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I'd be really curious to see how a map/gps based system handles situations where a divided highway is under construction and has temporary lines painted to dire

I'd be really curious to see how a map/gps based system handles situations where a divided highway is under construction and has temporary lines painted to direct the right side of the road to drive on the left side while left side traffic is held up by a man in a vest holding a sign. This isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, and if the road crews are hard at work, the zone where this is occurring can move by miles a day. To navigate this, a driver needs to rely on road markings, temporary signs, and humans directing traffic. Maps won't cut the mustard in a situation like this. If a driver assistance system can't handle this sort of situation, that's fine. I'm sure it's still useful most of the time. But it's clearly not "99% of the way to FSD."

ghaff 5y ago
I assume that, once you get vehicles driving autonomously on sections of highways, you have some sort of beacon/alerting system that cause the vehicle to tell the driver that it's going to be dropping out of autonomous mode.
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  The "beacon/alerting system" are the signs, and the man in a vest. If the car can't respond to those, then the words "full self driving" should never be used to describe it.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    On a highway, you often don't have a man in a vest and the signs I see are often vague alerts about construction and lane shifts ahead that may or may not be actually happening at the moment. But I don't really disagree. Some mechanism (perhaps a redundant mechanism) when approaching a possible construction area to give a human a minute or so to take over.
  - 8note 5y ago
    I'd see self driving as not needing a person at the wheel. I don't care if there are changes to the road, it's being driven without a person nat the wheel
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Autonomous driving systems do not need to be door-to-door. They also can't require taking over control on a moment's notice. But, systems that can fully autonomous for long stretches of highway driving seem useful. They just don't address use cases where people aren't able to drive at all. Which are interesting to a lot of people but they may just not happen for a long time. There are people who just want cheaper Ubers but there are others who are fine with handing off long boring sections of highway driving.
sgtnoodle 5y ago
Waymo's system doesn't depend on GPS for navigation either. They use their "realtime sensor suite" (lidar) to localize the vehicle position within the map. As part of that localization, there will be a metric of how good the local solution is vs. the map. If a divider moves, for example, the data will be inconsistent with the map, and the software will know that something is amiss, without having to intelligently classify anything. The software can drive confidently when in a consistent environment, and drive conservatively when in an inconsistent environment. Generally, any object that isn't in the map will stand out obviously. That's where having stuff like cameras becomes useful. Asking a computer, "is there a construction worker in this 20MP image of a street?" is hard, but asking a computer, "is this 0.1MP human sized blob a construction worker?" is a lot easier. Waymo has been responding intelligently to bicyclist hand signals for years. "Is this sign shaped blob a construction sign?" is even easier. The lidar and mapping is a key difference between Waymo and Tesla. Waymo works because they have the big data infrastructure, and the budget to deck out every car with orders of magnitude more sensors and compute.

ghaff 5y ago

I assume that, once you get vehicles driving autonomously on sections of highways, you have some sort of beacon/alerting system that cause the vehicle to tell the driver that it's going to be dropping out of autonomous mode.

MichaelGroves 5y ago
The "beacon/alerting system" are the signs, and the man in a vest. If the car can't respond to those, then the words "full self driving" should never be used to describe it.
- ghaff 5y ago
  On a highway, you often don't have a man in a vest and the signs I see are often vague alerts about construction and lane shifts ahead that may or may not be actually happening at the moment. But I don't really disagree. Some mechanism (perhaps a redundant mechanism) when approaching a possible construction area to give a human a minute or so to take over.
- 8note 5y ago
  I'd see self driving as not needing a person at the wheel. I don't care if there are changes to the road, it's being driven without a person nat the wheel
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Autonomous driving systems do not need to be door-to-door. They also can't require taking over control on a moment's notice. But, systems that can fully autonomous for long stretches of highway driving seem useful. They just don't address use cases where people aren't able to drive at all. Which are interesting to a lot of people but they may just not happen for a long time. There are people who just want cheaper Ubers but there are others who are fine with handing off long boring sections of highway driving.

sgtnoodle 5y ago

Waymo's system doesn't depend on GPS for navigation either. They use their "realtime sensor suite" (lidar) to localize the vehicle position within the map. As part of that localization, there will be a metric of how good the local solution is vs. the map. If a divider moves, for example, the data will be inconsistent with the map, and the software will know that something is amiss, without having to intelligently classify anything. The software can drive confidently when in a consistent environment, and drive conservatively when in an inconsistent environment. Generally, any object that isn't in the map will stand out obviously. That's where having stuff like cameras becomes useful. Asking a computer, "is there a construction worker in this 20MP image of a street?" is hard, but asking a computer, "is this 0.1MP human sized blob a construction worker?" is a lot easier. Waymo has been responding intelligently to bicyclist hand signals for years. "Is this sign shaped blob a construction sign?" is even easier. The lidar and mapping is a key difference between Waymo and Tesla. Waymo works because they have the big data infrastructure, and the budget to deck out every car with orders of magnitude more sensors and compute.