Honda claims it will launch the first Level 3 autonomous production car in March
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These are not sudden dangerous handoffs, but they do mean that a driver can't be drunk or asleep when behind the wheel.
I can't imagine the customer response to a self-driving system they can only turn on once a year would be good.
Seems like an obvious PR/Marketing nightmare.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-acti...
Drivers get into accidents ALL the time. Having a self-driving crash is entirely expected. It's also a relatively rare occurance.
Having the system not work in the majority of cases will make literally every buyer upset.
Already, Toyota has released their third version of driving assistance, TSS2.5, which has reasonably decent ability to stay in lanes on highways. For anyone who does any highway driving, it's a competent system that a driver can use a good portion of highway driving. And it's likely less capable than Honda's system.
OpenPilot is another example - pretty good at most roads on highways or large boulevards. Like others, not for use in city streets.
At least for the American road system, you may be underestimating how much time people spend on large, well-defined highways that could use this system. Some other countries rely less on big highways and this could affect the portion of time available to use it.
A car that works at L3 only a sunny day on low-density highway is useful to have.
Perhaps we would call the system you worked on "high level 3", and Tesla type systems where you have to be able to take over in milliseconds as "low level 3". Marketing departments would be tempted to call your system level 4.
The categories are well defined (SAE J3016) and have legal implications. If the marketing department is tempted it'll have to go through the legal department.
I don't know how anyone can claim this.
If someone steps out in front of the car with no notice and no stopping distance or room to drive around, how will you safely transfer control to the driver?
Well that's my point. The car doesn't know how to navigate it. Neither will the driver.
There are some cases where you can neither navigate nor safely hand over control. So 'there will be exception cases we don't know how to navigate, but we have a plan to safely transfer control to the driver in them' cannot be a true statement.
I certainly hope both know how to handle it. In your scenario there is no "good" option, but there definitely is a least-bad option. Likely it's to stand on the brakes and scrub off as much speed as you can before hitting the pedestrian. It might change the collision from a fatal one into "just" broken bones.
Or that the driver dont know how to drive...
To apply this to self-driving cars, we need more driver support. Visually identify cars and obstacles which could be an issue to supplant the driver's identification. Help the driver keep in a lane. Help the driver keep a speed relative to traffic around them. Help drivers see in the dark, and past bright headlights. Help drivers see lane lines through snow packed roads.
Help the driver see and hear things, but don't override their decisions.
Some of these technologies are available today in luxury cars - let's make it available to everyone on the road.
It's a good article with coherent arguments.
I don't know why authors give their work flippant titles and then are confused when people assume it's a flippant piece of work.
'Don't judge a book by its cover' isn't a reasonable complaint when the author has deliberately given it a silly cover!
When it comes to titles for articles, this is both memorable and far less click-baity as is normal these days.
"Don't judge book by a cover" doesn't apply to judging an article by it's title. See how silly it is?
[0] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/most-common-causes-coll...
- Distracted drivers, bringing their attention back to the hazards on the road.
- Fatigued drivers, by alerting them to a hazard they missed.
- Drunk... yeah, probably won't help much here. Hopefully we can get to the point where you can't start such cars while impaired by alcohol.
- Speeding - again, improving knowledge of hazards, such as corners they can't navigate at the current speed, or vehicles which are at drastically slower/faster speeds.
Don't be quick to dismiss how technology can augment humans. Anything a car can learn to eventually handle on its own, it can notify a human about on a much faster time scale (as in it won't be the perpetual 3 years away, it could be now, since we don't have to perfect the reaction, just the detection).
And, perhaps most importantly for you, this doesn't preclude the development and deployment of fully automatic driving systems when they're actually at level 4/5. In the mean time, we can make a meaningful and broad drop in the vehicle accident statistics.
EDIT: Since this may not be clear - I expect this information and these warnings to be coming 4-5 seconds before an incident would occur, giving the driver classes you've pointed out sufficient time to react.
If the goal really is just to reduce how many people die in traffic there are far easier ways than self-driving cars. The goal of self-driving cars seems to be far more than just reducing traffic deaths, that's just the part that sounds good in public.
Given what I read about Tesla, they'd most likely blame the roads, the driver or simply lie about the capabilities and push forward because "it's safer than humans!".
I drove 40,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina and 54,000 miles around Africa [1].
From experience, I can tell you the vast majority of vehicles sold in the developed world wouldn't last a couple of months on 'rural third world country roads'. The potholes, corrugations, mud, dust and everything else are intense.
For eg, this is how I crossed the Democratic Republic of Congo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV8V3GdOcPU
[1] youtube.com/theroadchoseme
In some sense, the self-driving system gets to be trained with experiences of failure, probably under the expectation that no intervention will occur (i.e. the "policy" cannot include human intervention). But the human driver doesn't get to learn from experience when to not trust the self-driving system (because getting it wrong can be disastrous).
Perhaps a missing piece that human drivers _should_ participate in, but almost certainly won't, is training in a simulator. There's a methodological challenge here -- ideally the simulator training should focus on scenarios where the self-driving system is weakest (i.e. where it's plausible that the driver will need to intervene), but those are likely also cases where we're worst at simulating the behavior of other cars/pedestrians/cyclists/loose object.
If we had enough self-driving crash data (like a black box), where the fault was of the autonomous system, and where human intervention could have prevented the crash; that data could be used in the simulator. So the player would be experiencing simulations of actual crashes.
Say for example, the designers never trained the car's system to recognize someone on a skateboard as an obstacle.
Obviously a lidar based system would spot the skater, but a camera+ai system depends on being trained to identify each type of obstacle as an obstacle and avoid it.
Do you really need to train your AI to spot people on skateboards vs rollerskates vs rollerblades vs heelies vs sliding on ice vs traveling on a travelator vs standing on a moving vehicle vs ...?
OK, being able to recognise the differences and act accordingly might be useful but the principle of "person getting closer to vehicle" should hold sway for most situations?!?
I think the big thing is that not all of these 'persons' move in the same way. A person in the exact same location could both be a 'hazard' and 'not a hazard' based solely on their velocity, and their ability to change direction quickly (and are they chasing after something which isn't a hazard, but which is intercepting your driving path). They don't just have to identify the person, they have to be capable of forecasting that person's movement.
IOW, someone walking and someone on a skateboard are different risks, because the skateboard could move into your path of travel before your pass them, whereas someone walking would not.
>human moving towards you at X speed
Lidar systems will work this way. Camera+AI not necessarily, it will still need a way to sense relative speed otherwise you are banking on an AI to identify an obstacle in an image.
Don't assume that self-driving software is designed with even a minimal level of competence.
Footnote: there have been many articles about this incident posted to HN. Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19333239
Probably yes, but they are not relatively good yet and certainly haven't been in the past. Most of the 3D video processing algorithms that are good enough to be used for self driving were created this year, so until they are productionized, we don't have any data on it. Still, probably we're just 1 or 2 papers down the way (to quote from 2 minute papers youtube channel :) ).
Definitely. My last couple vehicles have had Lane Keep Assist and Adaptive Cruise Control. I believe those two equate to about "Level 2" of autonomous driving. Whatever the technical definition is doesn't matter though, the important point is that those two features alone make driving long distances so much less mentally taxing.
The Volvo system in particular is great... keeping your vehicle firmly in the middle of the lane like it's on rails. Frankly, it's better at that task than I am and only requires slight and occasional steering wheel input to stay engaged -- just enough to know you're paying attention.
Before these systems, I'd be mentally exhausted after driving 2.5 hours to my parents house, especially if there was stop n go traffic and it took even longer. Since these systems, I arrive feeling mentally refreshed instead of drained. There is no way I'd buy a general purpose vehicle without these systems ever again and I look forward to any other ways that automated systems can augment my ability to drive safer, more precisely and with less effort.
I tend to drive faster, so slow drivers in the left lane drive me a bit batty.
With ACC on, that tendency is blunted heavily, and I just roll along, making occasional adjustments. But my temperament is much improved.
A lane change assist which speeds up and steers to the other lane is level 2.
I honestly don't understand how this has proved to be "a lot more difficult to bring to market than any of the major automakers..." I'm not an expert, by any measure, but this seemed to be a nearly impossible thing to bring to market anytime soon. The technology seems impossibly hard, sure, but more importantly this is something that is new and looks super scary to most people. Every single time one of these things fail it's going to make headlines, and that's going to make it even scarier. I just can't believe Honda (or anyone else) got this right so fast. Even if they're like 95% of the way to having it perfect (or whatever the measure might be), that last 5% seems like it's going to be REALLY hard to get right without some serious trouble and some bad PR.
The easiest opportunity in the US would have been to dress up the HOV and Express lanes and use them. They have controlled access and are specifically marked already to distinguish them from other lanes. however too many seem bent on doing it all at once for everywhere.
The first three tiers are not difficult. This claim by Honda doesn't not provide any more details other than they got a certification. We do not know if anyone else even applied for it or exactly what it entails.
Why is that? Afaik at least according to European and Japanese [1] laws, L3 is the first level where the larger liability of the OEM comes into play. That is because the driver can remove his hands from the wheel and therefore will need significantly more time to prevent an accident.
[1] https://hsfnotes.com/cav/2019/06/06/japan-allows-level-3-aut...
These are in very limited areas. An autonomous vehicle that can only drive in these lanes will be autonomous a small portion of the time.
>What needs to be done is force standardization of road markings and signaling and correct it where it is not compliant.
Maybe it's different where you are but road marking and maintenance, especially as you get into secondary roads, can be rather haphazard. This is not going to change markedly so that people can use autonomous vehicles.
Not looking at the road and taking over at a moments notice seem to be contradictory items. Also who/what is auditing the drivers attention?
Elsewhere in this thread, someone gave examples where a human takeover is needed but there is significant warning time: (1) exiting a highway to an unimproved road and (2) coming upon construction work with human-directed traffic control.
Driver attention is monitored with cameras in essentially all Level-2-and-above autonomous cars, I believe. The machine vision is good enough to detect sleeping.
They are just quiet about it. In part, this seems to be cultural, in part it seems to be where our major news comes from and the fact that it rarely reports on stories in other languages (and even more rarely reports on them well). There have been many discusisons on HN of the goods and bads of Japanese work culture, but one possible outcome of that hierarchy and control being a longer term strategic focus, and internal commitments to quiet & purposeful innovation.
The Japaneses didn't really bring electronic systems and fuel injection into the world faster than anyone else. They clung to their vacuum line spaghetti control systems embarrassingly far into the 80s.
They also got blind-sided hard by the minivan and the midsize SUV.
Can and "should do so despite being able to afford otherwise" are very different things.
See Honda and... * variable cam timing * hydrogen vehicles * aging in place technology
as someone shopping for a family rather than couple vehicle...we are pretty much solely looking at Japanese minivans and small SUV's as for reasons that mostly have to do with repair costs and mature features.
The TDI engine (for all its faults) was first made commercially available on a Fiat, and then was made (in)famous by VW (among others). Audi's four-wheel-drive system (Quattro) is imo still unmatched, and when it debuted in the World Rally Championship it blew away all competition.
you could make the claim (maybe) about diesel's and Europe, but separating technical innovation from industry level innovation here is important.
Edit: and I say that as a RABID WRC fan who is currently wearing my Peter Solberg hat.
Innovation in automotive is as much in things consumers don't see as it is in the features we perceive and use:
Now the plus side of the argument is that the Japanese are using more tried and tested stuff and thus slower to adopt the latest whizzbang gizmos and gadgets.
If Honda delivers L3 driving six months from now, it would be a huge leap over what they are selling today.
That being said, Level 3 has limited utility. If a driver needs to take over at any time, that means they need to be taking over in milliseconds, so it means that they need to be 100% focused on everything. Level 3 is a fancy cruise control. Level 4 & 5 are the ones that will fundamentally change driving.
It looks like they have level 4 and are calling it level 3?
It should be relatively easy a task not to crash as often as people in such situations? Couple of parking radars and a lane follower would probably be close to human levels of contact avoidance in crawling traffic?
Probably this means on the high-way only, while driving less than 50km/h... e.g. during a traffic jam.
City road Level 3 would require plenty of testing that will not go unnoticed.
I suspect that Self Driving Vehicles in Japan would have an advantage over the US. People drive well in Japan, it is no easy task to get one drivers license. In Tokyo, drivers seem to be aware of all their surroundings. Pedestrians also obey the rules and don't walk where ever it suits them.
A lot of US drivers are terrible. Even lvl 1/2 is an improvement over most drivers on the roads who are looking at there phones while driving down the center line or against traffic.
The big problem with testing in 3rd world countries is infrastructure is far different from in the US/ EU/ Japan so it's not a great proving ground. When you have cities where you have to deal with chaotic streets packed with people and slow moving cross traffic you need to just kind of push your way through, autonomous vehicles are going to struggle.
The title needs to be changed, as nobody's beaten anyone, yet.
I don't think that is an entirely fair representation. The claim you are referencing in that sentence appears to be about when they will launch. They seem to clearly be the first to actually achieve a certification. Which is what the title seems to be referring too. We can discuss about the potentially too close relationship between the Japanese government and companies, but the certification is the certification and is a fairly objective measure.
Fact: this is not available yet so nobody has beaten anyone