Ford says it conducted successful tests of driverless cars in snowy conditions
bbc.com
bbc.com
The method described is a really great way for car's to get stuck in snow drifts by trying to stay in lanes. Near term drivers will PROBABLY just take over in those situations but long term we'll probably need a combination of Lidar and Cameras to do this type of work.
Will the car be able to measure the depth of snow on the road? And find the most driveable part of the road? The high reflectivity of snow probably isn't a good ally for this use case.
Snow and ice are by far the hardest conditions for anyone driving. I have no doubt a computer can figure it out and be better eventually, until then it will be interesting.
ESP just modulates brakes to keep you from going sideways. It's basically automated cutting brakes paired with traction control and ABS.
All ESP does is utilize the car's existing technology to better do what the driver wants. It pretty much only comes into affect when the driver cranks the wheel hard enough to use up all available traction. It keeps the vehicle in an understeer condition and uses all available traction to try and steer in the desired direction (by acting like cutting brakes).
The point of this is so that the "AWD means I don't actually need to know what I'm doing people" are prevented from sideways (oversteer) because understeer is a lot easier for a novice to recover from and if he/she hits a pole he/she hits it head on utilizing the part of the car that's good at crashing "softly"
The traction control part of ESP is somewhat irrelevant. If the used is trying to give it throttle while the ESP code is doing it's thing and the ESP code is telling the traction control code to override the user then the user should just pull the fuse because you do better doughnuts that way...
I don't feel like this is particularly harder than any of the other problems self-driving cars face. To achieve performance on par with human drivers simple need to do a couple of things (which are what I do when driving in snowy/icey conditions):
1) Categorize current/recent road appearance into groups.
2) Do tiny periodic break checks on each relevant group to determine the traction available in that group.
3) Trigger a new set break checks when conditions change (e.g. exterior temp changes, precipitation changes, traffic density changes or road-type changes such as exit ramp or bridge)
This road surface analysis combined with a bit of traffic analysis should also allow you to determine 'emergent lanes' in snowy conditions.
Use a thermal camera to find the road? Or perhaps contrast, as the parts of the road with less slow should have roadway peek through. To determine how much snow you're dealing with, you detect wheel slip, which can assist in determining depth.
The biggest issue would be that this is still a rapidly developing field, and the one thing government is not good at is rapidly evolving technology.
But fundamentally, we will need something controlled by an agency or government, or at least a nonprofit organization of some sort. A single corporation can't control our nation's transportation infrastructure.
The more interesting question about the automated car is "can it do a Scandinavian flick"? They should come with a dedicated button for that.
The linked article, AFAICT, doesn't implicate driver aids in the accident, at all. (It's a rather short article, and the video doesn't mention anything about driver aids either.) Am I missing something?
I'm not saying ESP is a bad thing, mind you. The technical system works well and has reduced accidents overall, this is proven in several studies. There's been a few faulty ESP systems causing accidents, e.g. the Audi A3 and the Alfa Romeo Spider around '05 (fixed in recalls), but overall it's a success. But the more abstractions you put between the car and the driver, the more your run the risk of drivers ignoring, or not being aware of, bad conditions. Educating users about proper operation of any system is notoriously difficult.
I'm curious how they'll handle whiteout conditions, however.
:-) Obviously this doesn't apply to country or greater highways.
Edited to soften the first sentence, a quick search didn't find any active users, just research.
Just follow the car in front of you. That's what the majority of driving is anyway.
As far as error rates, it's feels significant to me. I've driven maybe 500k miles in my lifetime and would be very surprised if I haven't seen more than 50 cars ahead of me spin or slide off of highways.
There is nothing more nerve wracking than arriving at a huge intersection with multiple turn lanes going onto bridges or into tunnels and being the first car sitting at the red.
a) anyone who has driven in that situation since it's not even remotely an outlier of an event
b) anyone who took their self driving car out into that situation more than a handful of times
we've already seen self driving cars leave their lanes in response to pedestrians or road hazards or just temporary detours around construction. Why would a snow bank not be avoidable as well?
Of course the rational side of my brain knows there are brilliant people from all over the country (world?) working on autonomous driving for these companies, and they will have to do testing in all weather conditions across the whole country.
Perhaps it would help relax fears if companies like Google or Tesla opened (and publicised) an all-weather driving lab in someplace like northern Michigan.
[] - http://www.uberatc.com/ (which seems like a unofficial site but I can't find anything else)
Having never lived near the Rockies, I don't know how it compares. They probably are worse though.
*everyone = Google/Apple/FB employees
I think these mixtures are more prevalent east snd north of CA.
I remember being at a meeting talking about the implementation of a chipset where each of the three chips required another chip to be running first. Global conditions can be more obvious to an outsider than those involved in many details of creating X big plan.
Why would a snow bank not be avoidable as well?
The Google car in particular is intended to follow a pre-defined path derived from more-detailed-version of Google Maps with obstacle avoidance being just deviations from that pre-defined plan. It seems like the situation described by the op, the road-structure itself changing, would present significant obstacles to that strategy. Essentially, rather than solving the problem of guiding a vehicle down the road using visible spectrum image-processing, Google avoided the problem by various stands-in; lidar for obstacles and satellite maps for positioning. Clever but that sort of thing will have failures that might be surprising - and surprisingly obvious.
(It never snows where I live so plowing or driving on snow is an alien concept to me.)
They may make sense for areas that get a ton of snow, and have snow storms that last days, but I find it hard to believe the price will be cheaper than a human for a while.
Sadly, I feel like people won't accept self driving cars until they can drive in the snow as well as in dry, clear conditions, which won't happen for a long time, if ever.
Honestly it's a bit silly that self driving cars have to do better than humans to be trusted -- as long as they are doing as well as us, mathematically, we should want them.
Maybe the insurance companies, which are mathematically inclined, will end up fixing this by providing lower rates for self driving cars, even in snowy climates.
You can still walk.
They don't allow your rocket car on public roads today, so obviously there's some level of bubble you're willing to accept.
Also generic falls are only 4K behind vehicle accidents. Somehow poisoning beat vehicle accidents by 4K, I'm not sure how, maybe counting prescription drug interactions and allergies?
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age...
It would appear the most dangerous daily activity is eating and not exercising. So your kitchen and living room couch are by far the most dangerous things in your life. Deep in the decimal points come poisoning, falling, and driving, all roughly the same odds. Someone else killing you is about half the odds of those three. Drowning is about a tenth the odds of driving although most adult drowning is probably outside the house and most people don't swim every day (although it is excellent exercise). On average you're about a fifth as likely to die of HIV than driving so the bedroom is probably safer than the drivers seat, on a very long term average, although HIV clusters extremely strongly into certain demographics, so bedrooms are basically safe for almost all of us and a death sentence for certain demographics.
In summary, there are some daily household activities that are safer than driving, such as having recreational sex, but your kitchen and living room couch are maybe a hundred times more likely to kill you than driving, and its about equal odds for falls, poisoning, and driving. The odds are about 49 in 50 that you're not going to die in a car accident.
(edited to add this is worrisome WRT death rates if people sit in self driving cars and stuff themselves with junk food while watching TV or something... the overall death rate might very well go up, even if vehicular deaths supernaturally dropped to zero)
More likely there will just be no-fault where both parties pay unless there is a spate of accidents that point to software/hardware issues.
https://usinsuranceagents.com/answers/3251/what-is-self-insu...
Leasing capacity with little delay will only work in regions with dense population.
Individually owned vehicles are not necessarily maintained to schedule. I would bet that a large percentage don't receive much attention at all, other than oil and filter, unless something goes wrong. Therefore, personal liability won't entirely go away.
If a company owns a fleet of vehicles, and maintains them according to the manufacturer's recommendations, it is now impossible for them to be liable. A collision is always either the fault of the manufacturer or of another vehicle. Therefore, the owner of the vehicles need not have insurance. (This is not the current legal situation, but I expect that it would be in a few years.)
An individual person who owns a self-driving car would have exactly the same situation as above, provided they maintain the car to the recommended standard. In an attempt to deny a claim, the manufacturer would have the ability to argue that the vehicle was not maintained to standard, in which case the person would be liable for the results of that negligence.
It would certainly be a legal problem for the manufacturer, but it doesn't necessarily point to a fault in the autonomous driving system.
I sort of expect that licensing for autonomous systems will in fact be fuzzy and require operators to cover liability, not require manufacturers to make flawless systems (whatever that would mean).
That seems way too pessimistic.
Sure, but most human drivers can call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interacting with the physical world in general. They have an incredibly rich mental model, allowing for adaptations that would be risky or impossible to program into an autonomous driver. For example, when lane lines are missing or obscured, human drivers will often follow the car in front of them... unless they observe erratic behavior that might indicate the driver ahead has lost control. What's "erratic behavior" is a judgement I wouldn't expect near-future software to be particularly good at.
Of course, there are areas like reaction time and feedback-based control where autonomous drivers will always be vastly superior to human ones. Which is why it seems to me that the safest option in the medium term is likely to be (as it is today) an increasingly software-assisted human driver. This is the primary reason I'm down on the chances for wide adoption of fully (or mostly) autonomous drivers in the next 5-10 years: Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative. The active participation of the human will fall off over time, but I think it will be a much flatter curve than many enthusiasts expect.
Unfortunately, there's a cliff where if you aren't stimulating the human enough, they stop paying attention. They can't help it. Their neural architecture is fundamentally structured to do that and merely trying not to isn't going to cut it.
We can't have automated cars that 98% drive autonomously but beep when they need help, right now. This could work if the car can reliably predict when it is going to need help in 10+ seconds, but I'm not sure that's practical. (Which I phrase that way on purpose... maybe it is. I'm just not sure. Would certainly take a lot of work and some very conservative automated driving.)
> a judgement I wouldn't expect near-future software to be particularly good at.
Its going to take a fleet of a ten thousand self driving cars a week to have driving experience equal any person alive.
Thats why Google / et al are putting millions of miles of data into these logic engines before they even attempt to sell them.
Well yeah, I want to be able to drive my car year round. If it doesn't work in the snow it's useless for months for a large portion of the country. Even here in Seattle the rain is a big challenge.
There's a range limit on terrain profiling, though, imposed by parallax and the height of the scanner above the road. The higher, the better, of course. For a scanner 2m above the road, you can get good profiles out to 20m or so. This is enough to let you drive about 35- 40mph, which is enough for most heavy snow situations.
LIDAR can be used to see through fog, snow, and dust to a limited extent.[1][2][3] Better than human vision or cameras.
[1] http://viodi.com/2015/02/17/better-eyesight-than-humans-the-... [2] http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-helicopter-pilots-clea... [3] http://www.laseroptronix.se/gated/Rangegatedcameras.pdf
So, in order to work, it needs a mapped area. They skipped the actual problems with driving in snowy conditions. I guess I'll have to wait a while longer for an actual solution. At least the didn't go the full GPS route since I've been on roads that are marked 10 yards away from their actual location.
This is pretty much exactly the same thing that humans do. I drive much better on a road with missing lane markings if I have driven on it before, and just like me, these systems will have degraded performance without the precompute.
These cars require a lot more detail than traditional Google Maps data provides. And there's a huge concern about how they'd adapt to changes in the roadway which may have not made it to Google's servers yet.
Source, by the way: slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html
FWIW, a Googler has done a TED talk about having the car recognize police officers holding signs and temporary things like that, more recently, so they may have made strides in solving this problem.
But at it's core, the Self-Driving Car Project seems way too reliant on Google's cloud servers for my taste. I'd love to have a self-driving car, but it needs to be self-driving, not Google-driving.
I would not surprise me if we would eventually see every traffic light broadcast its GPS location, cycle pattern, and phase, either using radio or by modulating their light source.
That still is risky (hackers could hack the logic in a traffic light), but less risky than relying on one central authority to know what he whole world looks like.
Also, I don't think it is a good idea, but chances are police officers will have ways to stop self-driving car without giving visual signs.
To prevent hacking, the data transmitted by the traffic lights could be digitally signed using the public key of the jurisdiction. If 2 way communications is required, vehicles could sign their data with a vehicle key too.
Something like this would be a good way to securely allow lights to change their behavior when emergency vehicles or mass transit vehicles approach, broadcast road warnings to all vehicles, broadcast amber alerts. It could also receive reports from vehicles on average speed in road segments, reports of icy conditions (from vehicle traction feedback), reports of potholes or other maintenance issues, etc.
I just see far too many weird edge cases for car without a steering wheel to be feasible in the next few decades. Automated driver assist, sure. Taking over almost all the time, sure. But the dream of having it take you home drunk / take your kids to school without you / let you sleep on the way to work is pretty far off IMO.
Though there are some edge cases companies like Google might be able to do in the shorter term. An Uber-like service only needs to show you the closest it is able to pick you up and drop you off, and can largely ignore the parking nightmare entirely.
That muse be old. In their TED talk from last year, they had it spotting and reacting to cyclist hand signals, school bus mechanical stop signs, and even a police officer directing traffic at an intersection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiwVMrTLUWg
edit: I see you mention this below.
Weird article, though. The author says:
> In fact, when I first wrote about the car for MIT Technology Review, Google admitted to me that the process it currently uses to make the maps are too inefficient to work in the country as a whole.
but his previous article he links to says
> Maps have so far been prepared for only a few thousand miles of roadway, but achieving Google’s vision will require maintaining a constantly updating map of the nation’s millions of miles of roads and driveways. Urmson says Google’s researchers “don’t see any particular roadblocks” to accomplishing that.
(and, incidentally, you quote the word "impractical", which appears in neither quote :)
I also hesitate to trust the TED talk, to be honest. Even some of Google's earliest videos of their self-driving car project seemed to portray a level of capability beyond what their cars could actually do without a lot of hand-holding.
Based on GPS + Lidar + other sensors, the roadway and surroundings will be mapped to within centimeters -- which should make navigating during inclement conditions fairly straight-forward.
These systems might fail on snowy roads that have never been traversed previously, but what percentage of driving is performed on roads with hundreds/thousands of cars passing every day? 99.9%? 99.99%?
(The only crash I've been in involved someone else losing control of their vehicle and crossing the center line on a major highway, which probably informs this perspective a little bit)
But this year, here we are non day 11 and only 3 fatalities so far! I'm hopeful we can keep this rate through the spring.
In the long term, 4 or 5 nines will probably better than most drivers.
Leaving aside malicious map data for now, high-speed roadways would tend to be well mapped, and low speed roadways should be discoverable in real time.
What could be very dangerous is bad map data in addition to a construction zone or road washout. I do think that places like construction zones will be the first to have V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) installed - to be extra sure that vehicles are aware of unusual conditions.
1) Pull over / turn around
2) Pass full control to one of the passengers
3) Find a longer/slower route with sufficiently good conditions/mapping
It is a challenge for a human, I feel for the algorithm folks trying to test the obscured vision.
Secondly, when driving in spotty traction conditions, it is good to use a lower numbered gear and a safe speed combined. That same loss of traction event can result in a very rapid spin of the tires due to the higher gears and torque combining to produce a rapid increase in tire spin rate when not constrained by the weight of the car and traction.
This can happen before a human can respond.
The higher gear puts the engine at a higher rpm and closer to it's natural unconstrained speed, which diminished both the event and it's impact considerably.
The human experiences momentary chatter as the grip of the tire varies, but does not experience runaway spin and the abrupt loss of control it brings.
I would think an automated car could be programmed with this all in mind and do rather well.
An awful lot of humans could use this kind of data programmed in as well. :)
Have they tested a driverless car "push it out of a snow-bank" mode yet? :)
Countryside usually there is a lot more snow on the street and especially next to the street. Detecting "landmarks" there will be hard.
Also if you combine LIDAR with stereo cameras, you will find out like Mercedes dod in the 1980s that cameras have problems with low stand sun (light rays), common in winter season (evening). So winter conditions will be harder to solve.
Roads are typically resurfaced only once every 15-25 years, and in many municipalities, shrinking budgets mean that some roads are just outright being closed rather than being maintained.
I suspect there is an issue with update frequency or spatial resolution, but it seems like it could be a good fit for the sort of best-effort approach described in OP.
Can it hook up its own jumper cables?
Can it scrape the ice off all those sensors?
Can it scrape the ice off the license plate, windows, lights and everything else needed to not get a ticket from an irate cop?
Can it stop to give a lift to a stranded person on christmas eve?
It can certainly navigate and move in snowy conditions, but I can't see it actually driving in them.
Firstly I can see any of these being fairly easily solvable. We're still in the early days in this tech. It will likely take decades to really nail it.
Secondly, even if half are solved, that's half of things I would have had to do anyway (well scraping ice of windshield instead of sensors).
Thirdly I do recognise there are issues e.g. "Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs." This would still be problematic in heavy snow and away from distinct fixed landmarks.
But can we just appreciate the advancements that we are seeing year on year!
Airplanes deal with far worse sensor icing conditions every day. It's a problem that needs to be considered, but not a terribly complicated one. Cars have had heated windows for decades.