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How Autonomous Cars' Safety Features Clash With Normal Driving
An anonymous reader writes: Google's autonomous cars have a very good safety record so far — the accidents they've been involved in weren't the software's fault. But that doesn't mean the cars are blending seamlessly into traffic. A NY Times article explains how doing the safest thing sometimes means doing something entirely unexpected to real, human drivers — which itself can lead to dangerous situations. "One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn't get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google's robot." There are also situations in which the software's behavior may be so incomprehensible to human passengers that they end up turning it off. "In one maneuver, it swerved sharply in a residential neighborhood to avoid a car that was poorly parked, so much so that the Google sensors couldn't tell if it might pull into traffic."
From what I have read from people who have actually interacted with a autonomous car. They are very pokey, slow, and tend to pause trying to figure out what to do.
In fact many times its the required human driver who has to intervene in order to help the car out of a jam. I think the more we try and mix these auto driven vehicles with human one's the more we will experience the growing pains of this technology.
“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”
Very true, When holidaying in Texas I quickly found out that stopping for a red light that had just turned would upset drivers behind me. The lights had a much longer amber time, so a whole lot of people who would have had to brake for the lights in the UK would go through
Millions of people on the road today deserve to have their license taken from them because they can't follow simple rules like signaling, not parking halfway out into the street and leaving enough room to brake in case the car in front of you brakes.
Due to this - I am a pedestrian - I'd much rather have self-driving cars.
If the programming makes it jerk the steering away from a stationary hazard rather than, say, detect it earlier and slow down as it approaches, then it's not suitably programmed for coexistence with unexpected stationary hazards (Not even anything to do with human presence! What if that was a cardboard box and it swerved heavily in case that box "pulled out"?).
If it can't make it's way through a junction where the drivers are following the rules, that's bad programming. If it can't make it's way through a junction where other drivers don't come to a complete halt for it, it's not fit to be on the road with other drivers.
If you want a car to co-exist on the road, it has to be treated as a learner driver. If a learner driver swerved at a non-hazard, they would fail. If a learner driver refused to make progress at a junction because the masses didn't open up before it, they would fail. So should an automated car.
Unless - and this is important - you are saying that automated cars should only operate on automated roads where such hazards should never be possible and they are deliberately NOT programmed to take account of such things. Which, in itself, is expensive (separate roads with separate rules with no human drivers), stupid (that's otherwise known as a "train line", and because they can't do anything about it it will hurt more when it does happen), and dangerous (because what happens if a cardboard box blows over the automated road? etc.).
Program to take account of these things, or don't plan on driving on the road. The safety record is exemplary but equally there are only a handful of them and the eyes of the world are on them, and there are still humans behind the wheel, and even by miles travelled each one is probably dwarved by a single long-distance driver over the course of a year - and it's not hard to find a long-distance driver who's not had an accident for years.
If you're going to be on the roads, then you need to be able to take account of all these things, the same as any learner driver. Sure, you didn't hurt anyone by swerving or not pulling out, but equally - in the wording of my first driving test failure - you have "failed to make adequate progress" while driving.
A car sitting on a driveway would have an even better safety record but, in real life, it's still bog-useless compared to a human. Similarly for any automated vehicle that just stops at a junction because it can't pull out, or swerves out of the way of a non-hazard (and potentially weighs up collision with non-hazard vs collision with small child and gets it wrong).
"One Google car, in a test in 2009,..."
One would think that in 6 years some improvements would have been made. Do we have a more current example?
It mentions further down in the article that that particular example has already been corrected.
... For instance, at four-way stops, the program lets the car inch forward, as the rest of us might, asserting its turn while looking for signs that it is being allowed to go.
As it turns out, we do. A Google Self Driving Car and a cyclist on a fixed gear bike met at a 4-way stop. The cyclist was doing a track stand (staying upright on the peddles, sometimes peddling backwards and forwards a small ammount) instead of balancing on a foot. This caused the Google car to think the cyclist was going to enter the intersection after the car had started moving, causing it to stop and "wait" for the cyclist, which by this point had "stopped", which the car took to mean that he (the cyclist) was waiting for the car to go (which was actually the case), and so the car would start moving again until the cyclist started his next forward motion to balance himself.
That is a well known problem in architectural design. Give a clear path for people to exit and clear escalators and the like, and place directional signs where people have space to stop to read them. There's an art to finding a way to entice people away from stairs and escalators after they exit them.