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Elon Musk Says Autopilot Will Soon Recognize Emergency Response Vehicles (inverse.com)
Over the weekend, Elon Musk alluded to impending software updates that would make Teslas even safer than they already are. In response to a story about a DUI where a Tesla autopilot may have been involved, Musk said Autopilot may soon be able to recognize emergency response vehicles and react accordingly. Inverse reports: "Default Autopilot behavior, if there's no driver input, is to slow gradually to a stop & turn on hazard lights," Musk explained in the replies. "Tesla service then contacts the owner." That naturally got people wondering whether or not Tesla's autopilot was capable of differentiating between emergency response vehicles and everyone else. Presumably, someday soon autonomous vehicles are going to be able to recognize sirens (or their futuristic software equivalent.) If an ambulance pulls up behind an autonomous car on a single-lane road, it will need some mechanism to know it's supposed to get out of the way. In the meanwhile, Musk said that Tesla is already working on the first half of that problem, by teaching neural net to be able to recognize police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. On Twitter, he said that this capability would be added to the neural net "in the coming months."
I needed my hourly update on Musk's twitter account. Thanks Rei!
All you Musk haters are just jealous because he can fuck hot goddesses like Amber Heard and you can't.
Boys, weâ(TM)re hunting teslas.
Just curious - what does autopilot do when it approaches a school bus with the lights flashing? In most (all?) jurisdictions in North America, a car must stop (a certain distance away from the bus).
Is autopilot smart enough to handle this situation?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
What is the point? A driverless car will require a sober licensed adult in charge. How will they stay awake? And where is the fun in not driving? Who wants a driverless car other than the manufacturers? Is this the equivalent of 3D TV?
Just like every 3 year old. Soon maybe they'll add trash trucks, front loaders and tractors.
Dont think Elon cares for the backdoor much. Im Psychic bet I can guess the news in the near future. :)
[($)]
See if the driver is alert or not. :) Better hurry up with that. :) An addon package for later. :)
[($)]
"Default Autopilot behavior, if there's no driver input, is to slow gradually to a stop & turn on hazard lights," Musk explained in the replies.
If that's even close to true, then why in the world did the Tesla in question (the one that supposedly prompted his response) continue to drive for over 7 minutes before essentially being corralled into a stop by police cars? Something doesn't add up.
No wonder it's running into pedestrians! (LOL!!! Captcha "dozens")
Find a problem that doesn't exist*. Then solve it. Then market the hell out of it ballyhooing what a great solution you've come up with that nobody needed.
I admit that there are plenty of people who shouldn't be driving. For them there's Uber, Lyft, Ola, etc., and taxis. For those of us who like driving,...
McDonald's "problem" didn't exist for Burger King, Wendy's, or In-n-Out anyway.
My first thought on this, is its a bad idea to utilize imperfect machine learning algorithms for critical interactions. This is bound to go bad at a really bad time.
This will make it much easier to kidnap rich folks. Just buy a red flasher, stick in the rear window of a car, cut in front, flash, halt the vehicle and attack. Bonus points, at the request/regulation of LE/gov't, add a feature so the doors autounlock on stop, making dragging people out of their vehicle so much easier than having to bash the window and pull them out....
Guess what I think about autopilot on the ground (I worked on Jets with Autopilot.) I'll save the suspence. Autopilot on the ground is a wmd to go after targets, it MUST be outlawed. It's not helping you drive.
Lets put this together. Tesla owners have lots of money, so buy a magnetic flashing light from eBay, put it in the roof of the crims car, Tesla pulls over.
Make Tesla owner less wealthy.
Repeat.
Going to be real hard to do as well as a human there guys.
The one thing that comes to mind is a bad actor using this to cause a car to pull over and stop so that he can [insert bad thing here] to the occupants.
Obviously this is possible (and happens) today. Fake cops pulling unsuspecting drivers over is enough of a problem that it hits the news on a moderately regular basis and that drivers who suspect it are encouraged to call 911 to verify that the police are real.
For this to work safely, it would have to provide a means for the car to connect to a service that does some kind of similar verification. Cop cars need to be able to submit a "notice of pulling over command" to a central web site via cellular network, and the car being commanded to pull over needs to be able to query that central location to verify that the command is legitimate.
And it all has to happen securely, and fast enough that it doesn't delay an emergency pull over.
much better name for it.
For those who don't slobber over every meaningless Musk tweet, Tesla calls their adaptive cruise control system 'auto-pilot' for a variety of misguided reasons. This has nothing to do with aircraft. No idea why the editors didn't feel compelled to include that information. Aircraft typically don't encounter emergency vehicles.
No need for any autopilot. The adaptive cruise control / city safety already deployed in lots of vehicles nowaday will, when engaged and in the absence of input from the driver, slow down and halt the car.
Whether the default stoping distance is acceptable for the "certain distance away" required by the north american law is a different matter.
Though it is set-able, most of the time it is not per-vahicle dependent. Your car will stop at the same distance of whatever it detects, be it a truck, a bus, a car, a bicycle or a pedestrian. (But if law requires you to stop at a different further away back distance specifically for school buses, then ACC doesn't cut it, you'll need some object recognition (similar to TFS' Teslka neural net) to detect school busses and change the stop distance.)
This autonomous strop can be overridden by user input. In case of false positive, put your feet gently on the gas pedal and this will prevent the car from slowing down.
The car might still ring an alarm if it still thinks you're on a collision course with some large object, but the autonomous emergency braking will be inhibited as long as your foot is still maintaining the gas pedal.
Conversely even if only gently press the brake pedal while the collision alarm is ringing, this will encourage the car to autonomously start its emergency braking to avoid rear-ending the vehicle in front.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
At some point it will occur to all of these people that they have, in fact, missed the point. Musk is a bag of rocks, so are the people participating in his mass hallucinations by dumping money on his head.
Hopefully it knows what types of lights to look for based on the area. If you're driving in Ontario, blue lights mean snow plow, no need to pull over (though passing them might give your car a salt sanding). In the USA, blue lights mean pull over. As long as the car knows what the lights mean for each city (since some cities use green lights for various purposes) it should be fine. I don't think there's a database of that yet, though, but good on Elon for volunteering!
In other words, I'll be laughing my ass off when the snow plows come out and all the Teslas ditch themselves.
All emergency lights have a strobe on them that flashes periodically to let signals know to stop cross traffic. Tesla could easily leverage this I would think.
And if you are bored, you can get one for your cars to turn lights green. But if you get caught it is illegal.