Hidden obstacles for self driving cars
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
The problem is that the driving model is probabilistic. When you solve a problem probabilistically, getting from 90% covered to 99% to 99.9% covered to 99.99% covered involves exponential leaps in difficulty. So even if the car covers 99.9% of driving conditions (and it currently doesn't), there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done to get it to 99.9999% correct, or whatever the threshold is for it to be deemed "safe" for fully autonomous use.
I personally am bearish on the technology, as getting the inconvenient final situational cases correct will be extremely challenging. I would love to be proven wrong, but at Stanford I came to the opinion that the probabilistic approach would get us to really cool demos, but never a fully autonomous vehicle. That being said, the people working on this are a whole lot smarter than I, and I would love to be proven wrong.
The idea must be to come up with a generic algorithm that solves these problems as a whole. Not one specific case at a time.
The gas station is a special case though, because the objective isn't just travel from here to there. Finding a parking space is somewhat similar kind of special case, where there is a specific objective.
I recently narrowly avoided getting killed by a broadside collision by braking just in time. If I were further I would have sped up out of the way. Would a probabilistic approach handle this? Maybe they need to compile a list of special edge cases.
In the end, you need a learning technology that can properly adapt to any possible situation and give a decent response. Maybe it can be done, but we certainly aren't there yet and I'm skeptical as to the the tractability of the last bit of the problem.
All this shows is that the Google car was driving well, and you weren't. Though I'm sure as the tech progresses they'll look into this sort of thing, and will implement what makes sense.
Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the car all together. I would love to see a detailed analysis that compares these two approaches.
For autonomous cars, the challenge is software. It's very difficult to build software that handles all the edge cases mentioned in the article. The hardware (cars) is a solved problem.
For autonomous personal flying machines, you're right that the software is easy, but the challenge is power density. The only VTOL machine that can carry humans a considerable distance without refueling is a helicopter. Helicopters are too large, disruptive, and expensive for everyone to have one. But no one has figured out how to shrink one down and still be able to carry a person.
If you compare the two approaches, one big difference is that software is improving much faster than power density. So my money would be that we solve the first one first.
A flying car system would be totally networked from day one. Id imagine it being like the cars from the minority report.
The problem with emergent technology is that it's what people tend to be most afraid of, and if there ends up being situations a robotic car absolutely cannot handle that's known about, how long will it take for people to start abusing it?
And for unhandled exceptions...awhile back I was driving up 280 and a police officer pulled out in front of traffic, flipped his lights on, and started weaving back and forth across all lanes of traffic. All the drivers slowed down and kept behind the officer, obviously not sure what was going on. The officer stopped weaving at a couple points along about a one-mile stretch to get out of his car and pick up an item off the freeway, then got back in and resumed weaving, until he got up to a previously-pulled-over car and parked behind another officer.
That's definitely not something they covered in driver's ed, apart from "if something unusual is happening, slow down". But how long would it take for it to make the news if a smart car in that situation passed the car on a weave and struck a drunk guy that was stumbling along the freeway at 85mph, do you think? And do you really think every possible situation that occurs during driving will eventually be able to be handled by a smart car?
Another example, any point you run into a car or random other vehicle that's double-parked in the city. If the car can only figure out that pedestrians are blobs of pixels, does it have sufficient resolution to figure out how far away that oncoming car is, or will it just patiently sit behind that moving truck until they're done and start moving again?
There's a lot of edge cases for this tech, and most if not all of them have potentially fatal exception cases if you fail to handle them correctly.
If they're actually thinking properly (doubtful), they'll look at the rate of catastrophic accidents with human drivers, and make a call based on whether or not self-driving cars are an improvement.
In the air you can't ignore the 3rd dimension. Every calculation your car AI was making before, will now have to grow by an order of magnitude. Even making a helicopter stay stationary in 3d space is a challenge.
In other words, I think it's pretty unlikely you will just wake up one day and swap out your car for a self driving one to drive you around. Eventually, maybe, but fundamentally it will be less about which car you own and more about if you own a car at all. In the long run if autonomous vehicles are successful it makes little sense to own a car anyway, so it's only logical that the early adopters naturally be non-owners.
I think people overestimate their abilities. Sure, this is a new technology but in X years these cars will be better drivers than 99% of the people.
No, it WOULDN'T be perfect! What if it's starting to rain/snow while you already being in the car? And you still need to drive the car for parking..
In cases like garbage bags (may be empty, may contain sharp debris) on the road, I could see a car communicating with the others in the network to describe the problem from another vantage, or after driving through.
/rant
Humans usually spend about 30 minutes driving 5-10 miles to get a license, are far more unpredictable and inattentive, and have a stupid number of edge cases of their own.
Not to say we shouldn't hold self-driving cars to a higher standard, we absolutely should, but it's silly to think they need to be perfect.
This seems to be a pretty common opinion, but I fail to see why anyone feels they have a "right" to be told Google's plans, strategies and ideas, much less their development mistakes and failures for a thing that is not a product currently available (or even close to it).
I realize there is a very real fear many people have about autonomous vehicles because it's something they don't/can't understand. And while that's something Google's marketing/PR department may want to deal with, this fearmongering attitude of "Google won't tell me exactly how it's going to work... it must not be safe... oh no we're all going to die!!! " is just getting ridiculous.
Pretty interesting stuff.
The maps would get magnitudes better the year the cars were unleashed.
Also, most 3-lane roads magically turn into 2-lane roads, and many 2-lane roads turn into 3-lane roads etc.
The Google car knows the lane change is approaching long before it shows up on any sensor.
As a driver here you have to take daring decisions sometimes, something that robots probably should never do due to 'do no harm' rule. That's a real engineering challenge.
In theory self driving cars sound like they could be potentially safer than human drivers, but there are many edge cases like the one above where a robotic driver following reasonable heuristics (e.g., swerve to avoid animals on the road) could cause fatal accidents that most human drivers would be able to avoid.
There are problems for robot cars, sure, but this doesn't sound like one of them.
A baby crawling on the road is the same size and shape (roughly) as, say, a dog. In that situation the choice is a moral one, whether the robot knows it or not.
This is not a hypothetical scenario: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1279639/Bus-driver-c...
The driver in Victoria did not make a moral choice. Did they really weigh the life of the rabbit against death and injury of seven people? Extremely unlikely.
A robot, like an experienced driver, could easily use the heuristic that hitting the small thing is safer than hitting the big thing.
I would say yes. Firstly I would see what the driver actually did. Did the driver have the seven people in plain sight when he/she made that decision? But for sure the driver did make a moral decision to save the Rabbit's life. It would have even been the case where the person thought he could save the rabbit's life without harming the humans. So you have to make decisions which are purely not mathematical here.
>>could easily use the heuristic that hitting the small thing is safer than hitting the big thing.
How would this hold against hitting some one below average height versus hitting some one tall. Or running over a baby Vs an aged person.
Right there are all kinds of moral dilemma.
As I say in a separate comment that "small thing" may be human baby or toddler on the road.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqB47F12vI
http://www5.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/mercedes-benz-in...
http://www5.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/autonomous-long-...
> If it encountered an unmapped traffic light, and there were no cars or pedestrians around, the car could run a red light simply because it wouldn’t know the light was there.
So the car determined it was safe to cross and crossed? I don't see the problem. The red light is for humans, but a self driving car will know where the other cars are and know when to cross an intersection.
You could argue the reverse even. A self driving car comes to a traffic light that is green but detects a fast moving car running the red, it would stop. But a human might not and continue on thinking green is ok.
Road Signs ? None.
Rules ? They're more like suggestions.
Roads ? What Road ?
I imagine some kind of "paranoia" setting where the car just assumes that anything it sees moving can and will accelerate towards it or its immediate path.
It very much is hard.
I've driven in and around India. Aside from the fact that the majority of vehicles have four wheels and generally move forwards more often than backwards, the similarities to driving in countries with more regulated driving environments are few to none.
Try circumnavigating Connaught Place on any day for a taster, or try taking the main highway north from New Delhi any distance.
The smaller more fragile vehicles give way, in the interests of self-preservation, to the larger, heavier vehicles.
Approaching in an intersection in a truck? Blast your horn to warn others of your approach so that they can get out of the way. Slowing down to carefully approach the junction is not what happens.
Need to cut across some lanes of traffic in a school bus to make a turn? Have your co-pilot hang out of the side door waving, shouting and berating other vehicles to make them give way. That's your turning indicator in many cases.
Need to take the same school bus on a circuit to collect kids in the morning and are running a bit late? Why not head straight through some empty fields. Roads can be optional.
All of the above I have experienced first-hand.
You know those larger, heavier vehicles you mentioned? What if they're self-driving long-haul transport? They'll likely be able to make it through.
Cost will be the thing that prevents self-driving cars from dominating roads in India before the technology itself is a problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twMj9MTs3lw
A self driving car would just sit there frozen as there would be no 100 % safe action to take.
But I can also see that a self-driving car could edge forward gradually until it had the opportunity to take a larger advantage. A lot of those vehicles and bikes are not travelling at full speed and are also prepared to brake if need be. A self-driving car would be able to judge all of these things almost immediately unlike the reaction lag we get with humans.
That's like the easiest of the tests you give.
The difficult ones require record precision gear-clutch-accelerator usage, to move vehicle in measures of inches in case of grid locks in some places in India. This is beyond the fact that it may raining heavily, and you might be navigating through huge pot holes, with garbage, beggars and stray dogs on streets.
Well then nothing can give you true idea until you drive here.
I don't why we like to think that all people are stupid. At the moment, the human brain is still significantly more intelligent than computers.
As for distinguishing rock and paper, humans also often fail at similar tasks - "is it a lump of snow on the road ahead, or is it a rock?". Better to just avoid uncertain objects in such cases. But true that there is certainly some room for improvement (for cars, because we are unable to improve brains).
http://ufldl.stanford.edu/housenumbers/ http://benchmark.ini.rub.de/
200k miles is nothing. Over 8 billion vehicle miles are spent per DAY in the US. One person is killed for every 75 million miles driven. 200k miles isn't enough to test every terrain, under every weather condition, in every lighting, etc. There's too many variables in the equation. The Google car won't be truly safe until it has logged 1000x miles.
How would you suggest testing these vehicles to tens of millions of miles without having an actual public deployment?
Also, Google can test its algorithms in simulation to many millions of miles within hours. I believe they're lobbying for simulation to be a major part of testing:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/21/google-tes...
And this isn't true: "The Google car won't be truly safe until it has logged 1000x miles."
IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it conflates regulatory issues, problems that are clearly (relatively) easy but just not tackled, and problems that are legitimately still pending solutions before this goes mainstream. An article focusing on what the actual real difficult unsolved technical issues are would be fascinating, but this ain't it.
"The car’s sensors can’t tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either."
As a human I sometimes can't tell the nature of something on the road at speed. They gave an easy example (rock vs paper) but IRL it is usually things that aren't so easy to identify like trash bags that might be empty... or maybe not. So avoiding any unexpected item in the road when safe to do so is probably always the right solution anyway.
"Urmson also says the car can’t detect potholes or spot an uncovered manhole if it isn’t coned off."
People aren't that great at this either, especially in traffic where the hole is obscured until the last second, at least an automated car that reports home could, via various sensors, detect hitting "something that felt like a pothole" and send that information out to other cars in the region.
Some of the more interesting research in this area uses infrared to detect the change in heat of a shadowed hole versus flat ground. Of course, that only works when there's sunshine to provide the heat source.
P.S. Google people reading this (Urmson, Ferguson, etc), please consider this my annual reminder of the awesomeness of your Google Sydney office and the large quantities of autonomous field robotics engineers training and working within walking distance of it, for wages that could be doubled without your budgets even noticing...
Exactly. These are edge cases that will undoubtedly be better handled as the technology matures in the near future. There no reason that these (still very speculative) issues should slow down adoption.
A good example, but even if the trash bag is empty it can cause problems. I ran over an empty trash bag once, and it got stuck to my muffler and melted onto it. Made a huge mess and could have potentially caught fire.
The robot car has to be considerably better than people to become acceptable. This is a serious burden for the technology.
I would feel much better riding a bike in the vicinity of a self-driving vehicle than any random human.
There are a number of issues to iron out yet and a lot of testing to do. But make no mistake, they're already far better.