Singapore Is the Perfect Place to Test Self-Driving Cars
citylab.com
citylab.com
In America, for better or worse, it would take a long time to mandate these things if they were even possible (considering that the same laws would need to be passed at least 52 times for states and territories). America has checks and balances--everybody gets their say.
>It would be unthinkable in America to force all cars on certain roads to be self-driving only.
Edit: now that I think about it, cheating could be enforced by camera. Assuming the road had a computer network (like a much more reliable Bluetooth), I am sure cars could identify an unauthorized manually-driven vehicle and alert authorities.
To enforce that, you could make the licensing regime more like an FAA private pilot rating and less like a token ritual for access to your God-given right to drive no matter how incompetent.
There are private cities (Celebration, FL), private housing communities (1000s of them), private large corporate campuses, private shipping yards, private military complexes, private airports, industrial hangars - lots of places where you could safely force all cars to be self-driving without any governmental interference.
Edit: It's unthinkable at present but I believe if a city-state like Singapore undertook the experiment and it was successful it could eventually spread around the world like HD adoption. (That's why I said it would take a long time to happen in America.)
Thus, it is an excellent place for testing such things as self driving cars.
I don't know how that compares to other countries though.
[1] https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/dam/ltaweb/corp/PublicationsR...
I wrote a long post about it before, but basically I expect self driving trucks on dedicated interstate lanes to be the start. Then self driving cars on the same lanes.
Over time all interstates will be self driving. City streets will never be unless we get AI with general intelligence.
Driving is likely a much easier problem than artificial general intelligence. Even when it involves evading rampaging toddlers. Sure, if you want perfect safety, you'll need the car to anticipate a great deal —far more than humans currently do, like looking at the walkways as well as the drive lanes.
If we merely want something that's safer than a human driver that's probably nothing more than a (huge) engineering feat.
That isn't actually true. Scenario: Narrow one way road, you get to the bottom of it and there is an ambulance blocking the road. Behind you is a bunch of cars, ahead of you is a few cars.
You need to coordinate with other cars to move out of the way, you need to make use of driveways to turn around, you need to know to override the law and got the wrong way on a one way.
And that's just one scenario. You need general AI to handle all the different things that happen on city streets.
Highways is easier - it's controlled access. And if they block the road it's typically by officials who would have some way to remotely control the self driving cars and tell them what to do (not that that is not a car of worms in itself).
> If we merely want something that's safer than a human driver that's probably nothing more than a (huge) engineering feat.
Not even close. You would need to do better than 99.99999% perfect to do better than a human. That number is correct BTW - that's how rarely humans make a mistake that leads to a fatality. (Injury rate is not quite that good: 99.999% but that's still quite hard for a computer.)
We don't have that level of reliability in a phone, never mind a car. There are some appliances that are that good, but they tend to be very simple.
Such scenarios are rare enough that they could be handled either remotely, or not at all. The ambulance won't get through and its patient will die. Tough luck. But think of the many accidents those automated cars avoided in the first place. It sucks, but it's still worth it.
Also, cars don't have to be fully automated. They can still be remotely controlled, or otherwise warn their company that they should call a tow truck. My favourite example is automated trucks: you'll most likely have a central dispatch per region, with a few operators that manage 50 trucks each. Once a truck has a problem the computer can't handle, it just calls the relevant dispatch, where humans take over.
Also, automated cars don't have to do better than humans in every dimensions. Safety is paramount, but resilience in the face of unusual situations is not. It is okay for the computer to get you to your destination a bit more slowly, or even not at all from time to time. Even public transportation has way less than 99% reliability for my commute to work, and I still take it.
Saying it's fine "it's just edge cases" completely ignores the difficulty.
> But think of the many accidents those automated cars avoided in the first place. It sucks, but it's still worth it.
Did you read the rest of my post? Do you understand just how good the computer would have to be to have any impact at all? I have a feeling you don't.
> They can still be remotely controlled
No they can't. Wireless internet service is not even remotely close to good enough to make that possible.
> Also, automated cars ... every dimensions. Safety is paramount
This is why I say highways only. That covers that majority of the use cases, and the most dangerous part, and the easiest part. It's a triple win. The use case for city roads is basically non existent with the exception of self parking.
> has way less than 99% reliability
That 1% doesn't mean death. It's means slowness. That's not what I mean. The self driving car has to be basically perfect or death is the result.
People very much underestimate just how good people are at driving.
Let's arbitrarily decide that 99.9% of driving time is made up of the "common" cases, and the rest (0.1%) is the "edge" cases. I'm pretty sure there are many more edge cases than common ones.
Now let's further assume that whenever an "edge" case occurs (that would be a couple times per hours), the cars just slows down until it stops or stop being in that edge case. It's not very convenient, but I'm quite sure it is rather safe.
> Do you understand just how good the computer would have to be to have any impact at all?
From what I have gathered, computers are already good enough to work on sunny roads with few surprises. Including towns. Or maybe the google cars don't work as well as I though they did? I wonder how many times the human had to push the emergency shutdown button in their tests.
> No they can't. Wireless internet service is not even remotely close to good enough to make that possible.
Just use a regular cell phone, and communicate through the speakers. 56kb/s is more than enough bandwidth (space stuff like the Mars rover use way less bandwidth than that, and suffer from way more latency).
> The self driving car has to be basically perfect or death is the result.
We don't need computers to be perfectly safe. We need them to be safer than humans. If automated cars kill on average half as many people as humans do, that's already a huge win. Not enough to stop there of course, but more than enough to switch.
Besides, I believe that abiding the traffic code and slamming the brakes whenever something goes wrong is not hard, and already safer than human driving (which take chances, speeds, rides too close to other cars…).
Bugs on the other hand may prove most problematic (see Toyota's unintended accelerations). We may need Nasa like processes to ship that code on the road.
It'll be decades (maybe a century) before Americans give up their right to freely drive their cars.
The are huge individual american rights to move around freely that can't be denied.
I worked in Singapore in April and I loved the place. I felt very safe walking around at night for exercise, and the whole place was well run. I have read some criticisms of the government but people there seem happy, seemed to be employed, etc. A nice place and I would love to go back there!
I'd argue we already have too much testing under "ideal conditions." I want to see self-driving vehicles tested in snow, in rain, in strong winds, in fog, and on mountain roads.
Don't get me wrong, you absolutely want to start developing it under best conditions, but if they legitimately want to get this live by 2020 then we need to expand the scope to less idealised situations.
Unfortunately, the vehicles don't yet work perfectly under "ideal conditions". I think this ought to be the first step. There's no need to have a "blanket" rollout of autonomous vehicles - start in ideal cities and then spread further.
Granted, I DO think that they'll find driving in snow/rain/winds to be fundamentally different enough from ideal urban driving that the exact methods the vehicle AI has "learned" may not directly apply. So, it may merit testing in parallel, because as you've said we need to stop ignoring these cases.
I guess my point is a long-winded way of saying "Yes we need to test those cases, but in addition to ideal urban conditions, not instead of."
When I drive, I wish that your last statement was true. However, you're welcome to look at the traffic view of Google Maps and you can see that's wishful thinking. It's not as bad as places like Bangkok or Manila, but about as bad as your average European city.
Pretty sure Google Maps' traffic maps are scaled based on averages for the road/area and not some absolute scale for easy comparison too (though this being HN there'll probably be someone that worked on it along to correct me in a moment)
It makes perfect sense to walk before running. I don't really see a "mountain road" use case for this tech anyway.
It's been covered a few times that they're constantly running AP algorithms in parallel with the driver when AP is not enabled and filtering the results back home. You're going to get a ton more real world scenarios that way, unknown unknowns and all that.
Are self-driving cars able to handle rainy conditions? I'm not in the industry but thought this was still an issue.
The times I've seen it rain in Singapore or kuala Lumpur it's all or nothing. Fine weather -> 2 foot of water on the road -> Fine weather. I somehow don't think that scenario is in the test plan.
Seriously? I pretty sure all current vehicles need to go through extreme weather testing before they can be brought to market. For example my dad worked on a project testing Ford vehicles in extreme cold and snow conditions in northern MN.
Think of it this way: non-optimal driving conditions is nowhere near the last hurdle for full autonomy. We're a long ways off.
There we can answer that the seeming complete disappearance ox taxis when it rains will persist, because the ratio of customers per taxi shoots up when it starts to rain.
(Where I live (north Europe), you practically don't flag taxis on the street but order it on the phone; when I was living in Beijing, I think the rain phenomenon was simply that all taxis were taken as the first drops came down.)
This is a classic example of short term view and the invisible hand going bad, found in Thinking fast and slow.
Perhaps they’ll also help with the Singaporean phenomenon of the seeming complete disappearance of taxis when it rains—an almost daily occurrence in the tropical clime.
My question is whether the disappearance is real, or just perceived, as when it starts to rain, the available taxis are flagged to use immediately.
Looks like the pay structure (and possibly taxi pricing regulation) is silly for drivers.
Phase 1 - dedicated lanes for robocars, to mitigate problems with the still-dominant human-piloted cars. Robocars capabilities at primitive level, will likely have human-usable controls.
Phase 2 - once their safety and compatibility have been established, robocars will freely mix with human-piloted cars. Robocars will accommodate errors committed by human-piloted cars, and will no longer need human control.
Phase 3 - robocars dominate the roads, while laws and economic structures (e.g. insurance) will favor robocars. Robocars will have localized coordination capability.
Phase 4 - robocars will act in concert over large (metropolitan) distances to smooth traffic flows. Human-piloted cars will become as horses are today - a hobby for the rich.
Admittedly, I am mixing adoption phases with technological ones.
Just that Singapore also has it.
Now they are not evenly distributed in the US, so surely in the US it will happen in certain pockets first.
In the States, the plethora of drivers & traffic creates countless more variables for an autonomous vehicle to deal with.
In the very same paragraph that the article made note of the government's support, it also conceded that the Delphi already had pilot programs in the US.
I would expect to see some concrete examples of laws being passed.
I am not, by the way, saying that Singapore is not auto-car friendly or that they won't have them earlier or anything like that. Just that this article doesn't argue that fact.
(Edit: Not to be coy with my view: I think all the rich countries will get them at approximately the same time.)
I don't think that's a fair comparison at all.
Writing high quality, reliable code (for example, in airplane control software), including testing etc, tends to take 5-8 years. So from a project management perspective, that's the reasonable estimate.
Tesla, with the current AutoPilot, will have to collect data for closer to 20 years in order to have good enough statistics to claim AutoPilot is safer. (Since AutoPilot only works in some situations, they wont get 10 000 miles per year.)
Maybe phrased less combatively: Do you have a source that's not Google (or a Google-slanted PR piece) that has hard data about what's possible today and what will be possible soon?
That might not be bad for new technology and was showing trend improvement, but it doesn't compare favourably with accident rates for human drivers
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
Among people, there are some good drivers and some poor drivers. The average driving ability --- including fast reflexes for dealing with accident situations, for example --- is somewhere in between.
Is it fair to possibly force self driving cars on the good drivers?
(they probably shouldn't jump on the self-driving car bandwagon early anyway, but just a thought.)
I have pretty good reflexes, but that doesn't make me a good driver.
I equate good driving with common sense, not speeding over the limit or taking unnecessary risks, not tail gating people, and in general not being a tool.
I.e. when you're driving a 2-tonne metal tank going at 80 km/h, good == safe.
In this sense, autonomous cars have already far surpassed us.
Again though, I was discussing the situation in which cars were only slightly above average, meaning there were likely situations where some people would do better than it and might be putting themselves in more risk going into a self-driving car.
(if your point was more to make sure people don't take the wrong message away from my post, sorry for this response then!)
People suck at paying attention to boring situations. So, the easiest part of the trip is likely the best thing to automate.
Remember, the actual accident rate is very low. Further cars and humans are likely to make different mistakes so if you supervise and the car does sub second reactions and 24/7 360 degree vision the combined rate is likely to be great.
In addition, impaired drivers causing accidents will pay a fine or go to jail. Who takes the responsibility of impaired sensors in self-driving vehicles?
After all the work that was done with the DARPA Grand Challenge(s) in the past decade, it would be an embarrassment to Google if they couldn't get the cars to work in controlled conditions, rather than it being a staggering achievement in getting them to where things are at now.
I really want self-driving cars to happen, but I see the biggest impediment to that vision of the future being the general public's level of optimism and credulity WRT this stuff, to say nothing of the tech community's optimism and credulity. It's a domain that is a nearly infinite bucket of incredibly hard problems, problems that may ultimately prove insoluble as currently specified. If everything goes well, then maybe in 20 or 50 years a lot of transportation will take place in self-driving cars which operate with sets of known constraints in environments that are (to some degree) controlled.
If everything doesn't go well, then people will keep talking about how self-driving cars are inevitable, and how in a just a few years they're going to pick you up at your house and drive you to work using the exact same roads set up the exact same way as roads are now, doing the exact same commute that they might've been doing when driving themselves. This credulity will push the money and the technology forward, until too many disappointing setbacks occur, and then all the money dries up and nobody's talking about self-driving cars anymore.
If you tell somebody that something is inevitable and almost here and it's just a matter of throwing enough resources at it, it's much easier to get people to give you money to do those things, but as soon as anything happens that doesn't fit that script, they will assume you've been lying to them all along (or just aren't credible), and the R&D money goes away. Whereas if expectations are set appropriately, it's harder to get that money, but as long as there are achievable, realistic goals and people aren't basically pitching magic, then the funding is more likely to stick around during the rough patches.
What harm is there in, say, letting a suburb of Pittsburgh try it out. Then extend it to Detroit and so on.
One of the most surprising discoveries upon moving there was that, unlike nearly everywhere in the West, in Singapore a pedestrian does not have the right of way. In the U.S. this is ingrained into all driver education courses, but in Singapore they do not even slow down around pedestrians who are crossing a street.
The other observation that jumps out to anyone I know who has visited Singapore is how the buses are driven. A Western bus driver would likely lose his job for driving as erratically as they do in Singapore. In fact just a couple weeks ago one of these drivers killed a pedestrian [0, 1]. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.
Self-driving cars would be in for quite a test on the roads of Singapore.
[0] http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pedestrian-dies-after-...
[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/bus-drive...