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Automated Cars Are Not Able To Use the Automated Car Wash (thetruthaboutcars.com)
schwit1 shares a report from The Truth About Cars: [T]he simple task of washing a self-driving car is far more complicated than one might expect, as anything other than meticulous hand washing a big no-no. Automated car washes could potentially dislodge expensive sensors, scratch them up, or leave behind soap residue or water spots that would affect a camera's ability to see. According to CNN, automakers and tech firms have come up with a myriad of solutions to this problem -- though a man with a rag and some water appears to be the most popular. Toyota, Aptiv, Drive.AI, May Mobility, and Uber have all said they use rubbing alcohol, water, or glass cleaner to manually wash the sensors, before carefully finishing the job with a microfiber cloth. While it's more than just a little ironic that these automated vehicles require gobs of attention and pampering from human hands just to function correctly, some companies are working on a way around it. General Motors' Cruise has said it will design and implement sensor-cleaning equipment in production vehicles.
how these cars and their sensors would hold up in a dusty area when it rains. Who's going to wipe the mud of everything?
I like to get hanjobs in the car washs! Haaaan solo!
Does this mean a quick acetone wipe will assure that fine driving machine is driven by somebody paying attention?
Seems the self driving car developers have been focusing on the hard problem of how to make a car self driving and safe. Packaging the sensors to handle a car wash is one of the less-hard problems. Probably need some sort of diagnostic to make sure it is clean and functional before going back on the road. Also sensors that can tolerate driving in dust, rain, and slush. If these items are not on the developer to do list, then add them. They will get solved because they are not super hard and they have to be solved to make money.
If it can't handle a car wash at low velocity that lasts a few minutes, how's it going to handle hours and hours of rain with entrained road grime at highway speeds?
Automated cars will save millions of lives. Cheap automated car washes are our biggest worry?
Just more proof we are a long ways off of true AI
In the future, humans exist only to serve the machines.
they use rubbing alcohol, water, or glass cleaner to manually wash the sensors, before carefully finishing the job with a microfiber cloth.
Those people have never met snow or the salty sludge thrown around by passing cars.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
This vehicle has detected blocking of the LEFT FRONT UPPER optical sensor. This vehicle will now pull off the road in a safe location. Locate the OPTICAL sensor cleaning kit that was supplied to the registered owner of this vehicle and employ it in the method shown on the center console screen. Use of any cleaning product or method different from the specified product may invalidate your warranty. Have a nice day!
See! All these advances in technology just create new jobs in new places! How many "Washer of High Tech Car" jobs were there 20 years ago? None!
Wifi Antenna Cleaner?
Robot repair?
Laser lens deduster?
3D Printer Nozzle Declogger?
I could go on. Relax you all.
Do Teslas have this problem now? I remember when you use to have to put down your exterior antenna before going into a car wash. Yes, many of the current under-development cars have this problem. Once self driving cars really arrive there maybe a short period where you have to cover some special equipment in some cases for some brands -- but quite quickly the cars will evolve to not need this or car washes will evolve to accommodate. To propose this is the thing that will prevent adoption is foolish (or wishful thinking) which I think is part of the suggestion behind this posting.
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First world problem. Guess we'll still need humans for something.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
what do you expect? Some like washing a fleet is the kind of thing they'll do once the whole "self driving" thing is worked out.
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Wonderful sensors, Magical sensors, Blah Blah sensors.
Promised Reality: Sensor arrays that can pick up *REAL-TIME LIFE-SIGNS* from *LIGHT YEARS* away, at warp, with the resolution to tell what the *SPECIES*.
Reality: Short-range sensors that can't get wet, on a planet that is mostly water.
We have some work to do....
Yeah, because every time society goes on another automation kick, robustness is a zero-day freebie.
While I understand virtue signalling, I'm still working on this conspicuous signalling of brain damage. Perhaps the intended message is mostly harmless, comparatively speaking, next to alcohol abuse, for whom this ridiculous bell tolls.
On a GOOD winter day, Driving in snow country in winter is driving through a soup of salt spray plus whatever is coming down from the sky. Automatic windshield wipers can't deal with the caked stuff on the windshield and get confused madly going faster and faster. What hope do driverless cars have? On a really bad day, the snow comes down faster than you can clear your wipers. Driverless cars are for suckers.
Did I mention that this applies to Toronto: busiest freeway on the planet? Unlike most of the U.S., we actually have heavy traffic here.
Depends on who the one is, the mostly clueless or technical literate.
While going to work on an interstate in slushy weather, I was driving 65 in the fast lane which was separated from the oncoming lanes by a concrete barrier above headlight level. A truck in the oncoming lane hit a slush puddle and sent a wall of black slush over the barrier. It fully covered my windshield and side window. I couldn't see anything other than the fact that the car behind me got plastered too. So he couldn't see me either. I couldn't put my brakes on. I had to pray the car in front of me didn't stop, turn wipers and wash on, and wait to see again. It was a long few seconds. These things will happen.
A sensor could avoid being blinded in the same situation if it had something like eyelids with similar reflexes and speed.
The sensor processing should have a parallel path that does nothing but detect things coming at the sensor and send a signal to close the lid at just the right moment to block most of the debris. That combined with new technology to make the sensor windows hydrophobic should go a long way to keep them clean.
Redundancy is also important. I personally think they should explore audio sensing to augment the visual. It is cheap and can warn about threats that are out of sight. I prefer driving with my windows down in city environments because the noises give me a good 3D map of the traffic without taking my eyes from the road in front.
I deal with Lidars a lot, on self-driving loaders in an underground mining environment. It's pretty much the worst place for them - dusty, wet, hot, lots of vibration, you name it. Even though they are sealed to IP67, with o-rings on sealing surfaces & etc, they get water in them on a regular basis - IP67 is no match for even the mild pressure from a garden hose, let alone a pressure cleaner. The recommendation from the manufacturer is to send them back to the factory when they get wet, we generally take them apart and dry them out because a visit to the factory costs upwards of $5,000 (and six weeks delay) for an $10,000 device.
They mostly need to be cleaned about once a shift if the conditions are average. They need to be cleaned hourly if conditions are terrible. Failure to clean them gives us missing portions of scans if a mud splatter hits the lens, or a general loss of distance if it's just grime. Both of those things upset the self-driving software eventually, and then it's tedious manual control until someone can go clean it.
A dirty lens used to give us a "pollution error", but we changed the settings in the firmware of the lidars to turn that function off because we were sick of regular halts for errors that had yet to make an impact on the machine's operation. That is, what the manufacturer thinks is a critical pollution fault is actually about halfway to being unusable.
Lenses on our machines typically last about a couple of thousand hours of operation - probably a year or so if you translate that to a passenger vehicle. And of course, when cleaning them the instructions say to use a mild detergent and a clean, lint free cloth, gently buffing to a sparkling result. In reality, that is usually windex (or contact cleaner if there's grease on the lens) and any sort of material that can be found to wipe it with - paper towel, the sleeve of your shirt, a thumb, etc. Needless to say, this generally transforms the finely polished plastic lenses into a hazy scratched mess fairly quickly, especially if people spray and then wipe the lens without actually rinsing the crud off. So expect this to happen to consumer gear as well. And you can't just directly hose them, because hey, they aren't that waterproof either.
As long as there's plastic lenses in use, there's not really much manufacturers can do about this, other than have a secondary, cheap, external covering that can be unclipped and swapped out quickly. Or something like peel-off stickers like motorbike riders have for their helmets. They could shift to proper glass lenses, but even though they'd be much more durable, they would also be much more expensive to make.
(And what's going on with your backend, Slashdot? Heaps of timeouts and errors today.)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
This is still more evidence that this is a essentially a hat trick, not 'AI', and certainly not ready for prime time. We are fools if we implement any of this prematurely.
Optical sensors suffer from optical occlusions. Whoda thunk?
Before reading the article, I had originally had images of a the car AI freaking out the same way that a smal child does when the machinery starts moving past the car giving that slightly uneasy fealing that the car is actually moving. That paired with the sudden movement and noise freaks any 3 year old out. How would a car handle it.
Unfortunately, the article was about sensor care, which disappoints me greatly. I would have assumed that autonomous vehicles would just disappear from the driveway for a few hours for the car equivalent of mani and pedi. I'm assuming that a standin car could also come drop by to keep the driveway warm.
How many times do I have to say it? I've been saying it for years. It's the new "flying car"...... It always seems to be "just around the corner"
dealer will become the only approved way to wash your car and that will be $100 a pop forced each X days
I suppose it will just have to be a hand wash [NSFW] then. The sacrifices we have to make for our technology. [Sigh]
Have gnu, will travel.
Writing from a nordic country, currently it is -10C outside and everything is white from snow.
Robots won't get the ability to self-clean from snow - at least for some time now.
If you expect your self-driving vehicle to stay outdoors for an extended period (say, hours), you must be prepared to manually de-snow and de-ice it before it can move.
Heating / wipers will work in most conditions, but not in _all_ conditions.
Thus you can never be sure if your car will or won't move by itself.
My guess:
Self-driving will try, fail and then ignore snow and other difficult environments for the next years.
Want an autonomous car?
Sure, but the EULA claims that you the user will be responsible to provide the drive envelope for the device - above +5C, no ice (on roads or sensors), no slush, etc.
Nonsense. You won't own a self-driving car. And then it will be illegal for you to drive a car one the road yourself. Your choice will be whether Google, Uber, or some third party tracks your every motion in their automated taxi service.
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Humans suck at flying, machines suck at driving. The solution is quite simple, why are we trying to make a suit so fish can walk on land
or leave behind soap residue or water spots that would affect a camera's ability to see.
So driving through a puddle or getting splattered from the mud kicked up by the vehicle in front will disable an AV? How about purposeful vandalism with a paint aerosol?
And all those fragile sensors that might get dislodged. That would make the cars off-limits to about half the neighbourhoods. "Hey, mister! Do you want your £30,000 LIDAR back .... it'll cost you"
And when that happens, I hate to think what the insurance premiums would be. If these are real problems, rather than media scaremongering (the most likely explanation) then these vehicles have the status of showroom dummies - not real vehicles that are ready for the real world. That's just added another 5 years to their development time.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Do those jobs require one to wear French maid dress? We simply can't relax if they don't.
High class AI cars obviously can only be washed in high class AI car washes.
New business opportunities.
Also, since in the future you'll hail such a car with your phone for a ride, you will care just as much where it gets washed as the Uber car you use now.
What about telephone sanitizers though?
I can think of dozens of professions that need and drive cars and pickup trucks all day every day. Some companies are so small that they're made up of just one or two people. Think: plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, small delivery vehicles, home health care nurses, etc. Are they going to "summon" their work vehicle every morning? Get a ride with ALL of their tools with Uber? LOL! Look around at the traffic during the work day and notice how many vehicles out there are actually driven by people who are working, not just going shopping or wasting time. We don't all work in offices, with parking lots or parking decks nearby. And I sure as hell don't want cop cars to be self-driving!
I drive a company truck that's one of a "fleet" of eight pickup trucks. I drive it home, to the store, and just about wherever else I need to go. Today I'll drive it 51 miles to work and spend the day driving it with the truck being half on the road and half off the road, at about 1.5 mph. Visualize a vehicle driving on the shoulder of the road, except most roads don't have a shoulder wide enough to get completely off the road. That's with traffic on busy streets and sometimes against traffic in residential neighborhoods. I've even driven it many times through the woods on pipeline right-of-ways. How's a self-driving vehicle going to do that? Sometimes we need several trucks to block traffic when pipe repair work is being done. How's a self-driving truck going to do that?
Speaking of which, how does a self-driving car park in a parking lot with no spaces painted? Or park in an open field next to an athletic field. I don't even know how they got the cars in this discussion to drive into a car wash to begin with!
No, millions of vehicles will still be privately owned despite your vision of Utopia.
And soon there'll be antenna cleaner robots, robot repair robots, lens deduster robots, and nozzle declogger robots. I could go on.
I use a manual car wash and drive my car manually.
though a man with a rag and some water appears to be the most popular
Feminist demand this be changed to person with a rag! Women In Tech!
Get the robots to fight each other. It is the only way humans can survive.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
joshua what are you doing?
Laser lens deduster?
It's called a "Brewster Window Cleaner" you insensitive clod, and I was one.
I gotta say, it sounds like your equipment simply isn't being designed for the environment it is used in. And if these are actual mining loaders being used, what is the excuse then?
Yeah, cost. Well the cost excuse doesn't really cut it, long-term, when the equipment just isn't up to the job.
An old story, but relevant. I used to support end-user computing devices. A common request was for a printer and we'd always recommend dot matrix printers; they were inexpensive and flexible, though they didn't do any print job particularly "well". The worst problem they had though was unreliability of the paper feed mechanisms.
Eventually we started bringing in laser printers and it was like night and day. The print quality skyrocketed. Paper feed problems went down by at least 90%. Throughput of print jobs was much greater, frequently by 10x or more.
They were more expensive but it didn't matter. Everyone liked them so much better, we 'found a way' to make it work. IT liked them better because fewer support calls and happier users. The user departments clamored for lasers and suddenly became willing to negotiate in their budgets for funding them. The cost issue was only a problem until people saw the benefits.
Ahh yes, but who will clean the cleaners?
Yup, and those small companies may all lease a self-driving car for their exclusive use. Or maybe you load in at the beginning of the work week and load out at the end (so people can move over the weekend.).
Police departments will be the last to get self-driving cars, as they wouldn't be able to run red lights whenever they are late to the doughnut shop with real enforced rules.
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