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My conclusion from years of self-driving, LIDAR, etc. research is that managing medium to heavy precipitation reliably might be impossible. Visual algorithms r
by user3939382 5y ago
My conclusion from years of self-driving, LIDAR, etc. research is that managing medium to heavy precipitation reliably might be impossible.
Visual algorithms run into the same problem as human brains, and the size of e.g. rain drops interferes with the frequencies employed by radio techniques.
Is anyone aware of any strategies that give us hope in solving this problem?
- walrus01 5y agoI know next to nothing about lidar engineering but 60GHz band radars can still function out to several hundred meters in rain. It is significantly attenuated as the rain rate (in mm/hour) increases, but it takes a lot of rain to make it completely useless.
- rabuse 5y agoSummers in South Florida will put that to the challenge.
- LegitShady 5y agoPeople can't see in that weather either
- shiftpgdn 5y agoThis has been my argument all along. People are driving in unsafe conditions when they should be stopped.
- ironman1478 5y agoIn florida, I will say when it truly pours like that people do tend to drive extremely slowly and turn on their hazards. Also, sometimes these storms just appear out of nowhere. Over the summer I was driving from the Vero beach area to fort lauderdale and on the way to Vero beach, clear skies and on the way back there was an ENORMOUS storm that flooded streets and you couldn't see crap. It just happens
- kylecordes 5y agoMoreover, contrary to some other commenters: Unless it truly is "once-in-a-lifetime", or very brief, you cannot just stop and give up. To be a viable replacement, a vehicle must (as a human driver would) continue to make progress even in extremely adverse conditions. The progress might be much slower than usual, might be a re-routing (back up away from floodwater and go elsewhere), etc.
- chasd00 5y agojust because you can't write code to handle it doesn't mean a human can't. thousands and thousands of people drive in rain, sleet, snow and hail daily and do it just fine.
- bluGill 5y agoHumans do not do just fine - look at the statistics of car accidents. Humans refuse to admit how bad they really are at driving.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis depends on how powerful your antenna are, $200 wigig transmitters will struggle with much range over those distances.
- walrus01 5y agoAnd how directional and narrow the gain pattern is.
- abeppu 5y agoThough ... how good a job are humans actually doing in heavy precipitation? I know that under normal circumstances our brains constantly do a bunch of work to create the illusion of a comprehensive high res visual field even though we really only have detail at the fovea. When it's raining heavily, and we think we can see "enough" to drive ... are we right? Or are we just lucky and pedestrians and cyclists are more likely to be off the road at those moments and so accidents increase but not to the point of disaster?
- potatolicious 5y agoAgreed - I think the "but can it drive in a whiteout blizzard" question is best redirected to: "can a human?" I suspect there are operating conditions the AVs won't solve acceptably - some of those conditions IMO are also conditions where we should not accept a human to solve acceptably. In general I feel we have a lackadaisical culture around driving that encourages/excuses unsafe behavior, and is overoptimistic about people's ability to drive well.
- leetcrew 5y agopeople are actually pretty good at driving in blizzards in locales where they happen often. snow tires (and possibly chains), good clearance, and great caution can get you a long way. obviously you try to avoid driving in these conditions when possible, but sometimes a moderate storm is much more intense than forecast and you get caught out. pulling off to the side of a snowy mountain pass doesn't guarantee your survival either.
- honkdaddy 5y agoI grew up in a part of Ontario where total whiteouts can happen fairly frequently on both major highways leading in and out of my small town. It is in fact possible to drive dozens of km in near or total whiteout conditions simply by the hazard lights of the car ahead of you. You very frequently will see lines of cars km long, all going <20km/h, white knuckled and crawling home. Maybe one in every couple thousand goes in the ditch. I don't think vision-based FSV will ever reliably handle winter conditions like this. The engineering and QA effort just isn't worth the cost-benefit when you factor in the very small amount of drivers who are consistently exposed to conditions like that. My father, who spent his career commuting to the city on that highway, was disappointed when I explained this to him.
- hammock 5y agoAirplanes couldn't fly in inclement weather for decades. Took a while but we solved it. "Oops it's pouring, can't get a Cruise, gotta fall back to an Uber" doesn't sound that terrible to me, for now. Cruise could even offer a product that compensates/insures you for that eventuality, if for example Cruise was your primary vehicle.
- grayfaced 5y agoBut if self-driving succeeds then there won't be enough gig-drivers ready-to-go to cover a self-driving outage.
- hammock 5y agoTaxis, available with e.g. a simple phone call, have existed since before telephones and cars really, and they still exist now even as ride-sharing has taken over. They will exist as Cruise rises.