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Dashcam Video Shows Tesla Steering Toward Lane Divider - Again (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: The afternoon commute of Reddit user Beastpilot takes him past a stretch of Seattle-area freeway with a carpool lane exit on the left. Last year, in early April, the Tesla driver noticed that Autopilot on his Model X would sometimes pull to the left as the car approached the lane divider -- seemingly treating the space between the diverging lanes as a lane of its own. This was particularly alarming, because just days earlier, Tesla owner Walter Huang had died in a fiery crash after Autopilot steered his Model X into a concrete lane divider in a very similar junction in Mountain View, California.
Beastpilot made several attempts to notify Tesla of the problem but says he never got a response. Weeks later, Tesla pushed out an update that seemed to fix the problem. Then in October, it happened again. Weeks later, the problem resolved itself. This week, he posted dashcam footage showing the same thing happening a third time -- this time with a recently acquired Model 3. "The behavior of the system changes dramatically between software updates," Beastpilot told Ars. "Human nature is, 'if something's worked 100 times before, it's gonna work the 101st time.'" That can lull people into a false sense of security, with potentially deadly consequences.
Beastpilot made several attempts to notify Tesla of the problem but says he never got a response. Weeks later, Tesla pushed out an update that seemed to fix the problem. Then in October, it happened again. Weeks later, the problem resolved itself. This week, he posted dashcam footage showing the same thing happening a third time -- this time with a recently acquired Model 3. "The behavior of the system changes dramatically between software updates," Beastpilot told Ars. "Human nature is, 'if something's worked 100 times before, it's gonna work the 101st time.'" That can lull people into a false sense of security, with potentially deadly consequences.
Are they sharing the same autopilot dev team?
Tesla's autopilot automatically takes aim at anything the camera doesn't recognize and the Boeing 737-Max autopilot automatically takes a 90 degrees plunge to the ground the moment something abnormal happens.
There are parallels here..
It's clear in the video the the Telsa is trying to take the left lane that has that strange signage showing it is closed. When the driver steers back to the right at that point it is heading towards the divider, but the car is trying to take that lane that goes to the left of the barrier. That's different than "the car is trying to steer into the lane divider".
In my 30+ years of driving I have never seen that kind of signage or markers that are apparently used to dynamically close lanes at certain times. I would wonder what I was seeing myself the first time I encountered that.
It looks like two things are going on:
1) The visual system of the Tesla does not understand that signage meaning a lane / offramp has been closed.
2) The GPS routing shows that is a viable route when it is somehow only intermittently open.
Better known as 318230.
Not funny. Not in my garage.
No kidding. It's like Adobe Flash updates of the past. Except now the bug fixes introduce new people killing issues.
The only thing more hubristic than assuming something will definitely work is assuming something will never work.
Of course autonomous driving software will have bugs in it, and those bugs will lead to accidents. The status-quo alternative (biology-based driving software) also has bugs in it, which regularly leads to accidents.
The difference is that bugs in the autonomous driving software will eventually be diagnosed and fixed. Bugs in biological driving software, OTOH, will never be fixed, because every new person has to learn to drive from scratch; even if someone eventually becomes a flawless driver, sooner or later that person will die and replaced by another newbie, who will repeat the same newbie mistakes as everyone else. Lessons "learned" by software (and software designers) OTOH, can stay "learned" indefinitely, as long as they don't lose the source code.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Duh. That's why anyone with a brain knows these things are deathtraps.
You can't debug a NN, not in any reasonable manner, certainly not one that you're constantly retraining and tweaking all the time. In this case, even providing heuristics ("Hey, there's a bridge near this GPS location, so don't think it's a wall" is literally what Tesla are putting into their software in some places because they can't train the behaviour out of the NN).
This has always been the concern of anyone that deals with such stuff since Tesla said they were using that technology.
You're basically training a black box on unknown criteria from limited test data, and then acting shocked when people say they don't understand how the black box works, can't predict what it will do, can't retrain or untrain it easily, and are surprised that even a million miles of road data aren't enough to let it drive safely across the entire world in perpetuity?
AI will be the end of us.
The video clearly shows that the Tesla was in the Ravenna section of Seattle, which is reasonably nice. It was simply trying to avoid heading further south into the lower-class area known as the University District.
#DeleteChrome
Tesla and just about everyone else in the "autonomous" driving game is using an Expert System.
Sorry but expert systems are not what does the image analysis. Go back to start. Do not collect $200.
Yeah yeah yeah...because one thing is possible all things must be possible. You guys keep repeating the same mantra, while wondering why you aren't living on Mars yet.
You just answered why self driving will never work with the current approach: you can only train based on a dataset. You cannot create a dataset large enough to cover all permutations. We realized this in the 1970s with NN, but now a new generation is learning it all over again. It works better, because the processing speeds and data storage has increased, but it is still the same faulty crap underneath. Tesla is a joke, and autonomous driving is a joke too. "Enhanced Summon" is the best you are going to get out of your crappy Tesla, no matter how many "AI chips" they come out with.
It didn't "understand it" because it doesn't "understand" anything. It is a joke. How many permutations of "edge cases" are there on the planet? Billions. Trillions. Quadrillions. NN were invented in the 1960s. They aren't new. They are good for some things, but will ultimately fail.
I am glad to see this distinction has been discussed. Because of the difficulty in fixing this problem it is probably due to a combination of control loop in the inflexible decision logic and error in the camera based image recognition system. Musk needs to admit error in relying on fantasy technology and add an array of $100 LIDAR sensors to break these problems. Hell, why not use a few hundred of them for redundancy? Nothing beats detecting the actual real world as a backup, and it should simplify a lot of the stupidly complex things they are doing that increase cost to the luxury level for what is barely an economy car in build quality.
I'm a pilot. I fly a plane with an autopilot. I also drive a Tesla with their "autopilot".
The very expensive aircraft autopilot flies great. I can be hands-off the controls for extended periods of time, read a book, browse Facebook (hurrah for GoGo :), etc. Do I? Hell no! An aircraft autopilot has no clue what other aircraft are doing. TCAS might see another nearby aircraft, maybe it won't. I keep my hands on or near the controls, I look out the window, and I scan the instruments - all the time. Which is pretty much what I do in the Tesla. The big difference is that the Tesla actually does a pretty decent job of reacting to other cars. Odd lane markings and construction zones do freak it out from time to time. I have had the Tesla alert me to an unsafe traffic or road condition and tell me to take over - in a flurry of beeps and on-screen alerts. Freaks me out every time. I wish the autopilot in the airplane would do that - instead it just shuts off, throws a warning light if I'm lucky, and the plane wanders off somewhere in the sky until I pull head of my my ass. I probably hand-fly the airplane more than I hand-drive the Tesla - on cross country trips. Taxiing around on the ground is a bit like driving a Tesla to the grocery store - an annoying fact of life to tolerate only until I get where I belong - out on the road, or up in the air, where the massively automated systems not only make my life easier, they make it safer as well.
You people bitching about how dangerous the Tesla autopilot is are just spoiled, bitchy little meat bags of self-loading cargo. You have no concept of automation, risk, and capability, you see the autopilot and cry that it's not perfect. You all need to fly from LA to NYC in a Ford Trimotor, or drive between them in a model T. Keep a spare set of points and a condenser in the glovebox. The magneto on the Trimotor's radial engines probably uses the same points as the Model T. Make sure you can change the points and gap them in the middle of nowhere, because that's where they'll fail. You'll be flying for about 20 hours, and you'll make about 8 stops for fuel and maintenance. The Model T will take a wee bit longer, at least 60 hours, with modern roads, unless you have to stop and fix the engine. A model 3 can make that drive in 50 hours, and you won't have to change the points once.
All things are possible?
They don't. Well some nitwits do, but youre falling into the trap that because some things are physically impossible other things must be too. But when it comes to self driving cars you're pretty wide of the mark.
First, self driving cars aren't limited by physics like space travel is.
Secondly, you're ignoring the advancs in computer vision. Whether you believe deep learning is the key to strong AI or not (it isn't), or whether you believe it's 100% novel never seen before (it isn't), it has advanced practical comuter visison by a very large amount.
Thirdly, you're ignoring the history and advances. In the 1980s the first vision and lidar systems were made and could drive a car successfully on a closed track with no traffic. Cool demo but too early to be useful. Fsatforward to now with huge advances in all aspects of computer vision (both learning based and geometric), huge improvements in sensors, vast increases in computing power and you now have driverless cars which have indesutable successfully driven around in real cities with traffic. As in they might not be perfect or even good enough yet, but they do actually verifiably work.
You're basically stating that you kow that all future advances from about now will cease and self driving cars will stop just on the cusp of getting useful. Seems unlkely to me.
Finally you're ignoring the shockingly bad quality of the average human driver. A self driving car is not and will never be a human driver but worse. Because they always will and always have done a number of things vastly better than humans they can afford to do a fair few things considerably worse and still have better accident rates overall.
We are not going to get a self-driving car which is better than a well trained, fully alert human driver any time soon. That isn't going to happen. Can we get a self driving car with a lower accident rate than the average human? My money says a strong yes. Because while self driving cars will always foul up and drive into something no human ever would, they have other plus points:
They do not get tired. They do not get angry. They feel no impatience. They do not forget how to drive in conditions they haven't seen for a year. They are not distraced by their boss being an asshole at work. They don't text or use a mobile phone. They do not yell at their kids. They do not rush because they are late. They do not get close to the car in front. They do not race off the lights. They never try to show off or exhibit dominance. They don't daydream onboring journeys. They don't accelerate at pedestrians. They don't try to squeeze through gaps which are too small. They don't floor it to make the orange light. They won't pull out without checking mirrors. They wont forget to indicate. They won't realise they've misread the stanav then haul ass over three lanes with no warning to get to the turnoff. They won't drive the wrong way down a one way street because "it's only a short distance". They won't go twice the speed limit then slam on the brakes when they see a speed camera (and for bonus points blame other people for it). They wont speed in fog because they take lessons from the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal.
Now I, like 80% of the population rate myself as well above average as a driver. I don't need to be replaced with a self driving car. Those other idiots? A self driving car can be well below perfection and still be a lot better.
SJW n. One who posts facts.