Why Level-3 Autonomy is a major milestone in self-driving cars
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But something that I would like to know is what happens when it fails? Or at least, seems to have failed?
At the moment, if I buy a car and the brakes fail and I crash into someone/something then it's likely there was a defect and the manufacturer was at fault. That seems reasonable when you're making a 2 ton machine capable of hitting over 100 mph, there should be a shit load of safety measures in place.
However, it seems that self-driving software is in its infancy and I've lost faith in tech companies to release a product when it's complete and ready, instead releasing it sooner with a bunch of bugs for the users to test. In addition, if my brakes fail, a sound mechanic would be able to verify that was the case and I'd be off the hook: you would be able to examine the faulty part.
If my self-driving thingy failed on one of these level-3 roads, and I crashed into a bunch of nuns crossing the road would I be on the hook for it? How would I be able to prove in court that it failed and wasn't a result of me being a muppet. Coz you can bet I won't be able to examine the source code after the accident, unlike being able to see the faulty brakes in the earlier example.
She didn't kill anyone but did get injured minorly and she got a very nice price for her totaled Prius (above market rates).
It’s guaranteed she was pressing the gas, 0% chance she was pressing the brake and it just so happened to do exactly what pressing the gas would do.
Glad she made it out okay with no big injuries and no loss of life
Congratulations, you reached stage 1 of debugging!
Anyone who writes software knows, sometimes the user error is the "bug".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.0020...
Other SDC companies with a lot more promise than Tesla are an awful lot quieter about what they're doing because they know people have the concerns you do and they are downright allergic to over-promising on either capability or safety.
A slow moving lane of cars is a dangerous environment where things can turn catastrophic in an instant, with zero time to react for a human driver reading their news. Bikes and motorcycles come out of nowhere and pass you between the lanes. Pedestrians and children will attempt to cross the road, encouraged by the apparent slow speed. You will not see them since your view is blocked by close large vehicles. The same for essential signs and signaling. Slow moving can turn to fast moving intermittently and frustrated drivers will unexpectedly go full throttle to cut in front of you. You might find yourself suddenly stranded in the middle of an intersection with lateral trafic. Trafic is slow because your lane is blocked by construction, which requires carefully observing the human readable cues of the drivers in the other lanes, which might yield to you or not. All manner of bad things can and will happen with a scary probability.
If an automated car can handle all that safely without reverting to human assistance, what exactly can't it handle, and why is it not full self driving?
The 3 and 4 SAE levels were always a dangerous fiction, they imply you can bring to market uncomplete products that take some part of the human effort. This is simply not how the minds of human drivers works: if drivers lose focus to the road they can't regain it instantly in a fraction of a second when prompted by the failing AI algorithm. A half- self driving car is a defective product that is bound to kill someone, regulators should reject any products short of real self driving.
But that's not what level 4 generally implies, they call it "High Driving Automation" and the expectation is that the driver is on hand to correct the AI in certain limited scenarios.
Referred to as high-driving automation, Level 4 autonomy does not require any human interaction in the vehicle’s operation because it is programmed to stop itself in the event of system failure. Since a human driver is never needed, a Level 4 vehicle may not have a steering wheel and pedals.
And yes, at Level 4, you can take a nap while riding in the vehicle.
Level 4 driving automation technology is for use in driverless taxis and public transportation services. Such vehicles will be programmed to travel between Point A and Point B and restricted to specific geographic boundaries by geofencing technology. Certain conditions may limit or cancel Level 4 autonomous vehicle operation, such as severe weather.
I admit that I thought of L4 as being fully autonomous under specific pre-defined conditions (given that's what would actually be useful and that's probably why I've heard it described that way.) The key would seem to be that the vehicle won't try to hand off control unexpectedly given, in part, that a vehicle can't always stop safely.
Maybe it's something like a carpool lane. Autonomous vehicles get the far left lane, and are allowed to drive much faster and closer together than manually controlled vehicles.
Moreover, if the goal is to achieve autonomy with relatively dumb algorithms that fall short of full self driving, you have to do grade separation, fencing, tunnels or overground etc., otherwise you still need full self driving to handle those case where bikes or children roam around in your "dedicated" lane, cars and garbage bins are parked on it, drunk drivers suddenly invade it etc. And if you go the full trouble of dedicated and grade separated infrastructure, why not build a tramway or PRT (like the Booring Co Loop system) that any citizen can benefit from?
All in all, I can't see the scenario you are describing happening in any real city with real politics, maybe some oil prince can decree it.
One path I could imagine: a city like Phoenix parners with autonomous vehicle manufacturers to create a bubble where self driving cars can exist. It goes really well, other people want it, and other cities fall suit.
I'm not saying it's likely, but I would not put it out of the question.
May be building a whole new City is an expensive task, but given the current housing market in US I wonder why no one has put some thoughts into it.
The answer is in the article, and in the definition of Level 3: the automated feature is restricted to a certain operational design domain. For Drive Pilot, this domain comprises specific sections of highway, maximum speed, and certain weather conditions. It refuses to operate outside that domain, even if technically the software might be capable of doing so.
When it detects that it is leaving or has left that domain, it tries to hand back control to the human within a short period, failing which it brings the vehicle to a safe halt and calls for help.
The logical conclusion is then that the failure of the AI and calling for help from a human driver will either never happen at all, since you have a safe level 5 algorithm, or will happen abruptly in dangerous trafic situations that the driver cannot be reasonably expected to recover from.
> Everything points to the conclusion that solving the self driving problem for that specific operational domain, congested highway, is almost just as hard as solving self-driving in the general case.
The general self-driving problem is a much harder AI problem than the problem that Mercedes is solving with Drive Pilot.
The operational domain of Drive Pilot is not just any congested highway, it's particular stretches of limited-access freeways in Germany that have been identified and studied by Daimler engineers. These roads have machine-detectable lane markings and no tunnels, toll booths or traffic control devices (stop signs or lights).
The system uses satellite positioning with live corrections applied for transmission errors along these particular roads. The vendor has prepared detailed digital maps of particular signs, fence posts, and guardrails within this geo-fenced environment, and the sensors compare detected objects with the map, combining this positioning data with the satellite method.
This level of preparation reduces the long tail of uncovered cases for this domain greatly, making this solution much less risky for the car and for its neighbors, to the point where the vendor can assume liability and regulators can adopt a framework to support it and evaluate its use.
The general Level 5 self-driving problem throws too many uncovered corner cases at an autonomous car driving on random roadways designed for people. In my opinion, the current approach of throwing more and more data at ML networks cannot by itself bring down the risk to a low enough level to make it practical in my lifetime. Neural networks are not sufficient, and if we choose to enhance the roadways, then neural networks might not be necessary. Conceptual breakthroughs are needed.
I should mention that I build robots for a living, though not self-driving cars, so maybe these other vendors and their investors know something I don't.
It only has lane assist and distronic but its very well implemented and especially in heavy traffic its a godsent.
Basically it simply follows the car in front of you but even that is super relaxing, especially in morning taffic. In any major city rush hour traffic is always fun, but this makes it at least somewhat enjoyable.
We have come a long way with assisted driving and as a german I very much enjoy that because it means that I can still "become one with my machine" ;)
This is a clear step up and I believe that the future will lay in smart roads, even if its just a lane maker that your car can rely on.
This also totally does not solve the problem of object detection of the car but its another assist. Like you yourself are driving too: with context.
I (the car) am on a redisdential road, my speed is automatically limited and am in "high awareness" mode.
I (the car) am on the autobahn, I opt my sensors for distance. "ping" oh i will enter a construction site in 1km, i better notify my driver that this could get ugly and that he should be able to take over any second now.
What if the car in front of you heads off on a route you didn't want to take?
we are not talking about self driving here at all, but more like a "i am aware that you exist and adapt accordingly". There is an old person going 30 in a 50 zone? ok I will slow down and drive with the correct distance to him. He is speeding up? nice i will follow his lead to the maximum speed limit that is set.
When going from a 50 to a 30 the car also reduduces the speed to 30 and when you to to a 50 zone again it will speed up
I'm trying to explain to non-technical people why this feature is a major milestone for self-driving cars. On my website, I try to avoid jargon and assume my readers know nothing about the topic.
I find it very odd how people are so fixated on construction zones in that thread. Construction zones _are_ confusing and don't follow the typical rules of the road. That's why they always come with slower speed restrictions. People acting like their car is trying to kill them clearly aren't assessing if they should even be using self-driving in these circumstances. In fact, they likely don't realize that many legally-licensed drivers also struggle in these conditions. Many people, especially those with poorer reactions or eyesight, have a challenging time navigating certain construction zones.
I have an L2 and it works amazingly well when there are exactly two clearly marked lines. It's not that hard to understand when I can and can't rely on the car to drive itself.
* Less than 2 lines visibly marked, drive it yourself.
* If there are more than 2 things that look like lines, drive it yourself.
Most highway driving is not in construction zones.
If you mean Tesla you should always pay attention, you are responsible even if the road is perfect, there is a non zero chance the car can swing and kill some innocent person because you are alpha testing.
You are right to say that one should always pay attention, though. The Tesla system is capable of handling relatively sharp curves, which has the side effect of making it capable of turning quickly in the face of weird road anomolies (eg, suddenly and recently repaired/damaged patches of asphalt).
My other car has the opposite problem... it won't jerk in a situation like that, but it will gladly fly off the road with barely a warning on a shallow curve.
We are in a really weird intermediate state right now.
If others do the same shit I would say is still alpha testing, we seen recently and discussed in this and similar threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28566376 the car acts like a buggy piece of code, like a glitched game. You should not test your alpha code by risking innocents life , The minimum , absolute minimum, Tesla should do is to use their AI to make sure no idiot alpha tester is watching movies, texting, putting makeup or sleeping when they should pay full attention, but they are not doing that but the opposite , Tesla and Elon imply that you have to pay attention because of evil regulation.
For highway driving, nearly everyone has caught up to Tesla in most use-cases.
At first I wondered why the cars in front of me were half into my lane, then I realized that there were an abundance of poorly painted lane lines and it wasn't clear who was actually in the wrong. It was the weirdest mess of lane lines that I've ever seen, tbh.
It was also obvious that I wasn't the only one guessing, as different drivers seemed to guess differently.
Why is it that I can trust a level 3 system to not hit the car in front of me in stop and go traffic but I can't trust the level 2 system not to hit the car in front of me at 70mph? The stop and go driving certainly requires faster reaction times in my experience. Are the makers of level 3 systems legally liable when the vehicle in level-3 mode hits another car?
Currently, as how the NHTSA regulates vehicles, the driver is liable for any accident that their vehicle causes. Your car should always be at your control, and you should be the one responsible for it's actions. Not saying this is right or wrong, but that's how the government views driving.
Else there would be no benefit, would it? As long as I have full responsibility and have to be fully aware of the situation I might as well just drive myself.
Germany had to change it's law for Mercedes to be able to role out L3.
> In July 2021 in Germany, the Federal Act Amending the Road Traffic Act and the Compulsory Insurance Act (Autonomous Driving Act) came into effect. The Act allows motor vehicles with autonomous driving capabilities, meaning vehicles that can perform driving tasks independently without a person driving, in specified operating areas on public roads. Provisions about autonomous driving in appropriate operating areas correspond to Level 4. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Legislation_i...
As long as a car can handle all scenarios at 25 mph (a kid running out into the street with a ball, and anticipation of more complex events that would require pulling over and passing back control in an easy, non-jarring manner), I would think this still makes sense. What would this do? It would force new street creation (and perhaps extra shoulder space for pulling over) for these slow-ass autonomous vehicles.
But we'd all be safe and able to work or do other things during our commutes or on the way to do errands, etc.
Of course, it also started phantom braking at a couple overpasses I regularly traveled under while road tripping, especially when the sun was out, so I stopped using it altogether (my wife really, really didn't like AP after that).
They took the automated driving capabilities, added more sensors, and did the engineering and regulatory legwork around it to make it robust when entering, operating inside, and leaving its design domain.
Result: drivers can rely on it and regulators can enforce the rules.
But this Mercedes announcement is something else: it is a car maker providing an engineering automation solution for a useful, limited use case that people might be willing to pay for. It sits squarely within the SAE Level 3 definition. The vendor is standing behind it; the regulators are ready to enforce the rules. It really doesn't matter what the "I want full self-driving" purists think, since they haven't actually produced anything useful yet.