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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."
"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?
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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.
“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
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).
The article summary isn't very good. If the software is programmed in a way that causes a car to behave in a way that's dangerous, it IS the software's fault.
That's trivial but true.
It becomes interesting when the software has the car behaving in a way that is SAFE, but unexpected.
bickerdyke
Which is always going to be the problem ... because as long as there are human drivers on the road, there will always be cases in which the computer utterly fails.
And any technology future which is predicated on suddenly replacing all drivers with autonomous cars is complete crap and will never actually happen. Because nobody is going to pay for it.
It's the corner cases which will always cause these things to go wrong. And, I'm sorry, but the driver with his right turn signal on who swoops across two lanes and turns left ... or the ones who think they can use the oncoming lane because there's something in their lane ... or who randomly brake because they can see a cat a half mile away ... or cyclists who do crazy and random shit ... or any number of crazy things you can see on a daily basis ... all of these things will create situations in which the autonomous car utterly fails to do the right thing.
As much as people think it will mostly work most of the time, if these things require the driver to constantly monitor it or have to swoop in when the system decides it doesn't know what to do, then the utility of the autonomous car pretty much vanishes.
I just don't see this technology ever becoming widespread or used in the real world, other than by companies trying to prove how awesome it is. Because it's just going to have too many cases which simply don't work, and the occupants will have to be ready to take the controls.
In which case you might as we be driving and actively engaged in the process instead of zoned out and not paying attention. Because the human reaction time is greatly diminished when you're reading the newspaper and suddenly have to take evasive reaction.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No surprise this is up modded insightful. I'm betting many slashdotters are horrible technologists who assume the world needs to bend to technology. Simply put, that's not the case. If these cars can't handle driving around humans they are not ready for consumption. The fact that they can't properly work with and adapt with humans on the road means that these cars are unsafe. They may be "safe" from the definition of the laws, but they are not safe if they are causing or instigating traffic accidents. It seems it's blind luck that these cars haven't been the clear cut cause of an accident yet.
More to the point, autonomous cars are currently not the cheaper technology. Any bill that would attempt to force conventional vehicles off of the road would be stillborn, there are far too many automotive enthusiasts that have already made inroads in the other direction (ie, looser emissions testing rules on cars with collectors' insurance) that it literally can not happen. There would also be pushback from those that simply cannot afford new cars and advocacy groups for them; one can buy running cars for less than $1000 on the used market, it will take a decade for there to even be a chance for a used autonomous vehicle to be that cheap, if not even longer.
There have been lots of discussions on attempting to change driver behavior. Those are also nonstarters. People are not going to change how they drive until conditions in the field force them to do so. Hell, we still have idiots driving below the speed limit in the left lane on busy freeways where they're actually posing a safety hazard and where the law actually states that one can be cited for failing to yield and being passed on the right. Most people probably don't even know the rules for what's defined as stopping (ie, remaining still for two seconds where I live) and have no interest in bothering to learn, and the police don't seem inclined to enforce either, so this simply won't change.
The cars are going to have to learn how to adapt to these conditions.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.