Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
HN is a pretty critical place most of the time but sometimes it's valuable to take a step back. The challenges associated with building a car that can drive itself are pretty insanely difficult (even something as straightforward as "how do we get the training data?") and the fact that we're now at a point where there's a possibility of self-driving cars working in snowy conditions is pretty awesome.
90% of the way to true "self driving" is plenty to revolutionize things.
Isn't that basically what @usrusr was refering to? People who rely on the autonomous driving so much that they basically forgot how to drive themselves?
Demanding a probability of zero can make anything impossible. And you're not even asking for zero fatalities, you're asking for zero "issues", whatever those may be. That is a wildly unrealistic demand. Human drivers are not that reliable either, especially in bad whether conditions.
I've seen the demos of the start ups in the valley, the local experiments, but i'm still waiting for a single real-world deployment, even limited to local driving, such as city to city taxi driving, or item delivery.
On the other hand, i did hear of the trouble with tesla's autopilot "2" not driving properly on regular roads under the sun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg).
There are self-driving cars that drive themselves well in clear conditions, but these are the R&D cars with an expensive sensor suite on the roof and a bunch of processing power in the trunk that can't be found in production cars.
That's still more money than not having those components in your vehicle, for sure, but that's well within luxury car territory and costs are still coming down rapidly.
I build autonomous/ADAS testbed cars in Detroit and it's astonishing the stuff that the California cars get flustered by. LIDAR is baffled by snow, RADAR sensors get packed with slush if they're mounted too low, etc.
There's a lot of challenges, and I'm glad they're finally getting to it.
One particularly problematic variable that will undermine weather calculations and traction will be the complications of road de-icer. In high-altitude inland regions, de-icer is not used, with a few exceptions after storms are long gone and the temperature has warmed. These regions should be a piece of cake for autonomous vehicles. Detroit in mid-winter probably resembles this for a few months due to low temps but humidity will destabilize de-icer during early and later winter. And, temp fluctuations resulting from humidity, coupled with high snowfall, necessitates the use of de-icer to prevent the city from getting buried in. In coastal regions like CA, de-icer more predictably melts and cleans the roads. In regions like Chicago, de-icer will hve every effect imaginable, both creating ice and melting it multiple times a day. But if a road is not de-iced the traction will follow a different pattern. I can’t imagine how a self-driving car could determine this. To further complicat things, de-icer can often create ice and be counterintuitive in only shaded parts of the road. De-icer is used so differently, an so often foolishly in different regions.
Michigan also tends to just salt the shit out of roads. Probably enough to impact the chemistry of the Flint River. Not so much way up North where it stays colder. Sand there.
As far as the cars, they just measure the available traction several thousand times a second. Electronic stability control is mandatory for new cars in many jurisdictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#R...
As for traction on ice, if the vehicle is already on the ice, it’s too late to slow down. I wonder how the cars could know when they are coming up to ice. Humans can rarely know, but have some complicated ways of identifying, I think from glossiness? And ice is much more rare than snow/slush but both can be present side by side. Either way, I think they will figure it out. Sand can be awful to clean up in urban areas when too muh is used.
It doesn’t sound like you’re describing the Detroit I grew up in, where dozen+ car pileups are a regular occurrence, particularly the big hundred+ ones on 94 out your way. That’s even discounting the wide-area ice storms that knock out power from everything getting coated in three to four inches of pure ice, which I can remember happening at least four or five times when I was younger. The last couple winters have been relatively light. We are due for a whopper.
Seriously, Michigan winter is accelerated natural selection for drivers. You learn quick or you die.
The challenge is as roads get narrower (<2 cars), rougher, etc. to the point where you really need high-clearance 4WD and may even have to deal with washouts, etc. I don't expect you'll see autonomous driving systems get here for many decades if only because it's not worthwhile to do so and so much is dependent on evaluating the current conditions on the ground.
Detroit is a great step, but I'd really like to see some more challenging areas handled before I'm convinced.
In an ideal world, I trust autonomous cars over human-operated cars. So if the conditions are too dire for autonomous cars, I really don't want to be out there with humans driving.
In the U.S. I'm not even sure what such a mechanism would look like? How could you enforce this?
> In an ideal world, I trust autonomous cars over human-operated cars.
I don't understand this mentality out-of-hand, especially because I've been in cars that have had mechanical failures. There is no mechanical system that is perfectly reliable, and I'm not sure we're considering the emergent effects of this properly.
Finally, unless you outright _force_ all drivers to use the autonomous mode, then users can still take control of their cars as they see fit and we're really not improving anything. Case in point, the video says that driving deaths disproportionately affects young _people_. Which is garbage.. it affects young _men_ who are 8 times more likely to die in a vehicle that they're driving than a female of the same age. I don't know how autonomous modes being available are really going to help this group.
Some entity produces the data that finds roads unfit for driving based on weather and publishes it, local governments consume that data and institute a driving ban, non-essential personnel cannot drive or they'll get a citation.
> I don't understand this mentality out-of-hand, especially because I've been in cars that have had mechanical failures. There is no mechanical system that is perfectly reliable, and I'm not sure we're considering the emergent effects of this properly.
Correct, but I believe that a well-conceived autonomous car has a much higher standard of proper operation than a human, so even if there were mechanical problems, I'd trust the autonomous car to halt operation before the human.
I also don't really understand your last point so sorry for not addressing it.
Unless there was a problem with the halt override.
Are you more likely to get food poisoning from a person prepared meal or a snickers prepared by machines? Now, why assume driving is different?
> Are you more likely to get food poisoning from a person prepared meal or a snickers prepared by machines? Now, why assume driving is different?
Both are so slim who really cares?
Really, you must compare failure rates and severity on both sides. Looking at say aircraft, autopilot cause fewer crashes than pilots and spend vastly more time flying aircraft.
> autopilot cause fewer crashes than pilots
How often do pilots really cause crashes, though? In the sense that it's the pilots fault-more often than not, it isn't. Most crashes are not the result of pilot failure in normal operation-but pilot failure in situations out of their control.
It's hard to blame a pilot when an engine cuts out (a mechanical failure).
my point is not that automated cars are never going to work. But it's just a utopia on here, about how all of our problems will be solved. Computers can't beat physics.
PS: Roads do get closed in the US on a regular basis, generally they have cops direct traffic to other areas or just set up signs.
I mean, Google has prototypes with no steering wheels, and has as an explicit goal the ability to transport children, blind people, the elderly, etc. Eventually they absolutely do want to force drivers to use autonomous mode (at least "force" in the sense that users will need to opt in when they choose a vehicle or service, rather than minute by minute during a trip).
What this looks like is generally highway patrol blocking off the road and the news of the road closures or advisories is broadcast on the radio and television (and now the Internet, I suppose.)
Even down in sunny Austin Texas we have road closures when heavy rains inundate low-water crossings, though it seems every few years someone tries to make it through one and ends up drowning.
Chains are illegal on Minnesota roadways.
So all those young men can still do all the things they need a car for, they just don't get to legally operate one until they have demonstrated a higher level of proficiency.
And all the ones that aren't just total assholes can let the car drive when they have been drinking.
You realize that most states already do this, right?
IMO it's a dumb, inefficient drag net because being black and driving 5-over is not a strong predictor of whether or not someone will drunkenly drive off a cliff on their way to prom.
To paraphrase an acquaintance who drives a tow truck:
Basically all deadly crashes are a result of an inability to drive properly (either via distraction or impairment). Actual "people being bad at driving" rarely causes deadly crashes by comparison. People make bad decisions that make them bad at driving.
When a drunk couple goes off a cliff it's always a dude driving. Dumb things involving cell phones are less deadly but skew more female.
The best way to drive in the snow is to get out and do it at a time when there is light traffic. Go find an empty parking lot. Learn how your car handles, learn to rock your car to get unstuck. Learn about gearing, learn what no traction feels like. Learn what a skid feels like. One day, you might not have a choice but to drive in the snow, so you might as well spend an hour or so working on your driving skills. Not to mention all these skills translate to making you a better driver all the time, and could help you some day avoid an accident.
In Sweden, before you can get your driving license you have to take a course where you spend an hour on a skid pan, taking corners too fast and emergency braking (a "moose" shows up out of nowhere) so you know how it feels and what kinds of distances and reaction periods are involved.
Also in winter, snow tires are legally required between december and march (and this is enforced with random DUI-checkpoint-style stops)
Allow me to add the obvious implication
>anyone who can afford what I consider to be the minimum car worth buying should be able to afford one
Plenty of people drive cheap junk they bought with their tax return and pay insurance month to month. Those people deserve to get to work and the grocery store without having to violate any laws. The damage to our society from not requiring people to use snow tires is far less than the damage to our society that would be done by a huge chunk of people in violation of a law for a good chunk of the year.
Laws are how we quickly and easily categorize what a society finds acceptable and unacceptable.
Laws are not how you determine what is and isn't acceptable.
Our society does not require snow tires for part of the year. If this is so abhorrent then write whatever elected official represents you or move to northern Europe.
Good luck with that if you live in a northern climate. Modern life would essentially stop functioning here in Minnesota during the middle of winter if no one drove because of snow or ice.
Between the efforts of the DOT (plowing, deicing) and following some common sense (slow down, increase your following distance, avoid sudden changes in direction, anticipate stops, ensure your lights are not obscured by snow etc) there are only a handful of days when travel is not advised (usually due to blowing snow).
Source: New Englander
Going 35 on a road that's marked 45 but usually driven at 60 in good weather isn't going to give you time to stop short for something so you might as well go 45 if that's reasonable and piss off an order of magnitude less people.
Source: New Englander sick of being stuck behind people like you.
The article even says it: "But it won’t be Waymo’s first foray on dangerously snowy streets: the company has previously tested its vehicles in winter conditions outside Lake Tahoe."
Clear view screen is a round window that is usually located on a normal window. This window rotates at ~1500 RPM, thanks to that it will not be covered by snow or rain. It is used on ships and in locomotives.
It looks like this: https://youtu.be/uIwWnWvikkQ?t=24s
In general, however, I agree that doing what a prudent driver would do in the situation is probably not an insurmountable problem.
The thing is that it is vastly different from any other scenario a self-driving car will ever experience or train for. Humans on the other hand grow up with snow and know how it behaves, how it covers the environment and what features are prevalent despite of it (and consequently, people not used to snow that suddenly finds themselves in a snow-covered landscape often fail miserably).
Falling snow can significantly cover both video and disrupt LIDAR immensely. Just as our vision, thing is we already know how to cope with it, it is a greatly different problem than driving in good/ok conditions.
I did the self driving car class on Udacity and it was super effective as a primer for how these systems work in general and framework for solving these problems.
As a human in a snowy region, who has been in some pretty dicey conditions, I measure the slope of the road. Roads are typically shaped like a triangle, so if your car changes it’s rotation on the axis that is your direction of travel, you know you are outside of your lane. Even my smartphone has sensors for that kind of measurement.
Thankfully, the PGH left is starting to die off as they install newer traffic light systems with dedicated turning lights/lanes.
There are very few brick roads in Pittsburgh. Most are in older sections of the city where the residents have lobbied against a paved road for one reason or another.
And I would imagine steep hills and icy conditions are exactly what you want to test self-driving cars on to see how they handle it.
Many places still have brick. It's not a majority, but it's not a couple of historic district streets either.
"Available in Canada (summer only)"
"Shipping to winter regions is far more expensive because we need to use human drivers half the year. So we generally avoid focusing on them."
Not a new problem. Geography has always strongly impacted industry. But interesting to think of it from this perspective.
I'm excited to see attempts to tackle the truly difficult form of autonomous driving.
The problem is likely around vision. A lot of winter driving is done at an unsafe level of visibility.
It is probably better having non static rules for roads. Snow should reduce speed limits, and white out conditions should be used for emergency travel only.
Unless you can utilize radar to obtain better visibility than human drivers, in which case you could probably drastically reduce the number of winter accidents.
I still would like to see more races. In the snow too.
https://electrek.co/2017/02/18/self-driving-car-race-crash-b...
Its easily recognizable from space:
https://twitter.com/astro_kimbrough/status/82136198923045683...
And what about criminals tricking cars into doing things?
It will be a long time before smart people trust automated vehicles to take their kids without adult supervision. Cars will have to be able to interpret our actions and intent better than we can. Or at least be able to defend their cargo, record evidence and alert authorities.
At night, I was told by friends who are locals when staying there, as have other visitors I've talked to, that you do not want to stop at traffic lights in many areas of Detroit at night, at all. One person told me he was pulled over while stopped at a light and told this by a police officer, even.
Apparently, in these fairly deserted semi-industrial areas, stopping at a red light simply makes you a target. I was also instructed to leave room in front of me to move my car if someone tried to enter my car at a traffic light, and to be ready to roll up my window on someone's arm if needed.
The near team (in 1-2 years) goal should be getting 20, 50, 95% of their own employees off the personal cars for the daily commute.
Their parking lot should be empty after 2 years.
Or charge themselves if it is really idle.
Subways solve this problem by running every couple of minutes. Buses generally don't solve this problem well because traffic and alighting / loading delays cause them to bunch up. But on-demand self-driving cars can solve this problem, as long as there are enough of them close enough.
(It's also the problem Uber solved.)
Similarly, in many transport corridors intercity rail runs several times an hour (not so much in the US) and shuttle flights run every hour or two. Which are also sufficient in those contexts, in that it becomes reasonable to show up at the station/airport without checking the timetable.
Otoh, it replaces the latency and stress of rush hour.
This leads me to suspect that the stress of waiting for public transit is largely incidental and could be reduced by better station design, without having to make any (difficult, expensive) improvements to service frequency and reliability.
* Short distance between stops (due to low housing density).
* Traffic due to lack of bus lanes.
* Long time spent at stops due to cash payments and/or single door entry, rather than proof of payment or tap on stations at every door, no cash allowed.
* Inaccurate/nonexistent realtime updates.
A bus every 30 minutes isn't a big deal compared to SF/Bay Area travel times, but only if I can rely on a timetable/GPS to arrive at the stop 2 minutes before departure and be confident with a scheduled arrival 2 minutes before my appointment.
Wait, this doesn't make sense. Lower density means shorter distances between stops?
No, lower density should mean longer distances between stops, because you will go for longer distances before another person wants to get on or off.
Higher density would mean shorter distances between stops because there will be more frequently people wanting to get on and off.
If anything, you have it backwards. In most of SF, places with high housing density (e.g. Van Ness) have their stops closer together than places with far lower density (e.g. Geary in the outer Richmond).
I suspect (but do not know for sure) that this is done on the theory that dense neighborhoods require more granular transit access.
One bus replaces probably 150 car trips a day (assuming it makes ~3 runs, partially full. If you assume similar capacity utilization on cars (3 passengers), it would take ~50 car trips to replace those 3 runs, effectively putting 17 cars on the road for every bus currently in operation.
LOL! What magical fairly land is this?
Convincing local governments to allow more housing to be built, so as to solve the housing crisis? That's crazy talk!
Building self driving is an easy problem compared to the impossibility of THAT.
The problem is everyone else who votes against rezoning.
more housing = more residents = more local tax income
I’d rather they get them working maximally safely in a confined environment than pretend to be universally safe when they’re obviously not.
That’s not intuitive to me. I don’t see why snow conditions would teach us about likely accidents in Pali Alto.
A lot of technology only exists because their original problem set was extreme in nature (e.g. things out of NASA or military research). I think a lot of "easier" problems in autonomous driving could benefit from a breakthrough solution that got discovered in the course of solving a harder problem.
Google having full parking lots doesn’t harm Mountain View and Sunnyvale traffic as much as extra trips do.
* Car has detected only 3 wheels touching road * Car is on Woodward * Proceed as normal
Also, I've always wondered, if self driving car crashes who is legally liable? Is it the programmer or the occupant?
http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/tech-teams-productivity...
> Starting in April, Waymo began testing a free service with select passengers in Phoenix, using some of its 600 minivans from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.
Lived in Michigan for 30+ years myself, on the West side of the state. We get a lot of lake effect, and it's only 3 hours from Detroit. It's also 6 hours from the middle of the U.P., where they get _real_ snow. And if they really want to, they can go into Canada.
Should be a good set of real-world tests.
As a Canadian who lives in the very snowy Maritimes I have a lot of experience with driving in the winter. I started driving at age 14 and my job as a teen, 20s and 30s required me to drive in all conditions. Winter driving has to be instinctive there is no time to think and as noted above also depends on context.
If a pedestrian walks out from the side of the road and that road has a curve maybe even a downhill curve what now? Slamming on the brakes even ABS may not help. The inertia and being on an angle may (my guess is will) cause the vehicle to slip towards the outside part of the curve. If the vehicle is in the right lane it would slide into oncoming traffic.
Counter-steering at the very instant your vehicle starts to fishtail is a learned skill that has to be instinctive. And when to use that technique or when not to use it.
Slush is I think one of the most dangerous things a winter driver will face. A driver who drives into a line of slush that may be left on the center line can easily have their vehicle jerk violently to the left. It can be a situation where you have less than half a second to react.
Brakes on a curve has to be one of the most common problems with inexperienced winter drivers. I see it all the time even with drivers who I know have been living here all their lives.
Who will scrape off all the optical sensors in the morning? I've had ice so thick and so hard to get off you'd swear it was concrete glued to your windshield. Not to mention the slush, snow, dirt-salt-water mix constantly splashing up. Anyone with a backup camera knows it's a constant battle to keep it clean or it's useless.
It will be interesting to see the results but I think there is far more to self-driving in the winter than on clear, dry roads in warmer climates.
http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/02/07/detroit-mayor-announc...
I've made this suggestion before, but all commenters remarked about the risks of trusting another car, trusting another signal, hackers, script kiddies, and other malicious agents. The safest inter-car communication was determined to be adaptive cruise control.
Look at it this way; if you get false positives about hazards in front of you, the consequence is maybe you slow down unnecessarily. If you get a false negative, that's really no different from no data at all - your car should behave the same.
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way...
I'd expect the opposite - a self-driving car might outperform human drivers significantly in conditions where we tend to underperform - poor visibility, longer braking distances, poor steering control - because it will be more effective at adjusting than a human.
This is the wrong way to think about it. An autonomous transportation service that works only in great weather is already a multibillion dollar opportunity. The revenue from providing services in places like California and Arizona can fund expansion into harder areas.
Nobody said that PCs were useless in the 1980s because many parts of the world didn't have reliable electricity. Nobody said web search was useless in the 1990s because most of the world didn't have Internet access. Likewise, you don't have to solve for driving in monsoon rains or Indian traffic before you can print money with autonomous vehicles.
As a recognized tangent to that tangent, there's a big problem up here in the real North ( where basic necessities of life are ludicrously expensive. In part, at least possibly, due to transport costs. Would be amazing if self-driving vehicles could regularly deliver goods up there with no human risk on ice-roads. May be a pipe dream though.
That's assuming they can deal reasonably well with the reduced visibility and change in behavior of other drivers.
They'll probably also slide on a few right turns before they get the settings fully dialed in.
You could say "just don't drive in blizzards", but on a long drive you may often end up in a blizzard when you started in clear weather. Frequently this happens in areas where there are no safe places to stop for miles.
I'm not an expert on self-driving car sensors, but it's not hard to imagine that they could be made much less weather-dependent than the human eye. Driving through blizzard conditions is incredibly disorienting and terrifying, so the potential of better-than-vision detection of roads and traffic is IMO the most promising way for self-driving cars to handle snowy conditions.
it would simply not drive itself into a situation
Seattle would be impossible.
Why are companies going through the great expense of constructing full-size mock-ups if the domain problems haven't been solved on smaller mock-ups? Is there a fundamental difference between a 400 lb self-driving robot and a 2-ton self-driving robot - beyond the advertising novelty of being inside the car? Edit: If both robots are outside on a driving track, not in the Amazon warehouse.
And if "snow-vision" and other problems have been solved with smaller robots, or in other domains, why do news articles like this treat the topic as though it's entirely foreign and to be feared, instead of helping readers associate these concepts with existing concepts to drive acceptance?
going to be fun watching them deal with snow. though their approach has tended towards detail mapping. someone is going to figure out a break through in marking roads or perhaps they will get sensible and start with limited access highways first.
Self-driving cars are at the intersection of numerous solved domains, yet integrating these remains strangely difficult for the largest companies in the world.
Snow is not just increased visual noise. Just off the top of my head, with no experience in self-driving cars and limited experience in computer vision:
Snow (on the ground and street and curbs) is a vastly lower-contrast visual environment where numerous traditionally distinct features of the landscape are covered by a blanket of white.
Snow is a more dangerous and difficult-to-stop-in environment, with totally different physical dynamics. Recognizing pedestrians (and their intentions), road blocks, debris, etc. is probably already a challenging problem, and with snow it's not only more difficult, it needs to be done from a much farther distance to give adequate stopping time.
Along with snow there are issues with recognizing icy patches and other especially low traction sections on the road and adjusting control inputs accordingly.
I can't tell if you've never driven in snow or never even attempted a basic computer vision or robotics task in your life, or both.
Computer vision is not solved.
Sensor fusion is not solved.
Predicting human behavior is not solved.
[0] - https://www.flirmedia.com/MMC/CVS/Tech_Notes/TN_0001_EN.pdf
There's a difference in environment. How can you seriously think "Well if they have self-driving robots in controlled warehouse scenarios, what's the novelty of self-driving robots in unpredictable and often treacherous real-world public road scenarios?"
The application of robotics in industry is still very much more akin to industrial automation than it is true autonomy. There's a ton you have to take into account to design a system that works well. In practice, this means that traditional automation is typically still the better solution than full autonomy.
I also don't get that tone from the article, either.
Orders of magnitude in complexity difference and a much more hostile environment to survive in.
I am not really comfortable writing this but seriously, if you have to ask this question I am actually happy you did not receive funding (but I am obviously not happy that you ended up homeless), that was not a prototype, it was not even a proof of concept. It was maybe a small step up from a toy. Sonar as a sensor may give you a little bit of input data but your arduino does not have the processing power to extract meaningful information about its environment from that data nor does that sensor give you sufficient information that you would use to pilot a couple of tons of steel through an environment inhabited by fragile humans.
It's sort of sad to see.
1. What evaluation metrics should we use to measure the advancement of self-driving technology?
2. How can we measure the public's level of acceptance for these technologies, and what impact does media coverage (positive or negative) have in that respect?
For example, I would not personally gauge that SDCs are in early alpha. However, I live in a suburb of Phoenix, where Uber, Waymo, and Cruise [0] are all conducting extensive testing; I usually observe between 15 and 30 distinct SDCs during my 20-minute commute. I expect this familiarity has (by design, I'm sure) made me more comfortable with SDCs than most. I also assume that the environment is somewhat simpler than other metro areas, as we have very little precipitation and a mostly grid-like street layout.
My judgement of these cars is that they approximate the behavior of an extremely stodgy, overly conservative, but ultimately very alert driver. For example, they respond well to being cut off, dealing with late light changes, or unpredictable pedestrian behavior, while dealing poorly with things which require decision-making, such as making a right on red, or preemptively changing lanes to avoid the frequent stops of a bus. In other words, they've been optimizing for safety, and not trip efficiency; I think that this is probably the right order of priorities at this stage of development.
Given this, I would be comfortable taking driverless trips around town, on surface streets; I would therefore classify the current state of development as early beta more so than early alpha. However, this is a subjective assessment, not based on any objective metric.
At the same time, I read the news too, and I think we are observing the clash of two competing agendas. On one hand, you have the tech companies painting an overly-rosy picture of development, probably to soften up the market to increase (eventual) penetration.
On the other hand, you have overly-pessimistic outlets preaching various types of doom (job loss, trolley problem, etc) in order to drive clicks through fear, or (cynically) to poison the market and buy time for later technical entries to catch up to the leaders.
Both of these tactics will have varying levels of receptivity with different groups, roughly corresponding (I expect) to the Rogers adoption curve [1]. Therefore, I expect we'll continue to see both optimistic and pessimistic coverage for quite some time.
[0]: In this order of development progress, in my opinion