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Comment by peregrine | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who's lived in areas that have regular snow storms you know that eventually mutli-lane highways turn into single lane tracks of clear road. Usually these tracks are somewhere in the middle of the road and everyone just sticks to them because a semi or snow plow cleared it for us.

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.

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It's strange to me how these conversations tend to center around failure modes that would be apparent to

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?

As someone that grew up driving in the midwest I get a little nervous about autonomous driving being developed in California. It's a bit of a cliche, but CA drivers are notoriously bad drivers in winter conditions.

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.

Not northern Michigan, but there is the University of Michigan's "Mcity" near Detroit: http://ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/23020-u-m-opens-mc...

Uber's Advanced Technology Center [] is in Pittsburgh. Having grew up about 1.5 hours north of there, that is a good area to test snowy conditions.

[] - http://www.uberatc.com/ (which seems like a unofficial site but I can't find anything else)

Having spent multiple winters in Pittsburgh, it's not like a winter in the Rockies or the Tetons where as the GGGP describes, there are only single plowed lanes in multilane highways because it's snowing every day for two weeks straight. In Pittsburgh, the lanes get plowed fairly quickly and salted to death.

I suppose I was thinking more about the snow storms up near Lake Erie, which is only about 2 hours from Pittsburgh. Living in Erie, there was a few storms that led to I-90 having whiteout conditions and single lane traffic. Winters in Pittsburgh are fairly mild in comparison.

Having never lived near the Rockies, I don't know how it compares. They probably are worse though.

Tahoe is only a few hours away from Bay Area and virtually everyone* in bay area goes there at least a few times a year to ski. This year Tahoe got a lot of snow.

*everyone = Google/Apple/FB employees

Yeah I mean Tahoe gets crazy snow, but there are some things that happen to the road at super cold temperatures mixed with varying levels of rain or snow.

I think these mixtures are more prevalent east snd north of CA.

It's not that usual for large projects to proceed a fair distance before seemingly obvious problems become apparent. Bridges that fail to meet in the center come to mind.

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.

The "lane lines optional" nature of snowstorms definitely is going to require a leap of logic I don't soon expect self-driving cars to understand.

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.

Not to mention the composition or what might be below the snow.

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.

Electronic stability control is required by regulation in several jurisdictions (US, Canada, EU now or soon). From that it can be inferred that computers are better at some aspects of it already.

I don't know what you think ESP is but it's purely a "damage control" type of driver aid and is only a layer of programming on top of ABS.

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 understand what it is. It works because it can accurately estimate the available traction. A lot of the problems drivers have in slippery conditions boil down to not correctly estimating available traction.

> Not to mention the composition or what might be below the snow.

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.

> 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.

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.

Once cars have better connectivity it may be easier. Assuming busy traffic you could follow the average track of the last n cars etc.

It's hard to suggest how this would be handled on a all-encompassing scale. I'm sure Google would like to simply track every car on the road, but between multiple brands of cars and software, and valid privacy concerns, this isn't a great solution. Also, you'd need to validate that data carefully. You wouldn't want false submissions to end up strongly recommend cars drive off a cliff.

So nationalize it? It's not like big brother isn't already tracking traffic trends. Why shouldn't the Dept of Transportation be in charge of directing automated traffic?

There's ups and downs to that. Companies like Google would argue that their systems are too integrated to their business to be nationalized. (Unless we just nationalize Google. It's enough of a monopoly now........)

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.

Humans haven't been able to figure it out either (so many Winter accidents). At least the automated car will drive slowly and at a safe following distance.

Interestingly, driver aids have been implicated in causing more severe winter accidents, eg. this [1] 100-car pile-up in Sweden a few years back. Basically, people don't understand that the ESP lamp flashing means "slow down or you will probably crash". Drive an old, RWD, no electronics car and you'll be more aware of dangerous conditions. 100% non-overridable self-driving cars may someday fix this, but things will probably get worse before they get better. Humans being humans, they will think the car is overly cautious most of the time, and put it in manual because they're running 5 mins late.

The more interesting question about the automated car is "can it do a Scandinavian flick"? They should come with a dedicated button for that.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21035634

> driver aids have been implicated in causing more severe winter accidents, eg. this [1] 100-car pile-up in Sweden a few years back.

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 couldn't find anything in English, but local media had discussions along these lines at the time, with incident responders blaming ESP systems. They had ambulances with flashing lights being hit by new cars coming to the scene of the accident, i.e. it didn't happen within just a few seconds; in this case it's apparent that drivers were oblivious to just how bad the conditions were.

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.

It seems like the high reflectivity of snow would help in case of following the tracks of the previous car, where I'd guess the car's tracks are a little bit less reflective than the fresh untouched snow on the rest of the road?

Are self-driving snow plows realistic, even if just on highways? Would such plows eventually be more affordable, be able to run almost 24 hours a day and mean that more road is cleared?

(It never snows where I live so plowing or driving on snow is an alien concept to me.)

They're probably realistic, but I'm not sure they'd make a lot of sense for most places right off the bat. They really only need to be out on the roads right after / during a snow storm, which isn't 24/7. For some places in the midwest, this might even be once a week max for a few hours. A human will be a lot cheaper until the cost comes way down.

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.

I don't mean that the plow would operate on the same road 24/7, but that it could be plowing wherever required for longer shifts.

Solution: don't sell driverless cars, sell only driverless snowplows that people would just happen to also use as cars. Snow problem solved. :)

One would assume long term the snow plows would be automated as well, and therefore be clearing in a way automated cars would make best use of.

I'm curious how they'll handle whiteout conditions, however.

You'd hope, but many area's "snow plowing" means the locals get together and hire someone with a road grating tractor to come and plow. AND if they have the extra budget toss some dirt on there.

:-) Obviously this doesn't apply to country or greater highways.

On the other extreme, Montreal's snow clearing costs an average of $155 million per year.

With I would assume a large portion of that going to labor costs. Automated snow plows could be a huge help.

Lane following tech is an area of active research for snow plows. I guess it frequently relies on installed roadside infrastructure though.

Edited to soften the first sentence, a quick search didn't find any active users, just research.

Can I propose a simple-as-fuck solution?

Just follow the car in front of you. That's what the majority of driving is anyway.

The majority of driving, probably. The majority of avoiding death and injury while driving, especially in snow, is to NOT follow the car in front of you.

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.

As a person that has had to learn to drive on the "wrong" side of the road, let me tell you that works really well, until it doesn't.

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.

Hopefully the car makers will be able to use data from the times when the driver needs to take over to build better image recognition of the ideal path in snowy roads.

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