9 ms·

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring"

by ra7 5y ago

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering more insights into their tech and generally seem to have increased their PR game. I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency.

Groxx 5y ago
SF is unpleasant to drive as a human, but slow, dense traffic seems like a near ideal scenario for autonomous. SF needs lots of social calculations if you don't want to get honked at, which is mentally taxing, but they're far from necessary for safety. Even fairly simple autonomous tech will have better peripheral vision at near-to-mid range than one human can manage, so for all those bikers, crazy walkers, and chaotic 15mph cars you shouldn't hit, it stands a pretty good chance of being better. And when it's not, come to a stop and you're fine (barring some honks) - few are moving fast enough to hit you dangerously hard in those human-complex areas, and you don't need to stop instantly, just fast enough. --- Honestly, I'd put SF at dramatically easier than either residential or highway roads. Residential (and adjacent) has fast-moving cars ignoring signs with obstructed vision, and inattentive humans at relatively high speed (bikers used to low traffic and swerving, kids and animals running literally through bushes adjacent to roads, general lack of care around vision-blockers like fences due to perceived low risk, etc). Who's-at-fault doesn't matter - in car vs human, humans lose, and people rightfully get upset. Highways also seem harder, if highly specialized: accurate decisions 100+ feet in advance are absolutely critical due to the speeds involved, computer vision at that range has fairly low detail compared to humans, and lidar is practically braille for "car". Radar has trouble distinguishing stopped cars from the road because neither are moving. Ultrasonics as an ultimate backup really only work up to around 10m (and that's about the distance to stop a car at 25MPH, which you'll regularly encounter in dense city traffic). I'll also point out that more people have died due to Tesla's autopilot on highways than Waymo, Uber, Cruise, heck all self-driving companies I'm aware of at any size combined. They're riding all the terminology lines they can to get away with it, and they may very well have an order of magnitude or two more miles, but I believe the point still stands - highways are hard.
afavour 5y ago
> SF is a real nightmare to drive. Yes and no. The weather conditions are probably close to perfect for a project like this. A city that spends months with icy roads... _that_ would be the real nightmare.
- ra7 5y ago
  Yeah, fair enough. Only adverse weather they'd encounter in SF is fog and may be light rain. But I still consider driving in SF pretty challenging, especially for an autonomous vehicle – narrow roads, people not following rules, pedestrians everywhere, cable cars in the middle of roads. Certainly more complex than Chandler, AZ.
bluGill 5y ago
It may not scale to rural areas though. There are some roads were you don't need to look at the road in front of your: it is there and nothing else is. Instead you need to watch the ditches in a wide area around because that is where wildlife will jump out of in front of you.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The superiority of a blended computer vision system for this task, over a human performance, is almost impossible to overstate. The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    It isn't possible to not overlook deer because they are often doing things such that you cannot spot them. Unless you mean they won't fail to see a deer 2 meters in front of the car - but it is too late to do anything about it then.
  - fooker 5y ago
    >The computer is not going to overlook even one deer. Oh it will. Animals have evolved amazing camouflage. Computer Vision will easily miss a deer hidden in a dark treeline. And radar/lidar even more so because the forest is going to have a pretty irregular geometry. Even identifying a bicycle in a regular city street is something we have not convincingly solved yet. Animals on the side of a forest road is pretty far away.
- Filligree 5y ago
  So they’d need more training data. It doesn’t sound difficult to get.
- ra7 5y ago
  Is there a market for taxis in the rural areas? They have little incentive to expand there if there's no money to be made.
  - 5y ago
reaperducer 5y ago
SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ) Both are low-hanging fruit. When it can navigate a snow-covered road at night while it's still snowing, get back to me.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Doing that better than the average human is a pretty low bar.
- joebob42 5y ago
  But the bar to be better than a human in this case is also wickedly low. I basically can't do this. If it was absolutely necessary I would go out there and drive like 5 mph and be terrified the whole time, but otherwise I would just treat whatever I needed to drive to in a snowstorm at night as temporarily inaccessible. I have lived in places where it snowed in winter before.
  - dnhz 5y ago
    But the use case is not the middle of the night but perhaps during evening rush hour where it gets dark after 5 PM in the winter, and a storm began in the afternoon.
Lammy 5y ago
> SF is a real nightmare to drive. 'cause they decided not to build most of the roads: https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg
- mjmahone17 5y ago
  Wait do you mean? As in, the highways proposed in 1955 weren’t built? I’m not sure how highways going through SF would make it easier to drive in SF (outside of the highways): wouldn’t that generally increase traffic and conflicts?
  - Lammy 5y ago
    > wouldn’t that generally increase traffic and conflicts? When coupled to our additional refusal to build housing, sadly, yeah. What two things do people usually commute between?
    - tdeck 5y ago
      So just to clarify, you're thinking that traffic would increase because people would live outside SF and commute in? But don't people who live in SF need to get to work too? In that case, it seems like having giant highways carving up the city is going to make walking / biking to work harder which would cause more people to drive to work. That's what we see in "car-oriented" cities and it leads to an increase in traffic congestion that makes it miserable to drive, in addition to an environment that makes it miserable to do anything else but drive.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        Commute through, eg Mill Valley to South San Francisco, or similar. Right now, because there's no freeway that goes through the city, that commute is technically possible, I'm sure there are people that do that, but it's not a fun or easy commute, so people try and live in San Francisco and commute to one or the other. If there was a freeway from the Golden Gate bridge, through the city, instead of Lombard and then Gough, then the Mill Valley - South San Francisco commute would be (more) viable at a cost of increased inter-city traffic. Ie traffic that is in San Francisco, but not doing anything there other than transiting. Which is the so-called "extra" traffic GP refers to. See also: Boston's Big Dig.
nradov 5y ago
SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  This cars don't even work with a light drizzle.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    That’s a big point if true. What’s the source for that info?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - pvarangot 5y ago
      Not sure if I can tell so I'll have to pass on answering that. You can take a look at this though: https://youtu.be/0oyjYH6v0b8?t=434 https://youtu.be/0oyjYH6v0b8?t=434
      - ra7 5y ago
        Those are their previous generation vehicles. The I-Pace in SF are the newest generation with upgraded sensors.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Waymo in snow and sand https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.ht... https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2019/08/25/watch-waymo-vehicle-navigate-dust-storm-arizona/2112237001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2019/08/...
- jsight 5y ago
  Honestly, I think Boston is harder even without a winter storm.
bobsomers 5y ago
> I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency. Surely Alphabet has noticed that their competitors are nipping at Waymo's heels. If they don't pick up the pace, all sorts of business books will be written about how Waymo squandered a decade-long lead in the industry.

by ra7 5y ago

Groxx 5y ago

SF is unpleasant to drive as a human, but slow, dense traffic seems like a near ideal scenario for autonomous. SF needs lots of social calculations if you don't want to get honked at, which is mentally taxing, but they're far from necessary for safety. Even fairly simple autonomous tech will have better peripheral vision at near-to-mid range than one human can manage, so for all those bikers, crazy walkers, and chaotic 15mph cars you shouldn't hit, it stands a pretty good chance of being better. And when it's not, come to a stop and you're fine (barring some honks) - few are moving fast enough to hit you dangerously hard in those human-complex areas, and you don't need to stop instantly, just fast enough. --- Honestly, I'd put SF at dramatically easier than either residential or highway roads. Residential (and adjacent) has fast-moving cars ignoring signs with obstructed vision, and inattentive humans at relatively high speed (bikers used to low traffic and swerving, kids and animals running literally through bushes adjacent to roads, general lack of care around vision-blockers like fences due to perceived low risk, etc). Who's-at-fault doesn't matter - in car vs human, humans lose, and people rightfully get upset. Highways also seem harder, if highly specialized: accurate decisions 100+ feet in advance are absolutely critical due to the speeds involved, computer vision at that range has fairly low detail compared to humans, and lidar is practically braille for "car". Radar has trouble distinguishing stopped cars from the road because neither are moving. Ultrasonics as an ultimate backup really only work up to around 10m (and that's about the distance to stop a car at 25MPH, which you'll regularly encounter in dense city traffic). I'll also point out that more people have died due to Tesla's autopilot on highways than Waymo, Uber, Cruise, heck all self-driving companies I'm aware of at any size combined. They're riding all the terminology lines they can to get away with it, and they may very well have an order of magnitude or two more miles, but I believe the point still stands - highways are hard.

afavour 5y ago

> SF is a real nightmare to drive. Yes and no. The weather conditions are probably close to perfect for a project like this. A city that spends months with icy roads... _that_ would be the real nightmare.

ra7 5y ago
Yeah, fair enough. Only adverse weather they'd encounter in SF is fog and may be light rain. But I still consider driving in SF pretty challenging, especially for an autonomous vehicle – narrow roads, people not following rules, pedestrians everywhere, cable cars in the middle of roads. Certainly more complex than Chandler, AZ.

bluGill 5y ago

It may not scale to rural areas though. There are some roads were you don't need to look at the road in front of your: it is there and nothing else is. Instead you need to watch the ditches in a wide area around because that is where wildlife will jump out of in front of you.

jeffbee 5y ago
The superiority of a blended computer vision system for this task, over a human performance, is almost impossible to overstate. The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.
- bluGill 5y ago
  It isn't possible to not overlook deer because they are often doing things such that you cannot spot them. Unless you mean they won't fail to see a deer 2 meters in front of the car - but it is too late to do anything about it then.
- fooker 5y ago
  >The computer is not going to overlook even one deer. Oh it will. Animals have evolved amazing camouflage. Computer Vision will easily miss a deer hidden in a dark treeline. And radar/lidar even more so because the forest is going to have a pretty irregular geometry. Even identifying a bicycle in a regular city street is something we have not convincingly solved yet. Animals on the side of a forest road is pretty far away.
Filligree 5y ago
So they’d need more training data. It doesn’t sound difficult to get.
ra7 5y ago
Is there a market for taxis in the rural areas? They have little incentive to expand there if there's no money to be made.
- 5y ago

reaperducer 5y ago

SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ) Both are low-hanging fruit. When it can navigate a snow-covered road at night while it's still snowing, get back to me.

bryanlarsen 5y ago
Doing that better than the average human is a pretty low bar.
joebob42 5y ago
But the bar to be better than a human in this case is also wickedly low. I basically can't do this. If it was absolutely necessary I would go out there and drive like 5 mph and be terrified the whole time, but otherwise I would just treat whatever I needed to drive to in a snowstorm at night as temporarily inaccessible. I have lived in places where it snowed in winter before.
- dnhz 5y ago
  But the use case is not the middle of the night but perhaps during evening rush hour where it gets dark after 5 PM in the winter, and a storm began in the afternoon.

Lammy 5y ago

> SF is a real nightmare to drive. 'cause they decided not to build most of the roads: https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg

mjmahone17 5y ago
Wait do you mean? As in, the highways proposed in 1955 weren’t built? I’m not sure how highways going through SF would make it easier to drive in SF (outside of the highways): wouldn’t that generally increase traffic and conflicts?
- Lammy 5y ago
  > wouldn’t that generally increase traffic and conflicts? When coupled to our additional refusal to build housing, sadly, yeah. What two things do people usually commute between?
  - tdeck 5y ago
    So just to clarify, you're thinking that traffic would increase because people would live outside SF and commute in? But don't people who live in SF need to get to work too? In that case, it seems like having giant highways carving up the city is going to make walking / biking to work harder which would cause more people to drive to work. That's what we see in "car-oriented" cities and it leads to an increase in traffic congestion that makes it miserable to drive, in addition to an environment that makes it miserable to do anything else but drive.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Commute through, eg Mill Valley to South San Francisco, or similar. Right now, because there's no freeway that goes through the city, that commute is technically possible, I'm sure there are people that do that, but it's not a fun or easy commute, so people try and live in San Francisco and commute to one or the other. If there was a freeway from the Golden Gate bridge, through the city, instead of Lombard and then Gough, then the Mill Valley - South San Francisco commute would be (more) viable at a cost of increased inter-city traffic. Ie traffic that is in San Francisco, but not doing anything there other than transiting. Which is the so-called "extra" traffic GP refers to. See also: Boston's Big Dig.

nradov 5y ago

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

pvarangot 5y ago
This cars don't even work with a light drizzle.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  That’s a big point if true. What’s the source for that info?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pvarangot 5y ago
    Not sure if I can tell so I'll have to pass on answering that. You can take a look at this though: https://youtu.be/0oyjYH6v0b8?t=434 https://youtu.be/0oyjYH6v0b8?t=434
    - ra7 5y ago
      Those are their previous generation vehicles. The I-Pace in SF are the newest generation with upgraded sensors.
- verdverm 5y ago
  Waymo in snow and sand https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.ht... https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2019/08/25/watch-waymo-vehicle-navigate-dust-storm-arizona/2112237001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2019/08/...
jsight 5y ago
Honestly, I think Boston is harder even without a winter storm.

bobsomers 5y ago

> I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency. Surely Alphabet has noticed that their competitors are nipping at Waymo's heels. If they don't pick up the pace, all sorts of business books will be written about how Waymo squandered a decade-long lead in the industry.