I actually think this is one area where people are conflating a perception problem with a much more complex problem.
In many ways, “perception” is solved or close to it. But this is just a subset of the self-driving problem
In many ways, “perception” is solved or close to it. But this is just a subset of the self-driving problem
Think about seeing a playground ball rolling into the street. Most human drivers would anticipate a child jumping into the street after the ball even though they’ve never experienced that situation before because they can correlate the perception with non-driving scenarios (I.e. playground + ball is associated with children). A self-driving car may not have the non-driving context and I’m not sure society is willing to accept the outcome while the cars gather enough data to learn.
And that’s to say nothing of all the off-nominal maintenance related conditions to account for.
Maybe there can be enough data sharing to update models effectively. It will be interesting to see this industry evolve
If you do not allow for frequent doubt, aka re-classification, you get hallucinating systems, imagining a bike-rishka as a slow car with people hanging out
I believe a case of a pedestrian being killed by a self driving car was related to the system reclassifying enough to initiate a deliberate delay timer. In a system traveling 60mph this delay in decision was enough to cause a mishap
The serious accidents involving self-driving cars have all been huge failures at the basic "don't run into things" task. Google/Waymo, which seems to be past that, has subtle problems, like "projected that bus couldn't fit through space to left of car in wide lane and so turned slightly into path of bus and was scraped." The standard Waymo accident is "advanced into intersection, detected cross traffic, stopped, was rear-ended by human driver at low speed".[1]
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
It appears the mitigation for a high false positive (I.e., nuisance alarm) was to program in a delay (I.e., “action suppression”) which inadvertently introduced a worse hazard, the timetable from it is in the link below
[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/06/uber_self_driving_c...