Geofencing Will Enable L5
semiengineering.com
semiengineering.com
Why stop there? Let's build a special track for these robots since tires are pretty bad in terms of environmental impact and physical stress on roads. We can also make them longer so they hold a lot more people, and automate payment systems at the egress points, maybe add in some turnstiles.
Congratulations, we've just reinvented trains. Maybe we could just build some of those?
I'm not interested in self-driving cars, but thinking trains solve all problems is a very narrow, urban view.
I'd also point out that these are 2 towns with less than 6000 population each, in one of the lowest population density parts of the country, with one of the worst climates for self driving cars.
In many European countries there are vast networks of trains connecting small towns with larger cities. Is there a good reason we can't do the same here?
It's a response to this: https://nitter.net/grescoe/status/1571863398366973960#m
"By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin—a journey of 1,000 miles—exclusively by electric trolley. The tracks, and often the wires, extended deep into forest and farmland, making the railroads de facto intercity highways; after nightfall in the countryside, farmers would signal drivers to stop by burning a rag next to the track. Streetcars and interurbans became the dominant mode of urban transportation in North America, carrying 11 billion passengers a year by the end of the First World War."
Post-WW2, building suburbs without any sort of public transit was an additional way to discriminate against "the poors" as virtually all of those suburbs had race & religion restriction covenants in the property deeds.
Makes me so frustrated that I have to drive/own a car to be a "full" citizen in the US, I really hope other options start to become more viable/mainstream in my lifetime.
(As I'm sure someone will love to point out, yes there are things that cars are good at, rural areas etc, but there are lots of ways that cars have been misapplied in our society currently, and there are other cheaper, better, more fun options.)
The road building industry point is mostly moot as most large civil construction companies generally also do rail projects and could pivot into the expansion of rail systems.
Many places make it illegal to live in your car - but only while parked. What about living in your car while stuck in a traffic jam?
This is one thing that seems to be severly lacking in the US, afaict.
Obviously that gets a bit pie in the sky so maybe facing a reality of something simpler and more traditional public transit like is ok, but one can dream
The closest thing in the train world would be car-carrying trains... and apparently Amtrak does have "auto train" for a pretty reasonable price ($180 for 18 hour trip): https://www.amtrak.com/routes/auto-train.html
Too bad they only have one auto-train line in the US, that would be an interesting way to travel.
Trains are unable to handle last mile goods-transportation. Just like people like having power in their outlet, they like having food in their grocery stores and if mess that one up then their will be unrest the likes of which have not been seen in generations.
turnstiles are pretty annoying and don't actually help that much, if at all.
Navigation is not the issue. Large scale mapping using visual only features is pretty much a solved problem. I worked at a company that did this, Apple, Facebook, google, Niantic and a bunch of others all have this ability.
The biggest issue here is not that knowing where you are, but what is in the way. Sensors to figure out what is in the way, and if thats a real obstacle or a shadow is the hard part. combine that with working out what other road users are doing ( essentially body language for cars) and thats the main impediment to level 4/5 autonomy.
As a solution, it's maybe missing the resolution of 1m vs about 5m at the moment. This is exactly what's needed, but instead of limiting virtually harmless products like scooters, all cars should conform to geofences, especially in cities.
Rigorous geofence-based speed limiting in cities would save literally tens of thousands of lives per year, and the technology is easy, cheap, and already with us.
1. Cars that are good enough to drive themselves most of the time.
2. Remote driving centers, run by the car manufacturers, that will have a human take over as soon as the car hits a spot it is unsure of. To the passenger, this is invisible and is considered self driving. (As long as the self-driving is good enough, one operator can handle a lot of cars. If there is an open standard, one remotely-led car can lead [or at least prompt] all the cars in back of it.)
3. Areas, such as urban centers, that only allow self driving vehicles and have no parking (as the vehicles can leave after drop off).
4. Improvements to self-driving in those areas, as they are geofenced, don't have human drivers, and have lots of cars hitting any given snag - all of which make debugging easier.
5. As problems are solved, and the pressure to move to self-driving goes up (due to said areas) the self driving part will handle more, and remote-control less, in ever widening circles.
>“operating the vehicle on-road anywhere that a typically skilled human driver can reasonably operate a conventional vehicle.”
People who think otherwise must have spent their entire lives in metro areas with little to no weather.
Moderate amounts of snow will certainly make L5 driving impossible until we have AI where reasonable people start thinking about giving civil rights to.
I 100% agree. There's no way AI will be able to solve this without being sentient. In my area, there is a large network of single lane dirt and gravel roads that people rely on for their daily existence. I'll be damn impressed when AI can figure out handling an oncoming truck and figure out when to pull forward to a wider spot, backup, stay put, where and how far to pull off into ditches or shoulders that won't give way or lead you to get stuck in the mud or ditch, and when to know if they can push the vegetation out of the way or not. And when to trust a cliff-side "shoulder" or not. These aren't rare exceptions either, that's daily existence for these people. And if you think the paved roads in the area are much better, you're gonna have a rough time.
>People who think otherwise must have spent their entire lives in metro areas with little to no weather.
Despite the slight hyperbole, I think this is absolutely correct. I see this very problem with many takes on this site in a wide variety of contexts. The same people have zero problem advocating for regulation without any exceptions that applies to contexts they simply have never thought about.
At the risk of full-on ranting: They then complain when rural people object and do their best to invalidate the objections of rural people and insist they have the moral high ground.
Why do you believe that? I don't see how any adverse weather requires more personhood than Stable Diffusion needs to paint — probably zero.
The list of problems for which that sort of claim has been made but which have since been solved without anything resembling AGI is long enough that I'd tend to doubt new ones.
The bar for autonomous cars is not "is it superhuman" but merely "is it useful enough at the given price". Thus to make a massive impact, you could have a cheap L3, an expensive L4 and L5s need never appear (although, I am personally pretty sure they will).
The question to ask is, how many people do you know that will refuse to drive in SF, or lack the ability to do it trouble-free for 1hr? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a5fUrjn0Hw
We've seen spike in accidents after covid restrictions loosened because few months of little/no driving dulled people's skills.
Imagine if most drivers don't touch wheel at all for 99% of their commute. On top of the reaction time (no doubt delayed by being distracted on the phone) you now have driver that barely remembers how to drive, let alone react correctly in emergency
Regarding snow squalls, I don’t think it is a reasonable interpretation of L5 to say that the vehicle must be “smart enough” to do things it physically is incapable of doing. I think the difference between 4 and 5 is that 4 may refuse to operate in scenarios that the vehicle could otherwise safely operate.
Part of human refusal to drive is also a significant advantage to human judgement: if the road is a sheet of ice and the car is sporting all-season tires, even an L5 should refuse to operate.
The bad drivers you talk about are an L4 not an L3. L3s can just stop driving the car at any moment, the human equivalent is like someone suffering a medical emergency while driving.
Some other quotes from wikipedia:
"Level 5 ("steering wheel optional"): No human intervention is required at all. An example would be a robotic vehicle that works on all kinds of surfaces, all over the world, all year around, in all weather conditions."
"Under all roadway and environmental conditions that can be managed by a human driver"
I've driven in all sorts of conditions - thick fog on the highway, dangerously heavy snowfall (no lanes), fresh snow without winter tires, etc. These things are not physically impossible they just have a higher probability of killing you. So what is a reasonable definition then? A brash, foolish, broke 19 year old? A stogy, conservative 70 year old? And how do you even quantify these risks, without actually taking a ton of risks, then walking back when bad things happen?
As long as there's someone out there willing to take more risks, they'll be more "capable" than an L5, thus L5s can never technically exist, since there'll always be more capable (but in actuality just plain risky) human drivers.
We have a while before we get anywhere close to having to consider this -- but at some point we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that a significant problem with human drivers is that they often choose to operate their vehicles in conditions beyond the safe capabilities of the vehicle given particular conditions. Neither road conditions nor the laws of physics disappear at any SAE level. These things are always something that will be taken into account.
There will always be some amount of risk that cannot be determined in advance. Even I do not know when the snow plow will go down my street, and that may determine whether I can fully make it home or not. I'm sure the folks at the SAE have driven in inclement conditions before, so it makes sense to interpret those definitions with a reasonable lens.
The whole level system isn't applicable to humans, except that humans are almost universally as capable as hypothetical L5 systems by definition.
That's one of the main problems with self driving in general. It's a completely different system if 99% are self driving instead of 100%.
L5 is about transport, where everything can be 10-100x more efficient if everone is FSD. But if even 1% decide to take the wheel then it's instant gridlock everywhere.
If you want to drive, and have fun, we'll have racetracks for that.
You saying you want to take the wheel every now and then is like saying sometimes you want to ride your horse on the 8 lane highway. Uh... no. I'm sure it's great (well, in the analogy it is), but you ruin the whole purpose of the highway.
Or "sometimes I just want to drive on the traintracks". Ok... so all trains have to yield to you, inconveniencing maybe tens of thousands of people, after knock-on effects?
If that were true we'd never get to L5. We'd need a hard switch over before L5 was deployable, and L5 needs to be deployable before there would ever be a hard switch over. Deadlock.
The hard truth is, self-driving is going to have to share the road for decades before human drivers are phased out completely, and, that being the case, there is no reason for them not to have steering wheels for the time being.
But also you can just say some streets are for FSD only. Some neighbourhoods.
Similar things are already rolling out as a soft barrier for the worst polluting cars. E.g. London's ULEZ. And other places ban studded tires, sometimes by individual streets.
You could argue "but I want to be able to actually stop on ice patches, so I want studded tires". And the answer is "fine, but then you can't drive your car on these specific areas". And likely the areas will expand.
It's like "sometimes I want to roar with my obnoxious harley". Hopefully in the future the answer is "that's fine, but if you do that in a city we'll throw you in jail… and then fire you from a canon into the sun", because it's not your freedom to wake up 50'000 people just to have some fun.
Or maybe it's like saying you want to ride your horse on a country road every so often.
If your road and traffic infrastructure assumes no humans, you can do all sorts of neat stuff like have cars driving practically bumper-to-bumper for drafting, get rid of traffic lights / stop signs / etc. and have the cars communicate directly with each other to organise crossing busy intersections at close to full speed [1], and so on.
A single human driver in that kind of system would make every vehicle around them slow down and defer to the human driver's unpredictable behaviour and incredibly slow (compared to a computer) reflexes, with butterfly effects over a much wider geographic area... assuming the infrastructure for you to drive safely still exists.
Personally I don't think we'll ever get there... way too much infrastructure required, and a singly badly maintained car or bad actor could cause disproportionate amounts of havoc.
[1] like this https://youtu.be/ZhGduew_VjQ - the first ~30 seconds or so is the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a L5 FSD exclusive system... and then the last few seconds are what you'd expect to see when you suddenly add a human driver to the mix.
It's established fact that "just add more lanes" doesn't actually help.
I wonder if someone made a research about likeness of reckless driving vs closeness to race track.
Like, if it was $5 to have a lap nearby (as in "not have to reserve day to go to track and have a track day") I wonder how less of dumbass driving we'd had on the streets...
Do you have more information on this? I’ve never heard of additional classes to unlock different driving modes. I know some US cars come with a “red key” that will automatically change the car to its most aggressive tune, but doesn’t require any classes 700+HP.
I'll admit that I don't really have a lot of first-hand experience in this though. It's on my to-do list if I can get one of my side-hustles to take off :)
In many countries it's much, much easier for the government to block out an area and ban human drivers.
They will likely be the first ones to have a true deployed fully autonomous system, while the democracies will bicker and lobby back and forth about it for another few decades.
In China specifically, it depends on how much they care about a particular issue.
They have no trouble keeping animals and pedestrians off the high speed rail tracks, or keeping public away from military installations, for example.
I'm not aware of any actual incidents, but Kangaroos are the most common cause of animal collisions in Australia, so it's not entirely off-base to talk about.