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Self-Driving Cars' Shortcomings Revealed in DMV Reports (mercurynews.com)
A demand from the California DMV of eight companies testing self-driving cars has highlighted a number of areas where the technology falls short of being safe to operate with no human backup. From a report: All companies testing autonomous vehicles on the state's public roads must provide annual reports to the DMV about "disengagements" that occur when a human backup driver has to take over from the robotic system. The DMV told eight companies with testing permits to provide clarification about their reports. More than 50 companies have permits to test autonomous vehicles with backup drivers on California roads but not all of them have deployed vehicles.
It turns out that a number of the issues reported are shared across technology from different companies. Some of the problems had to do with the way the cars sense the environment around them. Others had to do with how the vehicles maneuver on the road. And some had to do with what you might expect from systems made up of networked gadgets: hardware and software failures. The disengagement reports themselves identify other problems some self-driving vehicles struggle with, for example heavy pedestrian traffic or poorly marked lanes.
It turns out that a number of the issues reported are shared across technology from different companies. Some of the problems had to do with the way the cars sense the environment around them. Others had to do with how the vehicles maneuver on the road. And some had to do with what you might expect from systems made up of networked gadgets: hardware and software failures. The disengagement reports themselves identify other problems some self-driving vehicles struggle with, for example heavy pedestrian traffic or poorly marked lanes.
so if I'm a self driving car with no backup operator, do I prioritize the safety of my passengers? if I have to run down 5 people to keep my rider safe, do I do that? what if I have to do the whole run over your mother / a baby / a nun or run over a bunch of assholes? how are they ever going to solve for this, because whatever it chooses will be wrong
But we all know that autonomous driving is safer than humans. The tech companies have told us that. They even have whitepapers and actual numbers based on tens of thousands of logged miles. Don't you trust them?
Holy shit, they've just described, you know ... driving.
This shit is what happens pretty much daily, and for which the act of driving requires you to have a high degree of situational awareness.
Just this morning as I was driving into work, some clown turning off a street into the road I was driving on ... he hesitated, then apparently said "fuck it" and went anyway. Unfortunately he didn't seem to be aware enough or intelligent enough to have noticed me. The end result was I had to pretty much do a panic stop behind some idiot who unsafely pulled out into oncoming traffic, and was pretty much suddenly in front of me and driving at half my speed (which was the posted limit).
Why the hell are these companies acting like they have self-driving cars when they clearly can't handle driving in the real world.
This shit is never going to work if it can't handle random, illegal, and stupid behaviour from the humans on the road. And if they think the world is going to replace all cars with autonomous vehicles, then clearly they expect the rest of us to pay for that future.
This is just hubris from the tech industry who are pretending they're closer to solutions that work in the real world than they really are. The fact of the matter is, we're not all going to run out and buy new cars to allow this awesome future as envisioned by corporations to actually ever happen.
Sorry, but all of the stuff in the above quote is pretty much mandatory for driving a car.
It is not like anyone knowning anything about AI could have told them it isn't ready for general roads, and only for special roads. It is not like allowing them on special roads first is exactly the plan in Europe where government listens to experts.
Add a failing test, add code to fix failing test, deploy to all vehicles - fixed. Humans rearly learn in that fashion.
A self-driving car's software has the priority to minimize litigation of its creating company.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Seldom (if ever) is there the rather obvious suggestion to limit autonomous vehicles to simple point to point 'highway' trips; but that's exactly where and how it should be done for the foreseeable future, if it happens at all. That is, the (literally) lethal mistake is to introduce autonomous vehicles into the complex and chaotic world of city driving. The next time you drive in the city consider how many of your decisions are predicated on understanding subtleties (some might occasion "stupidities") of human nature: "Is that guy looking at the person as they're talking on the corner? If so, they aren't as likely to start across the street" "Is that a child's toy which just bumped a bit into the road (to be chased by a child) or just a blown leaf?" "OK ...four way stop: it's that guys turn, but, he's got a cell phone in his hand he's consulting" ...etc. So, start out with truck loads from freeway exit 113 to 114, then if that works, exit 117...
In the US we define experts as those who are paid by industry leaders to say the things we like to hear.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Supposedly he has been convicted for raping children. Can someone post a link to the trial?
So the self driving cars act just like an inexperienced millennial who can't drive a stick or read a map, and texts constantly?
After a passenger eats at Chipotle, the vehicle will automatically set course for the nearest hospital, notify the CDC, and engage biowarfare protection protocols.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing
I told you so.
GASP... who would have thought driving was actually hard for a computer to do? Maybe they can keep paying attention EXCEPT when it comes to concrete barriers, or backing up trucks, or pedestrians in the street. But millions of cycles a second means nothing if they're not successfully driving with them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
They will work great until some prankster repaints the lines and leads them off the road.
I am wondering if self driving cars take into account probabilities when making decisions? it seems to me that you can never be 100% safe when driving, and are constantly weighing probabilities constantly in your head. like something similar to a 3d markov chain?? i dunno
.... ever written any piece of code ? Bugs are not suppose to happen... and yet....
We will probably never have streets filled with fully autonomous vehicles. It isn't a technology that can realistically be applied to something like driving a car. Isn't going to happen. It was a cool and very expensive tech demo, that's it. We may see them for specialized uses in controlled environments, maybe. People in the Valley really, really need to grow up and join the rest of us in reality.
There are times that they can't see the faded lines in the road or the stop lights? Well, yeh. I agree. Same here. And I don't consider that safe either. There are many different inherently unsafe intersections near me. The only difference is that the self-driving vehicle can avoid taking the chance by turning it over to me to take the chance. I honestly don't know if it would be better if it kept control and tried it than handing control to me. But, the buck is passed.
The biggest problem that autonomous vehicles have to overcome is that they expose the faults in a very bad system through extensive data collection. Exposing faults in something people depend on is never an easy road. The messenger often becomes the victim.
Like most who have lived more than half a century, I've been in a number of accidents including:
Driving is dangerous. Four out of four of the accidents above were because of driving while impaired in some fashion - a teenager unprepared to drive in rain, driving while tired, blinded by the sun while driving (should have stopped or greatly slowed), and driving while distraught. And there are numerous other incidents that didn't rise to the level that I would term an accident that would be reported by these self-driving vehicle regulations.
Road maintenance is also atrocious in this country and human drivers die because of it every day. Human drivers are also prone to complain that others shouldn't drive while impaired and then make exceptions for their own needs.
Maybe we should start this conversion by just shining a very bright light on reality - require every new car to be equipped with the sensors to record the reality and disclose every bit of it to the DMV - every solid line crossed, every rolling stop, every time the light is red and we're stil
Facebook just trained their image recognition "AI" with over 3 billion instagram images
They then only scored 85% in a test.
Self-driving cars aren't going to be able to recognise what they're looking at. Is it a person crossing the road wearing a big raincoat, or is it a newspaper being blown around in the wind?
So the self driving cars act just like an inexperienced millennial who can't drive a stick or read a map, and texts constantly?
I was born in 1991, which makes me Gen Y or "millennial" (uggghhhhhhh). I've been married for 6 years and I have a mortgage. I think you mean Gen-Z. Now get off my non-existent lawn.
Back in 86 at Michigan State I took an experimental c++ course. We were given a bunch of data points and required to drive a car around a course with obstacles etc. I was so proud of my work. I settled in for my demo. The professor said your course is a triangle. Oh god my car flipped out and just did a hard right off the track. I didn't code for that. Ugh!!! Not sure my point. But it was awful.
A company would have to be run by complete and absolute morons to ever even suggest trying to make the AI perform "moral choices." In nearly 100% of situations, you slow down, and, maybe if possible without hitting another detected object, swerve around the obstacle if it is completely stationary or already moving in the opposite direction of the potential swerve. If there's nowhere to easily and safely swerve, you just reduce your speed as much as possible before the likely collision to limit kinetic energy (and hence damage/loss of life) as much as possible. At no point should a self driving car ever make any "moral choice" period (and frankly, people probably shouldn't try to either. Thinking about it WILL cause you to hesitate, and that moment of hesitation could easily make the difference between avoiding a collision entirely and failing to avoid one).
Driving into the sun, any kind of snow, hydroplaning, hard to identify objects in the road, road construction, pedestrians doing stupid stuff, other drivers not following predictable actions or laws, driving in the rain, sensors failing due to age and wear, and about 100 other items are unsolvable problems that our level of technology, especially AI, is nowhere near yet. This is like all those "before their time" inventions in the 50's. The technology just wasn't there to make it real no matter how convincingly they presented it. AI would have to be at human 3D and visual processing level or better and the best AI in the world is around cockroach level intelligence currently, with the best measurement estimate.
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If you've ever driven in high wind situations, you know that they require a constant battle to stay on course.
Also, especially for higher profile vehicles, one must drive extra cautiously. Furthermore, the cruise-control
will require constant adjustment especially in variable winds. I would like to know if they can do all of
that.
Even if there are failure cases for autonomous cars, if the overall safety is significantly less than human drivers reason says we should implement post haste. But the reality is humans are emotional thinkers, and we likely won't accept that. The first time a self-driving car runs over a kid we will be pulling them all off the road even though ten other kids were run over by humans the same day.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Trees block traffic lights and GPS signals. Pedestrians aren't always seen by the bot-cars. So unless you live in a desert, once in a while your car is going to try to kill you or a pedestrian.
There is no way all traffic lights are going to be networked to talk to vehicles in the US. I predict "bot-car friendly roads" will be marked as such, and cars will have to shut down autopilot type driving in all other areas.
Lets start building the vacuum-powered hamster tubes from Futurama.
The good thing about this is that there are tons of poorly engineered roads, intersections, and road signs all over. When you complain about one of these, the city traffic engineers tell you to go fuck yourself. However, Google and its buddies have enough clout to get these things fixed. Currently, Calif is making freeway stripes wider to be more visible to self-driving cars.
Unfortunately, there are going to be plenty of issues that bother ONLY self-driving cars. Google and its buddies also have the clout to get those things fixed. But, guess who is going to be paying for that. Not Google, my friend; the bell tolls for thee.
......global warming
I've been wondering - is there a single autonomous vehicle out there that recognises hand signals from cyclists?