Hacker News Reader

Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your lane' 'Other driver in round about about to cut you off' 'Pulling out to cross a busy 4 line highway with no median or traffic signal'

Not to mention, any snow on the road is going to make it supremely hard for a computer to determine where their lane is, or even the road is.

View on HN

Driverless cars have advantages over humans too. Faster reaction speed, constant 360 degree surveillance, lack of distraction, (theoretically) better control of brakes and steering to handle skids.

Waymo has demonstrated solutions for many of the edge cases you mention. This video is from 3 years ago: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=530

Regarding snow, it maybe a difficult problem, but if cars can't see road markings, neither can humans, so how do they do it? Sometimes by following a car in front. Though far from real autonomy, my Tesla doesn't need to see road markings for autopilot to work, it will fall back to following the car in front.

And.. Why does Waymo have to solve this inclement weather problem now? Surely it would be better to demonstrate safety in good weather, then light rain, then heavy rain, then light snow? They can just refuse to operate in bad weather unless they are confident about it.

Weather and trips being not completely predictable, the car would have to be able to pull over and stop if there was weather the car wasn't certified to handle, and if the human was asleep in the back seat or whatever and took a long time to get ready to take over.

I think I've seen at least a prototype Waymo car (it was exhibited in the Computer History Museum) that was designed without the steering wheel and pedals for a human to use. That wouldn't work so well given that the car might pull over and be unable/unwilling to drive anymore. (Maybe you can put an expected upper limit on how long the weather will remain bad ... Nah, storms can last for days, by which point a human who didn't bring food and water could be in bad shape.) I guess you could rely on being able to call AAA. Though a bad blizzard might be exactly the case where AAA would have a hard time reaching you. The human being able to take over eventually seems like an important feature. I guess that is the way all the cars in the field (that I've seen) work.

Does anyone happen to know if self-driving cars are practicing "pull over and stop" maneuvers? For some reason I've never heard of it. I think it is the only potentially reliable fallback mechanism if the car encounters, say, weird terrain it knows it can't handle. (I don't think you can assume the human will be able to respond within n seconds.)

> I think I've seen at least a prototype Waymo car (it was exhibited in the Computer History Museum) that was designed without the steering wheel and pedals for a human to use. That wouldn't work so well given that the car might pull over and be unable/unwilling to drive anymore.

It'd be fine - you just need to have some backup option. A small joystick or two behind some panel, or screen control, or perhaps you control the car with a phone app. It's like having an emergency spare tire - you just need a minimal driving UI that can be used in case of emergencies but users otherwise don't need to see or deal with. It can be inconvenient and speed-limited, since you don't expect to use it much.

Though if there's decent connectivity an obvious intermediate option is remote operation. Some human who is really good at driving might take over for a bit, driving your car from the comfort of their own home or office if you're not comfortable doing so yourself using the backup control pad.

Other edge cases include: Amish buggies, rotaries in Boston, Syracuse's upside down traffic light (green is on top), etc. The possibilities are endless; how can you test them all? Humans are really good about adapting to novel situations on the fly, not so much computers.

I mean, you are right about humans as a species, but oh god, not as drivers. As a cyclist commuter, pass/get passed by a lot of cars and see a lot of irregular/irrational behavior. Everytime there is a change in the traffic rules along my route (detour, construction, closed lane, new signalling) you will get a pretty high rate of people who either ignore the change, panic and drive recklessly, or panic and come to a confused stop.

Maybe we need driverless cars that can show panic faces when they don't know what to do and be coached by a friendly citizen what to do? It would be super cute.

Agree. It's a fun game to think up edge cases that would challenge a self-driving car. On average these cars will far outperform human drivers. I see human drivers blow through stop signs every day completely unaware that they did so.

Didn't Uber car did exactly that? Perfect robot would outperform average human. Sure. Average robot to average human? That's much more interesting...

An uber car also killed someone and the emergency automatic braking system was disabled.

Chernikov tail lights

Zoox has hinted that their vehicles will use sounds (at least) to signal intent and reactions.

One approach would be to record 100-to-1000 trials of how human drivers navigate each particular edge case in vehicles instrumented for autonomous driving.

Sadly, no one seems to have figured out a way to economically motivate human drivers to do this.

The problem are not the expected edge cases, but the unexpected ones. No amount of hard coded reactions are going to do for those.

Isn't this part of what Tesla has been doing though? At least they sell cars that simultaneously has:

- human drivers in demanding situations

- sensor and compute package planned for autonomous driving

From there it is mostly a question of

1. getting permissions to collect the data

2. finding some efficient way to store -> sift for interesting situations -> magic happens here -> lots of regression testing -> self driving car -> profit!

I would think?

'Series of malicious actors dressed as police directing car into a shipping container to kidnap occupants'

Malicious actors posing as police officers pose just as much risk to human-driven cars.

Humans might be used to that situation depending on where they live.

How do humans handle edge cases anyways?

I think it comes down to being able to model the world around us, having a model for human behavior, animal behavior, etc. If we see a baby deer, we look for the mother deer.

It feels like we're also really good at creating multiple open-ended stimulations in the back of our mind about how things might play out, where they can easily be paused or fleshed out depending on which became more probable or if we want to learn something. It's kind of a running background process.

> How do humans handle edge cases anyways?

A minimum 14 years of "human learning".

Or, judging by traffic's constant deaths ... Their don't.

Anyone who's seen a Waymo car drive around the valley knows they're much safer than human drivers. They're annoyingly good, because for instance they just never miss a bike and are careful around them, and if you can't tell why it's a bit annoying.

But I've always come away from such incidents with a feeling of "I should have seen that". I've yet to see them screw up even once.

And yet you can't drive from SF to San Jose without seeing a human driver screw up.

> And yet you can't drive from SF to San Jose without seeing a human driver screw up.

I don't think anyone is debating that in perfect conditions the computer cars can sometimes out perform the worst drivers.

If your concern is terrible drivers killing themselves and others, what you should be arguing for is much stricter standards for obtaining a driver's license. Probably removing 'full coverage' insurance and only allowing liability would go a long way as well. Can't keep wrecking your vehicle if nobody's buying you a new one.

>If your concern is terrible drivers killing themselves and others, what you should be arguing for is much stricter standards for obtaining a driver's license.

Or for keeping a drivers license.

>Probably removing 'full coverage' insurance and only allowing liability would go a long way as well. Can't keep wrecking your vehicle if nobody's buying you a new one.

I disagree... a used car is pretty cheap. Cheaper than full coverage, if you have a bad record.

I think this should be attacked by increasing the minimum liability coverage. right now, in California, you can drive with homeopathic levels of liability insurance... $35K isn't going to cover very much hospital time/time off work if you hit someone who has a good job. The minimum liability coverage should be 2-3 orders of magnitude higher.

Of course, for either of these things to be politically possible, we first need a society where it's reasonable to get from A to B without a car. An idea that is fought against daily even in relatively dense places like where I am now.

"Constant deaths" = 1 per ~100 million miles driven

Self-driving cars might be able to beat that, but most of the self-driving car models aren't even close to 100 million miles driven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

(from page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... )

Furthermore self-driving cars are at this point ONLY driving through areas with a lot of pedestrians. You'd expect them, therefore, to have much higher accident fatalities than normal vehicles. Why ? They're always around pedestrians. Instead, in the first years of operation, they're safer than humans.

Even with Uber's less than stellar safety practices, and Tesla's ... well ... how do I put this politely ? [1] seems a good link. Let's just say Tesla owners could be more careful, especially since they signed a contract stating that they would be more careful (and youtube has much worse than that video). Given that that's how people use self-driving cars I would argue that's pretty damning for human driving skills.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT5-Z2MswgU

Not sure what your point is. That graph shows about 10 deaths per billion VMT, which is exactly the number I stated. It is a completely unfounded assertion that they are safer than humans.

> How do humans handle edge cases anyways?

30,000 deaths per year suggest that humans fail at these edge cases all the time. Maybe ate their best a human outperforms a machine but as any person who drives if other drivers are at their best.

Divide by millions. Statistically quite low failure.

Exactly, these statistics don't represent the 'average' driver, let alone a 'good' driver.

I think it's still close to the most likely cause of violent death for an American; Neck and neck with gun deaths, if you count the self-inflicted.

I mean yeah, compared to medieval statistics, it's great, but in comparison to the other non-medical ways to die you face as a 21st century American? automotive fatalities are quite high, and the problem deserves a lot of focus.

Best way to reduce traffic deaths is to reduce traffic. That requires changing of zoning so people can live near where they work.

You could also make it harder to be qualified to drive.

I view autonomous cars as the 'lazy technocratic' solution to a problem caused by total government mismanagement.

You say lazy, I say possible. potato, potato.

(I mean, I agree that reducing miles driven is also a good goal. I'm just saying, making safer cars is a lot easier than talking people into allowing higher density construction and cities built around transit and walking rather than around cars)

No, quite a lot of them die because of stupid stuff like: texting while driving, drink driving, huge ego.

You forgot ‘A woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom’ and ‘people playing frogger on roads’. And Waymo self driving car didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

Waymo can of course cherry pick the scenarios which they present about. Meanwhile a human driver still has to intervene every few thousands miles.

Things like snow aren’t necessarily a problem in the beginning because you can start by selling a self driving car that doesn’t work in the snow. There’s still a market for it.

People only have to do real driving in the worst conditions? That sounds like it wouldn't work out too well for them.

No, there are entire countries that don't have snow.

I think we need to keep our expectations realistic. Most of those would challenge a significant portion of human drivers (and the scenarios suggested by sibling commenters are even more likely to cause a human to crash), and it's perfectly acceptable for a human driver to say "X crazy thing happened causing me to crash. What the fk?"

"There's a ball in the middle of the road, is a kid going to pop up from behind a parked car and run towards it?"

I've seen this multiple times as a situation that people can deal with instinctively but computers won't. However people need to be trained to handle this situation; it is explicitly mentioned in the driver's handbook.† So I don't see this as a "win" for people over computers.

† CA driver's handbook page 37: http://driveca.org/cms/assets/uploads/2014/09/dl600.pdf

"There's no ball in the middle of the road, a kid pops up from behind a car, you have 0.1 seconds to apply the brakes before you hit the kid."

It's just as easy to come up with any sort of contrived situation for which a machine would outperform a human.

Except us humans drive in the middle of the street in residential areas often below the posted speed limit just for this reason. And if we live on this street, we can better anticipate the conditions.

While I am sceptical about the hype about autonomous vehicles I fully expect them to be equally good at that long before they go mainstream.

Why?

- They aren't as easily distracted as humans,

- you can program them to stick to the rules even if slowing down results in problems for the passengers

- you can program them to care about any neighborhood, not just the ones we live in

> Not to mention, any snow on the road is going to make it supremely hard for a computer to determine where their lane is, or even the road is.

HD mapping allows cars to know precisely where they are on the road even if they cannot see the lane markings below. In fact, georeferenced HD maps can pinpoint the car's location in the world down to less than 10cm of absolute precision (as opposed to relative precision)

These are tough issues, but they're probably not all relevant in the suburban Phoenix area where Waymo is getting started. Maybe it rolls out one city at a time for many years and that's okay?

I would add some more edge cases - driving a street in Delhi or Bangkok. Or navigating small Italian town where streets layout had been designed circa 12th century.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com