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MIT Study: Tesla Autopilot Drivers "Maintain Functional Vigilance" (mit.edu)
Long-time Slashdot reader Rei writes: Friday, the results of a study by the MIT Center for Transport and Logistics on autonomous system driver attentiveness were released, and the results were conclusive: "drivers do not appear to over-trust the system to a degree that results in significant functional vigilance degradation in their supervisory role of system operation".
The study, involving 323,384 miles driven (34,8% on autopilot) and 8682 "tricky situations" identified. Of the "tricky situations", 0% of incidents involved slow driver responses or missed detections; 4,5% rapid/timely responses; 90,6% anticipatory reaction (preventing the situation from occurring); and 4,9% "other". The study suggests that this is the result of two effects: 1) drivers effectively learn the limits of the system through usage; and 2) "tricky situations" are common enough so as to prevent excess trust by the driver in the system — creating the counterintuitive result that the better the systems become, the worse the driver may become.
While the study is limited by the age of the vehicles (under a quarter were even running HW2, vs HW3 which is being released now — and due to the length of the study, most of the miles were accumulated on older software versions), it offers positive conclusions — but also a precaution — about the integration of humans and driver assist systems.
In other news, Tesla has announced an April 22 Autonomy Investor Day to showcase the capability of its development versions of the software in city driving, and has started rolling out stoplight detection, no-confirmation automated lane changes and exits, and a limited rollout of advanced summon (navigates through parking lots without a driver).
The study, involving 323,384 miles driven (34,8% on autopilot) and 8682 "tricky situations" identified. Of the "tricky situations", 0% of incidents involved slow driver responses or missed detections; 4,5% rapid/timely responses; 90,6% anticipatory reaction (preventing the situation from occurring); and 4,9% "other". The study suggests that this is the result of two effects: 1) drivers effectively learn the limits of the system through usage; and 2) "tricky situations" are common enough so as to prevent excess trust by the driver in the system — creating the counterintuitive result that the better the systems become, the worse the driver may become.
While the study is limited by the age of the vehicles (under a quarter were even running HW2, vs HW3 which is being released now — and due to the length of the study, most of the miles were accumulated on older software versions), it offers positive conclusions — but also a precaution — about the integration of humans and driver assist systems.
In other news, Tesla has announced an April 22 Autonomy Investor Day to showcase the capability of its development versions of the software in city driving, and has started rolling out stoplight detection, no-confirmation automated lane changes and exits, and a limited rollout of advanced summon (navigates through parking lots without a driver).
When it comes to cruise control I know I'm driving and I have to make sure the cruise control doesn't run me into another car.
With "autopilot" I'm supposed to be fully aware at all times of what going on while I'm not actually doing anything. Basically it is a neat toy that I can play with to see what it will do. No thanks.
Like this vigilant driver completely aware of his surroundings.
Huge pervert!!!
TRUMP 2020!!
Why would an American study about an American company use commas instead of decimal points?
People that drive a manual transmission Did MIT test their "functional vigilance" against the autonomous car people in this study?
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So how does this explain the concrete barrier incident? Or the firetruck incident? Or the semitrailer crossing the road incident? Those don't happen?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
MPI discovered unicorns!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Lets get someone to finally say something good about our cars!!!
Elon Musk is just a scummy salesman.
I am one of the drivers in the study. They equipped my car with three cameras, one for my face, one for my hands, and one out front. They also record data directly from the car and audio. When I look at the animation of the various trips, I can recognize my drive to work.
I generally turn on Autopilot (AP1) anytime the road has paint on both sides of the lane. I've learned that there are some situations it handles poorly, such as coming over the crest of a rise, so that accounts for a lot of the disconnects. On highways, we're on Autopilot most of the time, and it's really quite good, though I watch for stopped cars, construction zones, and exits (it used to be bad about following the right paint into the exit).
If you have any questions about my experience, I would be happy to answer. (I'm not seeing messages from Slashdot on post replies recently; I'm not sure if something broke, but I'll try to check back.)
I signed a release for video clips of disconnects for release with this paper, so there will probably be some videos of me somewhere.
A couple of anecdotes do not change overall statistics.
I fully expect that we will one day have an amazing self driving system, but it will have to screw up a million times to get there. So those mistakes do happen and they will continue to happen and systems will continue to improve because of them.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Rei,
This article is meaningless because you promised us Musk/Tesla/You will provide us with full level 5 autonomous consumer vehicles by the end of this year.
Some random study about what happens in the next few months is pointless when full level 5 is less than a year away. A few more months of fake self driving just isnt important when we are getting full level 5 by 12/31/2019, as per you.
I do look forward to mocking you on 1/1/2020 when nothing has improved in any real way. Maybe the drive into a cement block bug or the drive into an emergency vehicle bug will have been worked out,
Musk is a villain and a proven repeat liar. You are a sheep.
They're not "anecdotes". They're real things that happened that shouldn't have happened if this article is true.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"0% of incidents involved slow driver responses or missed detections" is not a believable absolute statement, at least not without statistical confidence intervals. There are already recorded historical incidents that contradict this 0% statement, so the statement is obviously not true in an absolute and infinite precision way. Either the study needs to state the confidence intervals or state how the study differs from the past contradictory historical incidents. For example, how does the statement that "drivers do not appear to over-trust the system to a degree that results in significant functional vigilance degradation in their supervisory role of system operation" square with the guy who died while watching the Harry Potter movie? Either the study was constructed in a way that doesn't capture this situation, or the metrics were constructed in a way that doesn't capture this situation.
Since Tesla were too cheap (many meanings here) to build-in a camera pointed at the driver, this study installed one...
Not only does the driver know they are being watched, the type of driver that agrees to enroll in this study is comfortable being surveilled.
How were the results corrected for that? How *can* they be?
It's not really possible to have an intelligent conversation with someone who doesn't know what words mean.
It doesn't, but 'sample error' does.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Tesla autopilot drivers are attentive and vigilant because they're all wealthy.
Rich people don't get rich by making bad decisions.
I guarantee you that less than 5 minutes after Tesla sells their first economy subcompact there will be a "ghost ride the whip" video on Youtube.
They're not saying it's perfect, they're saying it's no worse than regular drivers on average. Based on the miles logged on by Tesla cars with autopilot, you would expect some accidents. Those accidents are likely to be different in nature than those that would be caused by humans.