an older vehicle, will increase. With income inequality where it is (and state minimums lagging) it has already become common to have underinsured drivers (and the upper middle class are already paying more through uninsured motorist protection). When it comes to police enforcement, but especially jurisdictions that use traffic stops to find or create crime to fundraise; the expense of having traffic police in a world where > 50% of cars can do no wrong flips the model. Finally, there is a large group of people who will not drive a car that's 7 years old or has over 100k miles; combining with less trained ability to do maintenance on more computerized cars. These people claim to be in control, but at one check engine light away from doing whatever a dealer tells them.
- nradov 7y ago
  Insurance premiums are calculated based on loss rates. In some hypothetical future where level 5 autonomous vehicles are available, there is no reason to expect that the remaining human drivers will have more collisions than they do today. Rather the reverse, considering the increased availability of advanced driver assistance systems. There's nothing wrong with driving a newer car and relying on the dealer service. Sure it's expensive, but if you can afford it then so what.
  - smileysteve 7y ago
    If you always drive a newer car and rely on a dealer for service, you no longer control what you drive when those dealers only sell self driving cars. (Or when the service model shifts as electrics have fewer service items and the service department closes)
    - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
      The myth that electric cars require less service needs to die. Maintenance needs in any modern car mostly comes back to value engineering. It's literally someone's job to optimize "how cheaply can we make this part, that it breaks just often enough that people won't complain". The exact same thing is already happening for electric cars, and you'll need to spend exactly the same amount of time and money on service. Furthermore, almost none of the service on a modern car is related to the combustion engine itself. It's mainly electronics, linkages, wheel beqrings, shocks, suspension, rust damage, tires etc. If you think about it, a car that's done 200 000 miles at EOL has only been running for around 200 days continuously. A generator, or the engine on a ship, train, airplane etc. runs more than a full order of magnitude longer.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        I drive an electric (LEAF) for a little over 5 years and also maintain my wife’s characteristically low maintenance car (Honda CR-V). Despite being very low maintenance, her car is much more maintenance intensive than my car. In five years, I’ve filled the washer fluid several times, changed the wiper blades, and plugged one flat tire. On her car, oil changes alone have taken more time, to say nothing of the brakes, power steering pump, valve adjustment, exhaust gasket change, and a handful of other jobs (all small). In my case, the “myth” very much matches my experience.
megablast 7y ago
Hopefully they don’t buy any car.

weego 7y ago

My belief is that we'll be replaced when vast swathes of roads are replaced with ones designed for automated vehicle transport, which is a fair way out of my lifetime I'd imagine.

Piskvorrr 7y ago
As in...railroads?
- njarboe 7y ago
  If I could drive my car onto a railroad track in SF and then not drive again until I drove off the tracks in LA, that would be great.
- reciprocornous 7y ago
  Hyperloops :P
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Speaking of, why are we talking about self-driving cars when trains and trams still have drivers, and those are much more constrained problem spaces?
  - numpad0 7y ago
    Simply because it has been a control theory challenge. Weight on the wheels change, frictions change and drivers are expected to stop the train within inches on average, and a feet at worst. That requires some R&D to implement. Yurikamome trams in Tokyo runs in L4-L5 and Tsukuba Express runs in L2, in SDC levels term. There was also a L4 PoC in Yamanote line so that’ll probably come by the end of this decade. Elevators had been L4 for like half a century as well, by the way.
  - rainyMammoth 7y ago
    because the cost of a train/bus driver is negligible compared to the train/bus and its riders.
  - deleted 7y ago

nradov 7y ago

Based on the actual rate of progress so far (not the misleading demos), we are a lot more than 10 years away from true level 5 autonomous vehicles.

DebtDeflation 7y ago
I remember 3-4 years ago when we were told they were 2-3 years away. I think even 10 years is optimistic if we expect them to handle "edge cases" like driving in the rain or snow, dealing with mis-painted lane lines, and differentiating between a plastic shopping bag and a tire in the road.
- smileysteve 7y ago
  Self driving has potential on finding the lanes (in rain, snow, mis paint) with infrared. The key component to driving in rain or snow is to slow down and increase following distance, something humans, but especially outliers, are relatively poor at. Slowing down is also the best option for a tire tread or a shopping bag. The bag being less safe than you imply if it is filled with a box of nails or happens to wrap around a driveshaft or exhaust manifold.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  A friend of mine with a Model 3 says it sometimes works better in rain than he does. Agree there are edge cases and probably 10 years is optimistic. But, of course, plastic shopping bags and tires on the road are a challenge for humans as well.
  - FireBeyond 7y ago
    And Tesla recently released a _marketing video_ touting their identification system, that showed their car running a clear stop sign!
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    I live in a rainy area and I drive a Model 3. The other day it got into a high risk situation on autopilot, because it doesn't have any ability to consider rain intensity, big puddles, or rain-filled ruts. It is far more dangerous than an average driver. And don't even get me started on the "automatic" windshield wipers.

scep12 7y ago

It's too bad we can't rip the band-aid off and just go straight to full autonomy for every car using Waymo (or similar). The problem you identified becomes a non-issue if 1) it's the norm and 2) the passengers inside aren't paying enough attention to the road to care about the quirks. It's probable in my estimation that roads filled with only automated drivers become safer, more efficient, and more predictable, which acts as a flywheel for the prediction in the cars to get better. Would be really interesting if Waymo could prove this out somehow.

barrkel 7y ago
People, bicycles, motorcycles, pets: all unpredictable on the road. What you suggest only works - barely - on motorways.
- scep12 7y ago
  Waymo is at the point of being able to deal with those pretty well, right? Either way, I'm suggesting that the impatience OP experienced as a result of being a human driver proximal to a Waymo car would be obviated if all cars were driven by Waymo. If you're not driving the car that's behind the tentative Waymo car, do you really care? You're probably focused on the work you're doing in the car or the TV you're watching.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Sure, they say so, and have been for years! That obviously means they haven't been exaggerating then and aren't now; in that case, I have a very nice bridge here that might be of interest to you!
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  That boy chasing that ball out onto a crowded street has much better chances with an automated car vs one driven by a human. Heck, any of those situations human drivers perform very poorly in already, the bar is low.
  - 7y ago

jacquesm 7y ago

I actually prefer the Waymo approach over the Tesla and Uber approach. When there are lives on the line you simply do not cross certain lines and in the longer term Waymo will be the only player left whose reputation is still in one piece. That more than anything will decide whether self driving vehicles gain long term acceptance. Anything else will lead to a 'self driving winter'.

threatofrain 7y ago
I’m not sure what brightlines exist in society for when lives are on the line. Lives are already on the line for human driving, so what is the moral story one would extract from the big picture of how people relate to driving today? The only story I see is politics and complexity, as opposed to moral clarity.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It's quite simple, actually: a self driving vehicle should be a monotonous improvement on non-self driving. In other words, all situations that are currently handled by regular drivers should be handled just as well or better for self driving to be socially acceptable. A statistical argument based on a reduction of overall fatalities including a number of new kinds of accidents will not be accepted. People (and the media) are going to focus on the accidents that would not have happened if self driving did not exist.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - timerol 7y ago
    The problem with your statement is that some people view handling a situation better as getting more cars through a bottleneck in a certain amount of time, and other people view better as making sure that all humans in the area stay safe.
    - jacquesm 7y ago

elicash 7y ago

Reminds me of when two people walking towards each other struggle with who is passing on the left vs right and go back and forth at the same time. The best strategy for a resolution isn't to be accommodating. It's to physically shift your entire body to one side and make no eye contact to make it absolutely clear to the other person which side of them you'll be walking on.

gilbetron 7y ago
That works well when one person does it - but if everyone had that strategy, then it wouldn't work either! (I've spent way too much time thinking about this).
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  That's basic game theory, and the game of Chicken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)
- jayd16 7y ago
  Look into how wifi transmission is solved among the many clients (although I'm sure its quite complex now). You might be able to use a random back off time to settle races like this.

blackrock 7y ago

I knew it. I suspected the Waymo cars were literally driving on eggshells. They’ve been peddling that these Level 5 Waymo cars were just around the corner. But they refused to disclose how the cars actually worked, and kept saying that their black box is so mysterious, that their scientists themselves couldn’t understand it, so there was no point in having the rest of us, mere mortals, try to understand it. Lies. We are a long ways away from being able to trust a robotic car with our lives. But to their credit, at least they realize that requiring a human to take over vehicle controls in a microsecond, is unrealistic. Ahem! Looking at another car company that thinks this is acceptable.

Piskvorrr 7y ago
Of course we're 5 years from L5. Always have been, since the 1970 lane-keeping Mercedes. You just need to understand that this is a codeword for "we have no idea what interesting and hard problem pops up next week, this research is SO EXCITING!" If you are expecting actual L5, in production, five years from any given date...you're gonna have a bad time.
michaelbuckbee 7y ago
Whether or not Waymo has been sufficiently forthcoming about how their tech works or not is subjective. Objectively though they have started performing rides with no drivers in AZ. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully-driverless-car-self-driving-ride-hail-service-phoenix-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully-driv...
Fricken 7y ago
Waymo has only ever peddled level 4 vehicles.

skywhopper 7y ago

Not a chance. One thing I found interesting in this article was the graph of successful object identification in images. The author made much of progressing from 50% to 88% in the last ten years (I believe this uncited data comes from [0]), but the great majority of that progress happened in the first five years, and the predictable slowdown of improvement is clearly evidenced by the graph. We should also be very clear that 88% success rate given for object detection and identification is against a relatively fixed set of static images[1]. And as far as I can tell from the paper[2], there's no indication of how long it takes to come to a conclusion on any single image, and no description of how much hardware was used to reach this rate of success, which to be honest, I'm surprised is so low. Given all of that, it does not seem reasonable to assume that this 88% success rate has anything to do with how well object detection works in real-time using on-board computing power while the car is in motion. So, don't start planning to throw out your driver's license anytime soon. [0] https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imagenet https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imag... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet [2] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/self-training-with-noisy-student-improves https://paperswithcode.com/paper/self-training-with-noisy-st...

m3kw9 7y ago

Also sometimes you need to move your car to affect the environment, for example if your car is stopped at a parking lot type intersection, and there is a large crowd of people passing, they would keep crossing unless you start to move your car a little indicating, that’s it for you let some cars through

jonas21 7y ago
You mean like those drivers who aggressively creep into the intersection to scare pedestrians into letting them through, even when the pedestrian has the right of way? I can't wait for Waymo cars to get them off the road.
- pas 7y ago
  OP might be referring situations like a festival, where there's a trickle of cars and a lot of people. And usually cars have to slowly inch forward, some people will stop and let them through, some people won't. The driver of course has to stop, but also not just wait forever to have a clear lane. Or, another example, a big parking lot with a few buses, people unloading their stuff from the buses (let's at the end of a long trip), relatives/parents/friends pick them up at the parking lot. Relatively dense, many people moving, but still cars come and go. Plus a lot of packs/luggage here and there. Usually in these cases more cars want to enter the parking lot to pick up others, but of course people want to continue unloading, so some kind of balance forms.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    This also applies to "living streets": pedestrians are the primary users, but cars are allowed through at lower speeds (20 kph?). "Wait until everyone clears the path" means "forever", a typical livelock; the car needs to signal intent "I wish to move forward" while still yielding to pedestrians.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Years ago I was trying to get through a huge crowd leaving a concert once, because I worked nights in a building on the same block, and while I was edging around the corner, a cop on foot thought I was being too aggressive and started banging on my window hard. I rolled it down and explained to him where I was going and why, but later my power window mechanism failed and it might have been related. I wonder how that should be handled with a hypothetical self-driving car?