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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!
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
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. :)
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See if the driver is alert or not. :) Better hurry up with that. :) An addon package for later. :)
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"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.
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.
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 ]
but, that already works on human drivers... set up a blue LED. Pick up a halloween police officer outfit, keep a flashlight shone in the guys face to keep him from investigating too closely. Honestly i'd say it's easier to fool humans than self driving cars (not implying it's hard to fool a bot, just even easier to fool a human)
You missed the part where the rich folk sees that it's not a real emergency vehicle, disengages self driving and calls the police.