I understand we have to have explanations or we can't fix them, but it's just as important to understand this should never have happened even WITH the described failure.
If I had to guess, there's code to avoid stopping at every little thing and that code took precedence (otherwise rides would not be enjoyable). And I get the competing interests here but there must be a comparison to humans when these incidents happen.
I would actually put money that this is the cause of most crashes involving multiple moving cars. Hell, a friend of mine got into an accident two weeks ago where they t-boned somebody that turned onto a median when they didn't expect it.
If your friend saw them and never attempted to stop then your friend needs to lose their license.
or what if they're driving a bus and they have to keep above 60 mph!
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I guess it's my fault, I didn't list every single contingency possible...
This is literally the cause of almost every human accident.
Imagine you're driving. There's a car in front of you, also driving, at the same speed as you. Do you immediately slam on the brakes? No, because you EXPECT them to keep driving. That is how driving works.
If, suddenly, they do something unexpected - like slam on the brakes, that might cause an accident. Because ... they moved in an unexpected way.
I honestly can't even figure out what you meant to say.
https://injured.ca/5-top-causes-of-car-accidents-in-ontario/
> they're going to slam on the brakes and the only way that's [hitting the other vehicle] going to happen is if momentum is too high.
there's a difference between hitting something and driving into something.
Well obviously even Waymo agrees, given that they're recalling vehicles to mitigate the issue.
The brakes don’t respond immediately - you need to be able to detect that a collision is imminent several seconds before it actually occurs.
This means you have to also successfully exclude all the scenarios where you are very close to another car, but a collision is not imminent because the car will be out of the way by the time you get there.
Yes, at some point before impact the Waymo probably figured out that it was about to collide. But not soon enough to do anything about it.
If the max speed is 35mph, that allows a good braking system to respond by safely stopping from LIDAR info 99% of the time.
People will take them if they're priced right and they can do things in the car without having to pay attention to the road.
I get that self driving software is difficult. But theres no excuse for this type of accident.
But take an even slightly more complex example: you're on a two lane roadway and the car in the other lane changes into your lane, leaving inadequate stopping distance for you. You brake as hard as you safely can (maybe you have a too-close follower, too), but still there will be a few seconds when you could not, in fact, avert a collision if for some reason the car in front braked.
I have no idea what the legal situation would be: is it their fault if the crash happens within 3 seconds but yours if it happens after you've had time but failed to restablish your needed stopping distance?
Honestly even in the simple one lane case, I doubt you can slam your brakes on the interstate for no reason then expect to avoid any liability for the crash, blaming your follower for following too close.
Driving has a bunch of rules, then an awful lot of common sense and social interaction on top of them to make things actually work.
Even if your software is as good as it can be, I doubt you'll be able to get them to recognise how to resolve deadlocks. Which would also involve severe hindrance to emergency vehicles.
The planning software would want to slam on the brakes without predicting that the blob of sensor data in front of you is going to continue moving forward at highway speeds. That motion prediction enables the planning software to know that the space in front of your vehicle will be unoccupied by the time you reach it.
A similar prediction error was the reason Cruise rear ended the bendy bus in SF a while back. It segmented the front and rear halves of the bus as two separate entities rather than a connected one, and mispredicted the motion of the rear half of the bus.
I think we're all on the same page about this part but what's confusing and hilarious is why would the correct answer ever be to drive into an unmoving object?
If they tried to avoid the truck and swerved and hit a different vehicle there would be no confusion here. But the self driving algorithm is effectively committing suicide (Kamikaze). That's novel.
My guess is that the self-driving car was not able to recognize the truck until it was very close and the sudden appearance of the truck is interpreted by the algorithm as if the truck is moving very fast. And the best answer in that case would be to let the truck pass (basically do what the waymo did).
But that means the lidar information about the shape not moving is being deprioritized in favor of the recognized object being calculated to move fast. A situation which could only really occur if a speeding vehicle plowed through a stationary object.
Fantastic solution for avoiding a situation like this -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbjjlvOxDYk
But a bad solution for avoiding a stationary object.
It’s why it’s so difficult to do (actually) and the ability to do it well is just as much about the risk appetite of the one responsible as anything else - because knowing if a car is likely to pull out at the light into traffic, or how likely someone is to be hiding in a bush or not is really hard. But that is what humans deal with all the time while driving.
Because no one can actually know the future, and predicting the future is fundamentally risky. And knowing when to hold ‘em, and when to fold ‘em is really more of an AGI type thing.
(It's been quite some years since I worked on vision-based self-driving, so my experience is non-zero but also quite dated.)