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Somerset cattle grid mistaken for wall by car sensors
- renewiltord 6y agoThis is for the auto-brake feature in cars presumably? This is the future. We'll modify our road networks to accommodate vehicles with improved features. One day we'll have radio car-info-beacons along the roadway and wonder why we ever considered only visual road signs.
- klyrs 6y agoProblem: improved mousetrap cannot catch spotted mice Solution: replace spotted mice with spotless mice I'd love to see you try and convince a farmer that this is an "improvement" and that they should replace their cattle guards
- kwdc 6y agoSolution: replace mice with cardboard photos thereof. Rationale: 2D is easier to detect and they don't move.
- renewiltord 6y agoWhat a weird thing to consider. The farmers' opinion is possibly the least relevant thing here. One might as well argue against environmental regulation on the grounds that you can't convince Volkswagen. "I'd love to see you try and convince a diesel car company executive that electric is the future". Yeah, I'm not going to do that. He's going to play along because the market and I will make him. I'm not going to convince farmers of anything. It will simply be untenable for future governments to have public roads that are not usable by cars.
- Veen 6y agoWhy must the roads adapt to cars rather than cars adapt to roads? It would be enormously expensive to refit every road to account for the ever-changing stupidities of self-driving cars. It also removes responsibility from manufacturers and puts it on the state.
- fastball 6y agoYou mean like how we already retrofit roads for the stupidities of drivers?
- hoseja 6y agoI invite you to ponder the suitability of modern roads for horse-drawn carriages.
- Veen 6y agoI live in the South West of England. Many of our roads look as though they haven't changed since horse-drawn carriages were the norm. https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/1a6d5e7bcd4f55f2ca79de5a8babfe2b?width=2048 https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/1a6d5e7bcd4f55f2ca79de5a... https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/satnav-stuck-lorry-coach-cornwall-678059 https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/satnav-stuck...
- PopGreene 6y agoApparently, some cattle don't have a problem with them. https://imgur.com/zTNZEl6 https://imgur.com/zTNZEl6
- mhh__ 6y agoAnimals are pretty clever, usually exactly when you need them not to be.
- csunbird 6y agoI think this also applies to children as well.
- briefcomment 6y agoWow, what an interesting looking and smart cow.
- tintor 6y agoSo, instead of being a cattle trap it is a trap for modern cars?
- mhh__ 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools The cows always win in the end
- taneq 6y agoWhich gave rise to the Cow Tools trope (TVTropes link warning, abandon productivity all ye who enter here): https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowTools https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowTools
- pokeymcsnatch 6y agoFor anyone watching this thinking it's clever and great- it's incredibly dangerous for the cow. Cattle can easily get their feet stuck between the pipes and getting them out is really ugly. Like... torch-cut pipes burning away flesh ugly. If you see this, shoo the cow back in. A cow that regularly attempts to cross cattle guards is first to sale or slaughter. Edit: And now I'm that guy on the internet that I hate, who saw an amusing animal gif and immediately went into buzzkill mode :-/
- darig 6y agoIt was on a quick steep incline, with a real fence (with matching slats spacing) that actually was going across the road right up to the dashed center line. They fixed it by regrading the road like they should have done in the first place, as cattle guards like this must be level, and the local codes required it. Editors getting desperate with their TSLA puts.
- kwdc 6y agoThe irony is that this is actually a good reason to drag the car manufacturers to the table and compel them to fix it from their end. But pragmatically, they likely don't answer the phone. Or email. So, it is still easier to fix the road. And hope the issue doesn't resurface elsewhere and inadvertantly injure or kill too many people.
- mhh__ 6y ago> The irony is that this is actually a good reason to drag the car manufacturers to the table and compel them to fix it from their end. The solution is having the balls to lay down good policy/regulation. There is no point forcing car companies to use a certain algorithm, for example, but it's not unreasonable to build a standard basket of problematic road signs which the car must pass - e.g. a cattle grid isn't too bad, but if a driverless car doesn't stop for a speed limit outside a school the company should have some liability.
- p1necone 6y agoI feel the "driver" of the driverless car should be responsible too. We are nowhere near actual full unsupervised autonomy - people should still be actively looking out for the car doing the wrong thing. You don't get to abdicate responsibility on the road just because you bought in to some corporations marketing.
- mhh__ 6y agoAbsolutely true, although the corporate liability thing really depends on whether the engineering takes after software or aviation (to pick two widely contrasting examples).
- bigiain 6y agoAnd I notice the "phone with wheels" built by mostly software engineers chooses to use words with well known meanings from the aviation industry without a) any of the rigour behind the regulations and certifications or b) much in the way of acknowledging the differences between the challenges of an "autopilot" safely managing to traverse the airspace 37,000 feet above Hawaii, compared to a rural lane in the UK (or 280 between the valley and the city). (While, sadly, at the same time it seems from the outside that the ACAS code got written by the same outsourced dev team that work on their website the rest of the time. :sigh: )
- matthewmorgan 6y agoHow does it cost 70 grand to level a cattle grid?
- dghlsakjg 6y agoFrom the article: To create a "virtually smooth ride across the grid", highways teams spent a month raising about 90ft (27.4m) of road and redesigning the "carriageway approaches".
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoI assume this is because the metal bars in the cattle-grid appear as a very reflective object in the cars' radar sensors which it interprets as an obstacle? I can see this would be a problem with cars that use only radar or radar+ultrasonic. Besides Tesla (and Waymo) cars which do sensor-fusion with vision, what other cars attempt to corroborate radar data with confirmation it's an obstacle and not a coincidental highly radar-reflective object?
- Arnt 6y agoNo, it's because the grid was angled relative to the road (and the surrounding hillside). If you regard the road as level, that grid was a sudden steep incline or decline, and after that the road suddenly returned to level. They fixed it by reworking the road so get rid of the suddenness.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoSo the profile of the barrier was interpreted by the RADAR module as a small metal wall in front of the car?
- Arnt 6y agoFrom the radar's point of view going uphill, the road disappeared. The radar would see a horizon, and empty air in front of the car, like the edge of a cliff. From its point going downhill it would look like an angled metal wall, or a bump, or something, and then the horizon and empty air beyond it.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoI was under the impression that some of the Tesla crashes into highway barriers were exactly because it relied too much on the stereo vision and not enough sensor fusion with RADAR or long range Ultra-sound?
- avianlyric 6y agoHighway barriers are different problem. RADAR, and I think ultra sound, has very poor angular resolution. So it’s very hard to distinguish between and object directly in front of you, from one just off do the side. As a result cars ignore RADAR data about stationary objects when the car is moving at speed. The assumption being those stationary objects are things like highway barriers to side of the car. You don’t want the break slamming on just because your driving parallel to the highway barrier. Consequence is that cars ignore stationary objects like highway barriers, when moving at speed. So if you’re heading straight at it, the car won’t slow down. But then the assumption is that the human really ought to notice they’re driving at a wall.
- CivBase 6y agoAre we already at the point where we are building road infrastructure around self-driving cars instead of the other way around? That was fast.
- sneak 6y agoI figure we're maybe 10-15 years from nationally-mandated machine readable road signs. Then again this could be the same perpetual 10-15 years away from FSD, so maybe it will actually be 25-50.
- exabrial 6y agoFools cars and cows alike
- macjohnmcc 6y agoMy wife and I were out driving looking at Christmas lights a few weeks ago and I tried to reverse the car with no other cars around but the car did an emergency stop because the lights confused the system into thinking someone was behind me or going to cross behind me. Automatic can be good but also too easily fooled.
- conradev 6y agoWhat is going to stop someone from putting up a sign on the side of a highway that looks like a photo of a red light? Very cheap to deploy and extremely dangerous. I remember seeing a post on HN (but I can’t find it) where simply flashing such a photo for ~100ms was enough to get cars to come to a sudden stop
- jiofih 6y agoWhat stops someone doing that today? Humans are also vulnerable.
- conradev 6y agoHumans would be able to see that it is on a long stretch of straight road with no intersection in sight and so while they might be confused, they would not come to a sudden and instant stop. The paper showed that self-driving cars are not quite at that level of deductive reasoning
- jiofih 6y agothats a very general statement, and should be appended with “yet”
- fphhotchips 6y agoI'm not so sure about that. I think it would take more than flashing a photo for 100ms (or just putting up a photo at all for that matter) to trigger a human to stop. You have to overcome the context and I think that's harder than "one photo on the side of a highway".
- jiofih 6y ago“putting up a sign on the side of a highway that looks like a photo of a red light”. People have done things like that and it works pretty well. Tech aside, the point is that disrupting traffic or causing accidents is nothing new, you can practice it today just as effectively!
- supernova87a 6y agoSeems like cars get spooked by odd things in their paths just like cows, huh? Well, I see 2 aspects that make this a "good" failure scenario, regardless of how they solve it. First, having the sensor+algorithm interpret something conservatively as "should stop" for it rather than "ok to go through" at possible grave cost, is the right behavior. Second, this is already (as you can tell by the exceptional nature of the story) a very rural and special case where the driver should be driving alertly (and slowly) anyway. From the photo, this is not something meant to be gone over at high speed blindly. As for the cars going off the road, that needs more explanation as the only action cars should be applying automatically is braking, not turning.
- sideshowb 6y agoOi! Having grown up around there I object to this being described as a special case; it's everyday driving conditions for a lot of people. :) Better built cattle grids appear on main roads with good visibility and it's not unreasonable to cross them at 40mph (thinking about it there may even be the occasional example people cross at 60). An anecdote from around 15 years back: the government considered closing the driving test centre in Minehead because there was no dual carriageway nearby on which learner drivers could demonstrate correct merging skills. Residents collectively replied that all the centres in London should be closed as they did not qualify drivers to deal with reversing down narrow lanes with sheep and mud on the road (...this is painfully evident if you're stuck behind an urbanite driver anywhere near Minehead in summer). Anyhoo, the test centre still operates today.
- jimktrains2 6y agoEmergency stops can be very dangerous, especially if there are people behind you or if the road is slippery. What makes you think that this is "very rural" or a special case? Why does it matter if it is rural -- should cars not work in non-urban environments? I have 100% never been around cattle enough to know for sure, but I was under the impression that cattle crossings didn't so much spook cows as are uncomfortable to cross and therefore they stay away.
- rasz 6y ago>Cars have come off the road not buying it. Not a single car on the market swerves after detecting an obstacle.
- ThePadawan 6y agoSome humans on the market swerve when their car unexpectedly puts on the emergency brakes downhill.
- londons_explore 6y agoWhen one car is following another, and the front car applies the emergency brakes, and the back car (which doesn't have quite as good tyres so can't emergency brake so quickly) swerves to avoid the front one.
- rasz 6y agoThis means you didnt adapt your driving style to the conditions of the road, basically tailgated someone. Dont know about other jurisdictions, but in my EU country law is clear on this one - the gap between yourself and the proceeding car must permit safe stop in case of emergency at all times. If you rear end someone emergency braking (child ran into the road, car caught fire, front window shattered with debris, etc) you are 100% liable and the sole guilty party.
- aaron695 6y agoThe concept people would vilify automatic braking systems is horrifying. They, like GPS mapping save countless lives. And we as a society need to change our environments to further optimise them. Which good engineers have been doing forever, this is part of engineering. It was surprising the BBC article actually was neutral, it was a pleasant surprise. The council realised their interesting mistake and fixed it. But it would be nice to see the BBC going to neutral good and mentioning the lives saved and other measures councils can do to improve these technologies.
- Traster 6y agoThis feels like the physical world version of writing at the top of your autopilot function if(thisSpecificCattleGrid) return True //Skip the autopilot for this case Like... yeah, that will stop the autopilot from crashing when you come across that cattle grid. It doesn't change the fact that your autopilot has some known bad behaviour and you've got no idea where else it'll show up.
- rasz 6y agoBut the automation is not crashing into anything. Automatic obstacle avoidance systems in current cars are only allowed to engage brakes. Something doesnt add up in that story.
- exporectomy 6y agoThe story doesn't say cars left the road by swerving off the side. I think they left it vertically because it was shaped like a jump and they were just driving too fast. It also doesn't say automatic braking/obstacle avoidance caused them to leave the road. Nor does it say the road was altered because of automatic anything. This looks like a massive reading comprehension problem that people here are suffering from. Journalists are experts in being pedantically correct in all their facts but leaving the careless reader with a completely wrong idea of what happened.
- rasz 6y agoWhat does this: >Cars have come off the road trying to cross a cattle grid after sensors mistook it for a wall and slammed on the brakes. mean according to you?
- exporectomy 6y agoWow. I actually didn't see that, even after re-reading it looking specifically for it. I had to ctrl-F to find it. It's in bold under the picture so I probably mistook it for general non-article clutter and ignored it. Reading comprehension problem here too! It does use that causality avoidance word "after". That's technically honest because the author only knows the sequence of events, not the causality, but it also means we only know that too. In an extreme case, it might not even be the same cars that mistook it for a wall as the ones that came off the road, but it also might not be the autonomy that caused them to come off the road, but the driver's actions in response to the braking.
- viseztrance 6y agoThough I think the fault lies with the car manufacturers, I wish they would find an alternative for these cattle grids because they can be quite hazardous for motorcycles in the wet.
- fuzxi 6y agoAny ideas? All I've got are either gates or geofenced shock collars.
- globular-toast 6y agoBicycles and pedestrians too. When I'm out walking I can often hop around the wide of the grid or climb the fence but not always. I never enjoy traversing a cattle grid. The obvious alternative is a gate. But it's been established now that motorists never have to leave their cars to open gates etc. on the public highway so I can't see that happening (although it does exist in some rare level crossings, for example). Also they probably can't be trusted to close the gate behind them.
- globular-toast 6y agoThe UK already has some of the safest roads in the world. We achieved that by spending money on good road design and education. Now we are having to spend even more money to "fix" the roads for car safety features designed for other countries who didn't spend the money to make their roads safe? How frustrating.
- exporectomy 6y agoIt's not actually stated that automatic braking is the reason for the change. It even gives a different reason: 'To create a "virtually smooth ride across the grid"'. They straightened out a step-shaped road into a straight one which is surely just a better experience for all cars and their occupants. I almost wonder if the vehicles that left the road did so by making a jump using it as a stunt ramp. This article has before and after pictures from the same angle: https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/farmer/18996741.cattle-grid-replaced-minehead-cars-crash-off-road/ https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/farmer/18996741.catt...
- avianlyric 6y agoOh wow, you could totally see someone using that as a jump by accident, there’s no visual warning that the gradient is about to change if your approaching the cattle grid from below. Easy to imagine someone at night, taking liberties with the speed limit, hitting that thing at 70mph and taking off.
- tom_mellior 6y ago> Easy to imagine someone at night, taking liberties with the speed limit, hitting that thing at 70mph and taking off. "Easy to imagine illegal, reckless, dangerous behavior posing a danger."
- ltratt 6y ago[Warning: over-serious response coming.] There's a big "cattle grid" sign a little way before it, so I don't think that's a realistic worry. As an aside, that road is long, but a dead end: it leads up to a beauty spot / hiking point. The road also largely lacks dividing lines (i.e. it's sort-of single track, though often wide enough for two vehicles), and the cattle grid comes not long after a sharp corner, so I can't imagine many vehicles would have been able to get to flying speeds. Besides, that neck of the woods has plenty of interesting driving roads including the main A39 out of Porlock just a couple of miles away, that I imagine are of more interest to speed demons.
- gruez 6y ago
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- LatteLazy 6y agoIt would be nice if there was a sign post for "auto drive failure ahead". You could put that a minute up the road, the car could see it, ping at the driver until he take over, cross the grid and then re-engage. This seems to be the correct solution for 99% of these Edge cases...
- t0mas88 6y agoGreat idea. The car already has sign-recognition technology so this should be easy to implement.
- TRcontrarian 6y agoSomeone might find it hilarious to put that sign in their front yard to mess with passers by
- hypertele-Xii 6y agoPretty sure it's illegal to put up traffic signs without permission.
- wasdfff 6y agoIllegal but unenforced unless its called in. There are a number of these in my neighborhood in effort to stymie tourists.
- btbuildem 6y agoI imagine it would be more than a visual sign -- something with a specific emitter, etc, not easily spoofed.
- SemiNormal 6y agoIt seems it isn't just auto drive. Cars with object collision detection are slamming on the brakes when they come near this cattle grid. Signs wouldn't help in that case.
- aitchnyu 6y agoDoes this mean sudden level changes in roads, like this tile road pictured here, will also trigger braking? http://cms.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2019/jan/17/wanna-get-that-sinking-feeling-ride-through-this-deadly-stretch-1926076.html http://cms.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2019/jan/17/wan...