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Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be

by gfodor 13y ago

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes. For an autonomous car, the car will a) need incredibly far range to see this debris in time and b) will need incredibly precise lidar/radar to see the debris if it is small. At a far distance, a small piece of debris covers a minuscule solid angle on the sensor. At high speeds, you have a twofold problem that tests the limits of the onboard sensors and collision avoidance systems: objects approach rapidly, and small objects can cause catastrophic damage or cause other collisions. In the case where other cars are on the road, the problem seems straightforward since the robocar can probably see all the other cars ahead of it changing lanes in a pattern. On a deserted highway however the car is in trouble unless it can spot the debris from a very far distance, it seems. Any thoughts?

TeMPOraL 13y ago
My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.
- rpedela 13y ago
  Yeah and I think a larger problem is deer or other animals running into the road especially at night. I don't know if the Google car can handle that situation yet, but the sensors should be able to see animals way before humans can.
  - eigenvector 13y ago
    Many (most?) car/deer/moose collisions are unavoidable even for a human driver. In particular, because a human driver focuses on monitoring the road ahead, they cannot determine instantaneously whether it is optimal to continue straight and hit the animal or to swerve into oncoming traffic or the adjacent lane. The reflex reaction is to swerve which can often cause an even worse accident. Humans also can't process the trade-off of hitting the animal vs. attempting to avoid it based on size fast enough whereas a self-driving car could conceivably be able to.
    - mattzito 13y ago
      I would guess, too, that there are mitigation actions that can be taken by computers that humans don't have the reflexes to handle. For example, I was always told in driving school as a kid that if you're about to hit a deer, you should let up on your brakes right before you hit them. This is so the bumper of the car comes back up and hits the deer center, as opposed to the bumper hitting the deer's bottom half, possibly bringing the deer up on to the hood/windshield where it could injure passengers. I have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but a self-driving car could easily handle something like that, or automatically turn a car to take the impact of the deer on the side of the car without passengers, whatever the best course of action is.
    - Already__Taken 13y ago
      Plus what can you car do to save you given the context of the accident it's about to have? That's a very cool idea.
- Someone 13y ago
  Are they? Visual acuity at the fovea is around 1 arc minute. Translating that to 150 by 100 degrees of visual field (humans have a larger visual field) gives a resolution of 9000 by 6000 pixels. Of course, the human eye doesn't work that way: resolution drops off rapidly away from the fovea. Many electronic sensors do work that way, though. So, individual sensors may, for some tasks, be inferior to human 20/20 vision. I googled to find out whether the sensors on Google's driverless cars had anisotropic sensors (a simple solution would be to have a wide-field and a telephoto camera), but cannot find good info. Anybody know more?
- gfodor 13y ago
  I'm skeptical at far enough distances LIDAR is accurate, due to noise and the falloff of light's subtended solid angle with distance. I am not a sensor expert but if there is a mattress on the highway far ahead (think 0.1-0.2mi or so) I would not be surprised if am going to see it due to the color contrast and my brain's pattern recognition well before LIDAR will detect it by bouncing light off of it.
  - agildehaus 13y ago
    At highway speeds of 70 miles per hour, a car covers 0.1 miles in 5.14 seconds. So, with your range of 0.1-0.2 miles, a human would have 5-10 seconds to perceive the problem and stop. Google's LIDAR can see approximately 60 meters out. At 70mph, this gives the autonomous car under 2 seconds to perceive the problem and stop. Most humans have a perception-reaction time of approximately 2.5-3.0 seconds on a highway, so the human range drops to 2-7 seconds. Factor in the time it takes to apply a maneuver (move foot to break pedal, apply break) and it drops even further -- I'm not certain by how much -- likely another 1-2 seconds. At your lower bound of 0.1 miles, I think the autonomous car already has the advantage. I think it's clear that a computer would react and apply a maneuver tremendously faster than a human. I also think it's obvious that to have a clear advantage over a human on a highway, these sensors need additional range. From what I understand, Google is working on their own LIDAR sensor (an upgrade from the Velodyne they use now), so perhaps they also have this in mind. I'd love to see more data on this stuff.
    - Qworg 13y ago
      You're discounting the actuation time for the machine, as well as latency in the system. Nothing is instantaneous. I've seen driving systems with 1-2 second latency from sensor data in to actuate brakes.
- Qworg 13y ago
  LIDARs are not better sensors than our eyes. They are different, but not better. The human eye is an amazing instrument. Contrast range of 24 stops vs. 16 in a top of the line camera. (Think 24 bit ADC vs. 16 bit). Follow that up with 24 bit color depth and the ability for our eyes to automatically adjust what portion of the spectrum we're focusing on, and you've got a spectacular sensor.
  - thrownaway2424 13y ago
    Agreed about the eye. They are great for looking at whatever you point them at, which for drivers in my area is usually their iPhone. I'd be surprised if humans were terribly good at perceiving a meter-high object that appeared in their lane at a distance of 50m, because their occuli are occupied perceiving other things. I'm sure a self-driving car that had an unblinking human eye would be a fantastic instrument. Anyway the LIDAR is not the only instrument you can put in an autonomous vehicle, right? You can have optical cameras, stereo cameras, infrared, whatever.
Qworg 13y ago
Debris is a really hard problem and I don't think they can get that resolution out of their LIDAR. Camera data may serve better, but that's hit or miss. I'd call this one unsolved. (Source: I'm a robotics/perception/sensors guy who has worked autonomous vehicles)
- jessriedel 13y ago
  Since you're one of the few people here doing more than speculating, could you expand on this a bit? Is the LIDAR resolution a hard physical limit, and if so what's the origin? What makes identifying the debris with the camera so hard, just the standard object recognition problem in computer vision?
  - Qworg 13y ago
    Certainly. LIDAR resolution is related to a few things: - How many beams you're putting out and at what angles - How fast you're spinning and how fast you can get the data back. - How many points of data you can get through your bus If the Google Car is using the big Velodyne (http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx), it puts out 1.3 Mpt/second over a 26.8 degree vertical field of view. That makes it put out ~135 pts per vertical and horizontal degree. At a range of 50 meters, with angular resolution of 0.09 degrees and 0.4 degrees vertical resolution, you're looking at vertical spacing of 34.9 cm/pt and a horizontal spacing of 7.8 cm/pt. You'll need multiple "hits" to make an obstacle, and they have to reflect well enough to be counted. A common thing to do is reject any obstacle below a certain height - since it could just be noise. Debris with cameras is tough because you can't differentiate between "dry spot on pavement" and "someone's dropped a sheet of drywall".
    - davedx 13y ago
      Could you use some kind of LIDAR stereo configuration to tell the difference between a dry spot and a solid object?
      - 13y ago
bertil 13y ago
Most human drivers tend to over-estimate the consequence of a collision — it’s common that swerving to avoid a wild animal poses a greater danger than hitting, for instance. However, what a robocar can do that most humans can’t is organise the clean-up, and that’s hundred times more important, because presently, hundreds of cars will pass that debris. Let’s say you have a radar under the chassis (not unlikely given Telsa’s latest PR issue): the car OS can warn the authorities instantly with an exact location; images from several cars can be compiled to form an exact estimate of what it is. All car with significant connectivity can be informed that this lane is closed a small portion before any physical equivalent (orange cones) has time to be set up, possibly allowing a safer clean-up if the (connected) highway detects that all cars in the next x minutes have been warned, and a brusher drone can be dispatched.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  Could we have the cars drive in such a way that the effect on air pressure as they pass would push some debris off the roadway?
  - bertil 13y ago
    I can’t tell if that’s a fantastic idea, or you've watching too many Fast-and-Furious action movie. Let’s agree it’s both. Serious answer: probably not. What you describe involves turbulence control — an area that has driven the most spectacular effort in computing for half a century, and as far as I can tell, still a very dark box. Having self-driving space flight to Jupiter trigger philosophical debate by quasi-human AI, that’s pretty much a given by now; using a fan in a controlled manner… no way. Who would have though in 1968 that 2001 was the realistic one, and Iron Finger 2 non-sensical?
mikeash 13y ago
What do you think the odds are that a human will be able to handle it properly? 90% of the time, a human will either 1) not notice the debris at all, and plow into it 2) brake to a sudden stop, causing a massive hazard for all around or 3) swerve dangerously into another lane. Just this morning I watched a car come within inches of plowing into a gigantic orange traffic barrel. He was going 30MPH on a quiet residential road but he simply was not paying attention, and braked just barely in time to stop before hitting it. And this is not some unusual thing, this is how people drive. I've nearly been run down in a crosswalk at a four-way stop sign by drivers who simply decided that they did not need to look forward while going through the intersection. And you think that humans are going to have a good record at spotting and handling small debris when cruising at 70MPH? Good luck with that. One thing I will say about humans: when they're about to run over you at low speeds, you can usually get them to stop by shouting at them. I doubt computers can manage that yet.
- gfodor 13y ago
  if there is a large object in the middle of the highway in broad daylight i am pretty sure humans navigate it pretty well since their eyes can see it far ahead due to color contrast, pattern recognition etc. the human visual system seems to excel in this situation and it seems to be a one where LIDAR may be at a disadvantage, where the stakes are high.
  - konstruktor 13y ago
    The program driving the car is aware of the limits of its perception, though. My grandma probably isn't.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    The visual system does well, but the decision-making system behind it often does not. I'm sure that guy this morning had no trouble seeing the orange barrel he nearly rammed, but actually noticing it is another matter.
thrownaway2424 13y ago
Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway. On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of people every day. A robot-driven car won't do that. It would even be acceptable if the robot car stuck the debris in the roadway at full speed, every single time, as long as it wasn't mowing down little kids at the local farmers' market every Sunday.
- Loughla 13y ago
  Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people. And I would say that mowing down little kids at the local farmer's market would be one of those 'bizarre' incidents, unless there has been a rash of farmer's market mow-downs that I'm not aware of. I've never hit anyone, and I'd rather not let a robot wreck my car and endanger my life in a situation that would have been easily avoidable, should I have been in control. There's your counter argument.
  - pekk 13y ago
    We let people kill more than a few of us. We let people wreck our cars and endanger our lives in situations that would have been easily avoidable.
    - Loughla 13y ago
      And we don't have a choice but to live with people. Selling a random person an item and asking them to give over control to said item, when the item carries the very real possibility of causing harm, is a harder sales pitch. You have to remember that not everyone is sold on technology, just for the sake of technology.
      - 13y ago
batbomb 13y ago
Do your eyes have zoom and both active and passive (near or far)-infrared detectors? Because you could easily put those on robotic (or even non-robotic) cars. You could even put several on a robotic car. Take this, for example: http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-wildlife-130830.htm http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-w... But, I think you are overestimating your own ability to see debris far away, and underestimating other bigger problems. A much bigger problem, for example, is a two-lane highway with many blind spots in the form of hills, other vehicles, and blind curves, especially those filled with slow-moving bicyclists and animals. Think the 1 in California, or the switchback-heavy roads of ski resorts in the western United States.
pkulak 13y ago
I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"
  - mindslight 13y ago
    For consumer use (as opposed to an experimental vehicle), this is never an option. Even if you assume the person in the car is (present, of-age, licensed, awake, sober), the context switch of promptly having to drive on a busy road after hours/days/months of not having driven would be terrible.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    Unfortunately the thing to think about here is that as these things become more mainstream, there will be less people who are even skilled enough to control a car. So in the long run, if the system works well, any part of the design that relies upon human intervention is doomed. Ultimately your stopgap would become the equivalent of giving the wheel to the child in the backseat: more dangerous than just letting the computer do its best.
    - magicalist 13y ago
      On the other hand, it will be best case a decade or two before these things are out on the road en masse and even then only the youngest drivers wouldn't have gained many hours of driving experience. Meanwhile, in that time both automated car and sensor tech will have advanced quite a bit. It's only been a decade since that first DARPA challenge and five years since google started their project, after all.
icehawk219 13y ago
Along the same lines another thing that I think most of us in the US this winter (or least parts of it) had to deal with are potholes. I've gotten quite good at avoiding the potholes around me by preparing for their presence well ahead of where they actually are. In one case there's one right at the top of a hill near me and right under the passenger side tires if you don't move slightly to either side. But because of the incline of the hill you can't even see it until it's less than a few feet in front of you. I'd hope they figure out how to detect these but it seems like a pretty difficult problem.
- larubbio 13y ago
  But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.
  - robszumski 13y ago
    These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder. Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.
    - BrandonMarc 13y ago
      why not (mostly) a mesh network made up of the individual cars themselves, with a few connecting to the actual internet and acting in a sense like mobile cell towers? the cars would probably vote on which one in a vicinity was going to be come the next "hub" based on some algorithm accounting for location of surrounding cards, location of its own access point, as well as info about its likely route & destination. Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?
- 13y ago
unexistance 13y ago
working with technology teach me one thing: technology cannot solve everything :D So what can be done with unknown situation encountered by the auto-car? alert the human: Please take control of the car, undetermined obstruction ahead (or something to that effect)
- chillingeffect 13y ago
  Yeah sure that sounds great, alert the human, but guess what? The human is asleep, reading, writing, or drunk.... as has been promised elsewhere as one of the main advantages to a self-driving car. "This future is better than the current one b/c you don't have to pay attention" So if you're telling me I still have to suddenly pay attention, poof! up in smoke goes the advantage of this supposedly self-driving car. I can't take a nap, b/c I might have to wake up and grab the wheel when a ladder starts flying off the back of a truck towards me. This is not a consistent picture. It's just a bunch of fairy tales. Each day dream breaks down when it relies on a neighboring, magical scenario.
  - prawn 13y ago
    You're responding to one person's suggestion as though it presents the ultimate plan of those dedicated to this technology.
konstruktor 13y ago
You are thinking of the wrong failure mode. Going too fast to react to a piece of debris is something a well programmed robotic car will never encounter in the first place. It will not go faster than the limits posed by its perception (known) and road conditions (approximately known), and err on the side of caution. It knows no impatience. It is aware of its surroundings at all times, which means it may go faster if it knows it can change lanes, or slower if it perceives a lorry behind it. In extreme situations where a human would outperform a robotic car, the robotic car will simply be slower. I would, however, assume that in most situations where somebody perceives the car as too slow, what is actually happening is the human overlooking some risk factor.
- gfodor 13y ago
  Smart. A good lesson in identifying misplaced assumptions, thanks.
baddox 13y ago
Humans aren't particularly good at that problem either. I wouldn't be surprised if Google has or will soon get their autonomous cars to perform better than humans on a variety of road obstacles.
brc 13y ago
There is also the likelihood of the development of 'close area' networks, where a car ahead that spots the debris (and either hits or avoids) passes down a message along the chain, so that following vehicles are alerted and all begin to slow down in unison. Development efforts have been spent on this technology for existing vehicles, with the idea of alerting a driver to a hazard before they can visibly see it. This is especially important in low-visibility fog/snow conditions where massive pileups can occur.

by gfodor 13y ago

TeMPOraL 13y ago

My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.

rpedela 13y ago
Yeah and I think a larger problem is deer or other animals running into the road especially at night. I don't know if the Google car can handle that situation yet, but the sensors should be able to see animals way before humans can.
- eigenvector 13y ago
  Many (most?) car/deer/moose collisions are unavoidable even for a human driver. In particular, because a human driver focuses on monitoring the road ahead, they cannot determine instantaneously whether it is optimal to continue straight and hit the animal or to swerve into oncoming traffic or the adjacent lane. The reflex reaction is to swerve which can often cause an even worse accident. Humans also can't process the trade-off of hitting the animal vs. attempting to avoid it based on size fast enough whereas a self-driving car could conceivably be able to.
  - mattzito 13y ago
    I would guess, too, that there are mitigation actions that can be taken by computers that humans don't have the reflexes to handle. For example, I was always told in driving school as a kid that if you're about to hit a deer, you should let up on your brakes right before you hit them. This is so the bumper of the car comes back up and hits the deer center, as opposed to the bumper hitting the deer's bottom half, possibly bringing the deer up on to the hood/windshield where it could injure passengers. I have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but a self-driving car could easily handle something like that, or automatically turn a car to take the impact of the deer on the side of the car without passengers, whatever the best course of action is.
  - Already__Taken 13y ago
    Plus what can you car do to save you given the context of the accident it's about to have? That's a very cool idea.
Someone 13y ago
Are they? Visual acuity at the fovea is around 1 arc minute. Translating that to 150 by 100 degrees of visual field (humans have a larger visual field) gives a resolution of 9000 by 6000 pixels. Of course, the human eye doesn't work that way: resolution drops off rapidly away from the fovea. Many electronic sensors do work that way, though. So, individual sensors may, for some tasks, be inferior to human 20/20 vision. I googled to find out whether the sensors on Google's driverless cars had anisotropic sensors (a simple solution would be to have a wide-field and a telephoto camera), but cannot find good info. Anybody know more?
gfodor 13y ago
I'm skeptical at far enough distances LIDAR is accurate, due to noise and the falloff of light's subtended solid angle with distance. I am not a sensor expert but if there is a mattress on the highway far ahead (think 0.1-0.2mi or so) I would not be surprised if am going to see it due to the color contrast and my brain's pattern recognition well before LIDAR will detect it by bouncing light off of it.
- agildehaus 13y ago
  At highway speeds of 70 miles per hour, a car covers 0.1 miles in 5.14 seconds. So, with your range of 0.1-0.2 miles, a human would have 5-10 seconds to perceive the problem and stop. Google's LIDAR can see approximately 60 meters out. At 70mph, this gives the autonomous car under 2 seconds to perceive the problem and stop. Most humans have a perception-reaction time of approximately 2.5-3.0 seconds on a highway, so the human range drops to 2-7 seconds. Factor in the time it takes to apply a maneuver (move foot to break pedal, apply break) and it drops even further -- I'm not certain by how much -- likely another 1-2 seconds. At your lower bound of 0.1 miles, I think the autonomous car already has the advantage. I think it's clear that a computer would react and apply a maneuver tremendously faster than a human. I also think it's obvious that to have a clear advantage over a human on a highway, these sensors need additional range. From what I understand, Google is working on their own LIDAR sensor (an upgrade from the Velodyne they use now), so perhaps they also have this in mind. I'd love to see more data on this stuff.
  - Qworg 13y ago
    You're discounting the actuation time for the machine, as well as latency in the system. Nothing is instantaneous. I've seen driving systems with 1-2 second latency from sensor data in to actuate brakes.
Qworg 13y ago
LIDARs are not better sensors than our eyes. They are different, but not better. The human eye is an amazing instrument. Contrast range of 24 stops vs. 16 in a top of the line camera. (Think 24 bit ADC vs. 16 bit). Follow that up with 24 bit color depth and the ability for our eyes to automatically adjust what portion of the spectrum we're focusing on, and you've got a spectacular sensor.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Agreed about the eye. They are great for looking at whatever you point them at, which for drivers in my area is usually their iPhone. I'd be surprised if humans were terribly good at perceiving a meter-high object that appeared in their lane at a distance of 50m, because their occuli are occupied perceiving other things. I'm sure a self-driving car that had an unblinking human eye would be a fantastic instrument. Anyway the LIDAR is not the only instrument you can put in an autonomous vehicle, right? You can have optical cameras, stereo cameras, infrared, whatever.

Qworg 13y ago

Debris is a really hard problem and I don't think they can get that resolution out of their LIDAR. Camera data may serve better, but that's hit or miss. I'd call this one unsolved. (Source: I'm a robotics/perception/sensors guy who has worked autonomous vehicles)

jessriedel 13y ago
Since you're one of the few people here doing more than speculating, could you expand on this a bit? Is the LIDAR resolution a hard physical limit, and if so what's the origin? What makes identifying the debris with the camera so hard, just the standard object recognition problem in computer vision?
- Qworg 13y ago
  Certainly. LIDAR resolution is related to a few things: - How many beams you're putting out and at what angles - How fast you're spinning and how fast you can get the data back. - How many points of data you can get through your bus If the Google Car is using the big Velodyne (http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx), it puts out 1.3 Mpt/second over a 26.8 degree vertical field of view. That makes it put out ~135 pts per vertical and horizontal degree. At a range of 50 meters, with angular resolution of 0.09 degrees and 0.4 degrees vertical resolution, you're looking at vertical spacing of 34.9 cm/pt and a horizontal spacing of 7.8 cm/pt. You'll need multiple "hits" to make an obstacle, and they have to reflect well enough to be counted. A common thing to do is reject any obstacle below a certain height - since it could just be noise. Debris with cameras is tough because you can't differentiate between "dry spot on pavement" and "someone's dropped a sheet of drywall".
  - davedx 13y ago
    Could you use some kind of LIDAR stereo configuration to tell the difference between a dry spot and a solid object?
    - 13y ago

bertil 13y ago

Most human drivers tend to over-estimate the consequence of a collision — it’s common that swerving to avoid a wild animal poses a greater danger than hitting, for instance. However, what a robocar can do that most humans can’t is organise the clean-up, and that’s hundred times more important, because presently, hundreds of cars will pass that debris. Let’s say you have a radar under the chassis (not unlikely given Telsa’s latest PR issue): the car OS can warn the authorities instantly with an exact location; images from several cars can be compiled to form an exact estimate of what it is. All car with significant connectivity can be informed that this lane is closed a small portion before any physical equivalent (orange cones) has time to be set up, possibly allowing a safer clean-up if the (connected) highway detects that all cars in the next x minutes have been warned, and a brusher drone can be dispatched.

stephengillie 13y ago
Could we have the cars drive in such a way that the effect on air pressure as they pass would push some debris off the roadway?
- bertil 13y ago
  I can’t tell if that’s a fantastic idea, or you've watching too many Fast-and-Furious action movie. Let’s agree it’s both. Serious answer: probably not. What you describe involves turbulence control — an area that has driven the most spectacular effort in computing for half a century, and as far as I can tell, still a very dark box. Having self-driving space flight to Jupiter trigger philosophical debate by quasi-human AI, that’s pretty much a given by now; using a fan in a controlled manner… no way. Who would have though in 1968 that 2001 was the realistic one, and Iron Finger 2 non-sensical?

mikeash 13y ago

What do you think the odds are that a human will be able to handle it properly? 90% of the time, a human will either 1) not notice the debris at all, and plow into it 2) brake to a sudden stop, causing a massive hazard for all around or 3) swerve dangerously into another lane. Just this morning I watched a car come within inches of plowing into a gigantic orange traffic barrel. He was going 30MPH on a quiet residential road but he simply was not paying attention, and braked just barely in time to stop before hitting it. And this is not some unusual thing, this is how people drive. I've nearly been run down in a crosswalk at a four-way stop sign by drivers who simply decided that they did not need to look forward while going through the intersection. And you think that humans are going to have a good record at spotting and handling small debris when cruising at 70MPH? Good luck with that. One thing I will say about humans: when they're about to run over you at low speeds, you can usually get them to stop by shouting at them. I doubt computers can manage that yet.

gfodor 13y ago
if there is a large object in the middle of the highway in broad daylight i am pretty sure humans navigate it pretty well since their eyes can see it far ahead due to color contrast, pattern recognition etc. the human visual system seems to excel in this situation and it seems to be a one where LIDAR may be at a disadvantage, where the stakes are high.
- konstruktor 13y ago
  The program driving the car is aware of the limits of its perception, though. My grandma probably isn't.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The visual system does well, but the decision-making system behind it often does not. I'm sure that guy this morning had no trouble seeing the orange barrel he nearly rammed, but actually noticing it is another matter.

thrownaway2424 13y ago

Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway. On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of people every day. A robot-driven car won't do that. It would even be acceptable if the robot car stuck the debris in the roadway at full speed, every single time, as long as it wasn't mowing down little kids at the local farmers' market every Sunday.

Loughla 13y ago
Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people. And I would say that mowing down little kids at the local farmer's market would be one of those 'bizarre' incidents, unless there has been a rash of farmer's market mow-downs that I'm not aware of. I've never hit anyone, and I'd rather not let a robot wreck my car and endanger my life in a situation that would have been easily avoidable, should I have been in control. There's your counter argument.
- pekk 13y ago
  We let people kill more than a few of us. We let people wreck our cars and endanger our lives in situations that would have been easily avoidable.
  - Loughla 13y ago
    And we don't have a choice but to live with people. Selling a random person an item and asking them to give over control to said item, when the item carries the very real possibility of causing harm, is a harder sales pitch. You have to remember that not everyone is sold on technology, just for the sake of technology.
    - 13y ago

batbomb 13y ago

Do your eyes have zoom and both active and passive (near or far)-infrared detectors? Because you could easily put those on robotic (or even non-robotic) cars. You could even put several on a robotic car. Take this, for example: http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-wildlife-130830.htm http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-w... But, I think you are overestimating your own ability to see debris far away, and underestimating other bigger problems. A much bigger problem, for example, is a two-lane highway with many blind spots in the form of hills, other vehicles, and blind curves, especially those filled with slow-moving bicyclists and animals. Think the 1 in California, or the switchback-heavy roads of ski resorts in the western United States.

pkulak 13y ago

I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.

ForHackernews 13y ago
As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"
- mindslight 13y ago
  For consumer use (as opposed to an experimental vehicle), this is never an option. Even if you assume the person in the car is (present, of-age, licensed, awake, sober), the context switch of promptly having to drive on a busy road after hours/days/months of not having driven would be terrible.
- gfodor 13y ago
  Unfortunately the thing to think about here is that as these things become more mainstream, there will be less people who are even skilled enough to control a car. So in the long run, if the system works well, any part of the design that relies upon human intervention is doomed. Ultimately your stopgap would become the equivalent of giving the wheel to the child in the backseat: more dangerous than just letting the computer do its best.
  - magicalist 13y ago
    On the other hand, it will be best case a decade or two before these things are out on the road en masse and even then only the youngest drivers wouldn't have gained many hours of driving experience. Meanwhile, in that time both automated car and sensor tech will have advanced quite a bit. It's only been a decade since that first DARPA challenge and five years since google started their project, after all.

icehawk219 13y ago

Along the same lines another thing that I think most of us in the US this winter (or least parts of it) had to deal with are potholes. I've gotten quite good at avoiding the potholes around me by preparing for their presence well ahead of where they actually are. In one case there's one right at the top of a hill near me and right under the passenger side tires if you don't move slightly to either side. But because of the incline of the hill you can't even see it until it's less than a few feet in front of you. I'd hope they figure out how to detect these but it seems like a pretty difficult problem.

larubbio 13y ago
But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.
- robszumski 13y ago
  These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder. Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.
  - BrandonMarc 13y ago
    why not (mostly) a mesh network made up of the individual cars themselves, with a few connecting to the actual internet and acting in a sense like mobile cell towers? the cars would probably vote on which one in a vicinity was going to be come the next "hub" based on some algorithm accounting for location of surrounding cards, location of its own access point, as well as info about its likely route & destination. Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?
13y ago

unexistance 13y ago

working with technology teach me one thing: technology cannot solve everything :D So what can be done with unknown situation encountered by the auto-car? alert the human: Please take control of the car, undetermined obstruction ahead (or something to that effect)

chillingeffect 13y ago
Yeah sure that sounds great, alert the human, but guess what? The human is asleep, reading, writing, or drunk.... as has been promised elsewhere as one of the main advantages to a self-driving car. "This future is better than the current one b/c you don't have to pay attention" So if you're telling me I still have to suddenly pay attention, poof! up in smoke goes the advantage of this supposedly self-driving car. I can't take a nap, b/c I might have to wake up and grab the wheel when a ladder starts flying off the back of a truck towards me. This is not a consistent picture. It's just a bunch of fairy tales. Each day dream breaks down when it relies on a neighboring, magical scenario.
- prawn 13y ago
  You're responding to one person's suggestion as though it presents the ultimate plan of those dedicated to this technology.

konstruktor 13y ago

You are thinking of the wrong failure mode. Going too fast to react to a piece of debris is something a well programmed robotic car will never encounter in the first place. It will not go faster than the limits posed by its perception (known) and road conditions (approximately known), and err on the side of caution. It knows no impatience. It is aware of its surroundings at all times, which means it may go faster if it knows it can change lanes, or slower if it perceives a lorry behind it. In extreme situations where a human would outperform a robotic car, the robotic car will simply be slower. I would, however, assume that in most situations where somebody perceives the car as too slow, what is actually happening is the human overlooking some risk factor.

gfodor 13y ago
Smart. A good lesson in identifying misplaced assumptions, thanks.

baddox 13y ago

Humans aren't particularly good at that problem either. I wouldn't be surprised if Google has or will soon get their autonomous cars to perform better than humans on a variety of road obstacles.

brc 13y ago

There is also the likelihood of the development of 'close area' networks, where a car ahead that spots the debris (and either hits or avoids) passes down a message along the chain, so that following vehicles are alerted and all begin to slow down in unison. Development efforts have been spent on this technology for existing vehicles, with the idea of alerting a driver to a hazard before they can visibly see it. This is especially important in low-visibility fog/snow conditions where massive pileups can occur.