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Korean Competition Shows Weather Still a Challenge for Autonomous Cars
- therobot24 12y agoa guy in our group did clear path detection for vehicles using only vision - his biggest hurdles were shadows and rain his thesis was awesome though, he created shadow and rain drop removal while also mitigating the effects of 'smeared headlights' from a wet road at night
- yason 12y agoThen the same software could produce an enhanced image of the road to a human driver, too, right?
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoProbably. I always thought that an interesting intermediate for cars would be to have a HUD displaying wireframes around detected objects. The motivation being that it can help, but doesn't have nearly the potential for harm as a full self-driving vehicle. Of course, then you end up with the same problem that we have with aircraft - people become reliant on fallible assists.
- therobot24 12y agoi suppose, but it was just PhD research, nothing enterprise
- agumonkey 12y agoI take it that it's not openly published, but just in case, feel free to drop the url or at least this guy's name.
- therobot24 12y agoit was funded by GM so i'm sure they own the patents, but the phd and masters thesis documents are published somewhere (at the very least the CMU library - Tony Qi Wu, he graduated in 2012-2013)
- agumonkey 12y agoFound this on youtube : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB32EAA2DCE0B0E8C https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB32EAA2DCE0B0E8C
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoI would like to hear more.
- csense 12y agoI'd imagine it's more challenging when the road is covered in snow and the snowplows haven't gotten to it yet.
- infogulch 12y agoThat's hard for humans to navigate, let alone self-driving cars. Besides driving very slowly, drivers will often estimate the lane position based on the shape of the snow and the quantity/size of lanes and shoulder they expect. If the snow is not too deep, rumble strips [1] can be very helpful. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_strip
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoIn our area, there are a couple roads where they have ~2.5m thin poles with reflectors on top sticking out of the ground at the edge of the road shoulders. Very helpful, especially for snowplough drivers.
- maxerickson 12y agoThere's research into providing enhanced information to snowplow drivers and also automating snowplows: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/01janfeb/safeplow.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/01janfeb/s... But you can stick a lot more sensor gear on a snowplow than a cheap sedan.
- rdtsc 12y agoOne of the worst combination of weather related road conditions I've been in -- fog and ice, at night, in the mountains. A self driving car wouldn't have to work very hard here to do better than me. * Check for weather conditions at altitude (not just start and destination points). * Refuse to leave the house using that route if weather conditions are bad. Oh well, lesson learned. On that topic does anyone know of maps software that does that for you -- i.e. check weather not just traffic?
- snowwrestler 12y agoHa, yes, maybe self-driving cars would be safer if they also functioned as safety monitors. -- "Take me to the ski resort, HAL." "I'm sorry Dave, I can't allow you to do that. It's snowing along the way." "Yeah, I know--that's the idea. I want to make some fresh tracks." "Driving through the snow would be more dangerous than driving on dry pavement. In addition, I calculate that skiing is 4.76 times more likely to result in injury than reading a book. Please return to your couch; I will download a new book to your Kindle." -- Incidentally, this was a major theme of Asimov's Robots/Foundation series--that intelligent robots programmed to prevent humans from coming to harm would become nannies of humanity in order to execute that command.
- qwerta 12y agoI would be more worried about insurance companies. They will get way more data and ways to sneak out of paying damages.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- knowtheory 12y agoThis would have been a much more interesting origin story for the Matrix, esp to play off of what machines would optimize for regarding human longevity.
- csours 12y ago
- abdias 12y agoWhat will snow do?...
- snowwrestler 12y agoOn HN I frequently see comments to the effect that self-driving cars will be commercially available in a decade or two, and that they will be safer than human-driven cars. Personally, I question whether either is true, and I strongly doubt that both can be true at once. Humans have a lot of shortcomings--emotions, sleepiness, distraction, the effects of drugs and alcohol--but humans have some amazing strengths too. We've got cognitive abilities in recognizing patterns and making decisions that were honed by millions of years of evolution, and directly trained by, on average, decades of actually driving cars. I think it's easy for technology-minded folks to overestimate the impact of the weaknesses, and underestimate the deep complexity of the strengths. We barely have fully-autonomous self-flying planes today, and I don't know of any research showing that they are safer than human-piloted planes. And flying is a far less complicated domain to automate than driving.
- rimantas 12y agoThose coments are mostly extrapolating results gotten in a place with a nice weather, and every inch of the road mapped.
- dan00 12y agoI think it's easy for technology-minded folks to overestimate the impact of the weaknesses, and underestimate the deep complexity of the strengths. I'm also really astounded when I'm reading the answers about self driving cars here on HN. If you have ever worked on algorithms that are mostly based on heuristics, then you know all of these ugly edge cases, and this uncertain feeling, that you most likely don't have covered all edge cases.
- jusben1369 12y agoI think the risk here is that you're aiming the bar for 100% perfection (very high) when the accurate bar to compare it against is human drivers (far from 100%) So self driving cars just need to be better than your average human driver. That's a much lower bar from the parking lot fender bender to the prevalence of speed in fatalities etc. EDIT: Changed to "100% perfection" from 0% to remove any confusion.
- josefresco 12y agoJust drove about 8 hours and experienced heavy fog along the way. Visibility was reduced to maybe a hundred yards. The entire time I wasn't thinking "self-driving cars would fail here" but rather that a self driving car with it's multitude of sensors would probably do much better considering what it could "see" and also the reduction in "eye fatigue" as driving in heavy fog can wreak havoc on your eyes and perception of movement (not a problem for a computer).
- rayiner 12y agoFunny. I just had my Uber driver take me on a 50 minute trip from the Kennedy Center to Union Station, a trip that usually takes 15 minutes, because he blindly followed the GPS straight through downtown. The entire time I was thinking: "it's 2014 and we still haven't gotten basic route-finding right; self-driving cars are a long way off."
- TwiztidK 12y agoI think a network of self-driving cars might actually help with that. All the cars can communicate where they are going and could agree to take paths that reduce traffic and get everyone to their destination faster. EDIT: Also, these features should be coming soon thanks to devices like Automatic and apps like Waze.
- rayiner 12y agoSo one of the things I used to work on is software for cognitive radios: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio. One of potential features of cognitive radio networks is that each node can share information about its local RF environment, to allow the network to make frequency-selection decisions based on global information. It's easy to describe, very hard to implement. Very, very, hard to implement in a way that works every time, like anything that goes in a car must. Heck, we have so far to go even within the scope of the technology we have today. One of the things I've noticed as a heavy Uber user is that drivers tend to get confused when they're first hailed, and again when they pick you up. GPS systems tend not to give you a good fix on your orientation until you're moving,[1] and when you get a hail on the other side of town, they're really not very useful for giving you the optimal "first turn." This is a really simple thing, that's probably worth a lot of money to a company like Uber, that's really hard to get right with existing technology. With distributed decision-making of autonomous vehicles, you're talking about something orders of magnitude more complicated. [1] My wife and I get a kick every time Siri says "proceed to the route." Which is a lot.
- AshFurrow 12y agoTo be fair, wet roads confuse human-driven cars, too.
- bane 12y agoOne of the interesting things we're finding as we start to coax machines to do human jobs is that humans tend to not accept a machine unless it's much better at the job than a human. For example, on many computer vision or NLP tasks, the current state of the art is about as good as most humans. The problem is that when they're wrong, they're wrong in ways that humans wouldn't be, and the wrongness appears to be "broken" to us and we overweigh these incorrect responses because they're both wrong and not human in their wrongness.
- rimantas 12y agoAre computers able to recognize a cat in a picture and tell it apart from dog?
- maxerickson 12y agoYes. I'm not sure it is the best article, but this talks about recent advances: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530561/the-revolutionary-technique-that-quietly-changed-machine-vision-forever/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530561/the-revolutionar... (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8290441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8290441)
- seanflyon 12y agoComputers can recognize a cat and describe the scene around it. http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-wort...
- laurencerowe 12y ago> To be fair, wet roads confuse human-driven cars, too. Especially in California.
- abc_lisper 12y agoWon't infrared sensors work well here?
- waps 12y agoWater in the air has a large heatmass. So rain leaves a "shadow" in the infrared. Worse: it can make things invisible in infrared sometimes too. Rain/fog distorts an image because there's droplets in the air that function as random lenses. This will affect infrared images just like it affects visible spectrum images. Only things with wavelengths larger than the droplets will be able to see through fog.
- zmanian 12y agoI've seen the Google self driving car on the roads on Mountain View and Los Altos since the current storms started. Clearly they are taking advantage of the weather conditions for data.
- lallysingh 12y agoThis article mentioned cameras, not the laser scanners used by the Google cars (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/28/google-self-driving-car-how-does-it-work http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/28/google-sel...)
- maaaats 12y agoWhich companies had cars here? I've been impressed with some European car makers and their self-driving cars, especially Volvo. They seem to make cars that handles true driving conditions, while American makers have idealized conditions, especially the Google car.
- maxxxxx 12y agoOnce you live in California you start to forget that there are weather conditions other than sunshine and warm. It happened to me!
- hamitron 12y agoSeriously, as a californian seeing rain for the first time in a year I doubted the sun would ever return
- 001sky 12y agoThe lack of skill, experience, and equipment conspire to make it much more dangerous than the objective risk. That's why there are so many hydro-planing wrecks out after heavy rain. And why californians need chains to drive in conditions that are normal on the east coast.
- maaaats 12y agoThen you should try northern Norway. Months without sun, then midnight sun the whole summer! It's wicked.
- jusben1369 12y agoAnd my earliest iPhone's were pretty poor at getting a GPS signal and drained my battery like a madman. Within 3 years that had all changed dramatically. So I'm not sure how much weight I place on current results in an area advancing so rapidly.
- icebraining 12y agoYes, but your iPhone wasn't exactly the first mobile device with GPS; having a smartphone with GPS, Wifi, etc and decent battery life was a solved problem, even if Apple couldn't do it at the time.
- jusben1369 12y agoI guess my point is very smart technology companies focused on solving problems usually experience rapid improvement in the first few years in key areas of performance. So I expect with all of the attention/investment and competition around self driving cars the advancements over the next few years will be dramatic.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI was thinking about this when driving in the recent rain here in California. A lot of data 'goes away' and sometimes I relied on memory of what was there rather than actively see what was there to navigate. I haven't seen any discussion on whether or not auto-cars would have some sort of equivalent to a 'muscle memory' of where they have been driving to help them over the rough patches. In the test case, if the car recognized "oh this is the course from yesterday, even though it doesn't quite look like it, its in the same GPS coordinates" and then try to match larger easier to spot landmarks with its previous experience. That would certainly help it out.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoAnd then you get a case where something is added or removed unexpectedly and the detection is marginal, and the car makes the wrong decision because "it was/wasn't there last time".
- glenra 12y agoSure, but the goal isn't "perfect", it's merely to do better than human drivers. Human drivers make that mistake constantly, so the case you're describing is one where the cars will do MUCH BETTER than people because cars are better at sharing information over time. So we go from a world in which every driver independently has to update their own personal worldview and is thus individually surprised by the addition of a new sign to one in which a few cars are surprised and have to slow down and update but within a few days every subsequent car through the intersection automatically knows the new data.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI really think this is key. Cars letting other cars learn from their experience. Although that too has limits, for example if my car detects a cat in the road that wasn't there before it probably doesn't need to propagate that information.
- danielweber 12y ago"The wrong decision" is very unlikely to be "drive into a ditch." If a stop sign disappears, the car won't figure "gee, I guess I can plow on through." If a stop sign shows up, the car is very likely to still notice it, and if not it still will be paying attention to what other cars are doing. It won't plow into the car in front of it. It will still notice what cars on side streets are doing.
- brandon272 12y agoLiving in a cold, snowy climate, it seems like self driving cars will never be possible here. Winter snow removal equipment scrapes the lines off the roads requiring re-application every summer in my area, and a common sight in the cities is the "re-positioning" of lanes during the winter. Drivers carve out their own lanes in the snow, so a 4 lane road might have only 3 lanes in the winter. I find this challenging to negotiate in the winter as no one seems sure whether they should follow the carved out path or be in the actual lane, assuming they know where it is under the packed snow. How could a self-driving car deal with that? Not to mention inconsistent, icy road surfaces with unpredictable traction and the springtime muck of snow/gravel/salt that makes keeping the windshield clean, much less exterior sensors and cameras.
- maxerickson 12y agoElectronic stability control is already required equipment on new vehicles in the U.S. (and around the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#Regulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#Re...), because computers using sensors are better at measuring traction than humans are at estimating it.
- nogridbag 12y agoIt's also the first thing I disable when driving in the snow in a RWD car, since the last thing I want when trying to make it up a snowy mountain road is for the computer to cut all power to the driving wheels.
- BuildTheRobots 12y agoMy understanding with ESP (My Nissan has it as Electronic Stability Program) was that it uses small amounts of single-wheel breaking to cause the vehicle to keep the expected line during extreme manoeuvring (eg swerving around a child running into the road, or swerving around the car in front suddenly anchoring on). I would have thought your issue with power being removed to the drive wheels is actually the Traction Control system kicking in not the ESP, but then it's possible you have one button that disables both.
- robomartin 12y agoOne of the most important things I learned very early in my CS schooling was that data (or problem) representation is, by far, the most important step to solving a problem computationally. Your computing platform, compiler, language, editor, memory size, speed, etc. cannot compensate for bad representation. While I recognize the amount of work and smarts that has gone into self driving cars it is my humble opinion that the typical approach being taken is fundamentally flawed. The right approach, again, in my humble opinion, is to change the representation of the problem: Roads have to be smart. Cars smarter, yes, but roads need to be modified for robots. Change the problem you are trying to solve and the solution might just become massively simpler. Embedding technology into roads in order to facilitate robotic navigation would solve tons of problems. Private enterprise can take care of parking lots and private garages, and they will, when enough self-driving cars are around to make it worth their while to install the technology. When my kids were younger they had huge problems opening doors around the house that were equipped with spherical handles. If their hands were wet after washing them, even worst. So, we changed the problem: We installed lever type door handles and even the youngest kid with hands full of soap could open the door now. But, hey, what do I know.
- gwern 12y ago> Embedding technology into roads in order to facilitate robotic navigation would solve tons of problems. Private enterprise can take care of parking lots and private garages, and they will, when enough self-driving cars are around to make it worth their while to install the technology. It is easier to have some brainiacs work very hard on making very smart cars than it is to change local government and infrastructure everywhere. If you ever make a plan which begins, 'let's convince every county, state, and federal agency in the USA to change their road construction methods to add this novel expensive feature...' you can probably drop it then and there as a stinker.