I'm far from an expert on the self driving car race, but I think even if Uber had to abandon LiDAR altogether it wouldn't mean it would be impossible to approach the problem in a different way. And it isn't clear that if the injunction were granted they'd have to abandon LiDAR altogether -- it may be that they could try a slightly different approach and/or develop a second firewalled team from the one tainted by Lewandowski.
It would surely be painful but I don't see why it would mean shutting down the self driving car project.
If Uber loses this they probably won't be able to hire from Google, they will have to do "clean room" implementations, and this will all have to be done on the up and up with documentation and proof that whatever product they come up with was entirely started after the ruling with no use of anything that could have come from Google or Waymo. Not only will that all be a huge expense, it will be practically impossible to compete with those barriers constantly looming over the R&D team, not to mention all the extra legal red tape.
That is the crushing blow, not that they can't use LiDAR
The parent's point was that, for driving, the "natural" human way is still better along one relevant dimension [1]: how much sensory data is required (SDCs need a lot more).
SDC engineers would regard it as an improvement if they could get SDCs to work using only the sensory data that a human would get. The parent was saying that Uber could show superiority by similarly doing more with less.
[1] Humans also drive with coarser control over the car i.e. no direct computer interface, just gripping the wheel and pushing the pedals.
Passive sensing lets your eyes see stars and comets: long range, power efficient, avoids sensor conflicts with other objects.
Imagine being able to see heat signatures at night, or through obstructions.
This is the kicker. Lidar allows companies to make up for a lot of the current shortcomings of state-of-the-art computer vision.
As to how easily Uber could advance state-of-the-art computer vision, CV is an academic field with decades of research efforts built up already. To be fair, CNNs are still young-ish in terms of producing results, but Google, FB, etc all have better teams than Uber in this area. The fact that every major self-driving car project except Tesla is using lidar says a lot about how insiders see the first-to-market strategy playing out. Relying on pure CV at this point is kneecapping yourself.
It looks to me like Uber could take another PR hit, burn a $billion or more on the fallout, raise more billions, and keep on going. Have ethically motivated boycotts ever worked out, historically?
Have ethically motivated boycotts ever worked out, historically?
organizing works!
for anyone interested in more modern day wins, check out "when we fight we win" by greg jobin-leeds and agiarte.
On the other hand, not all of Chavez's boycotts were successful. That includes his final effort, a hunger strike which ultimately killed him (aside from his own death, it was not a particularly successful boycott otherwise either).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Immokalee_Workers
What about misappropriated code? Patents seem like it would be a much more simple situation.
What matters is whether Uber will receive an injection on their self driving car project.
The autonomous vehicle war is going to be over in under 5 years. Uber is all in on that, and they cannot afford to be delayed by any amount of time that is measured in years.
And maybe not by a matter of time measured in months. But how long do court cases take? Years, not months (especially if Google decided to try to make it take longer).
The very worst worst case scenario is that Uber would be barred from using rotating, parabolic, Lidars.
But there are a lot of other ways of making self driving cars that don't use this specific method of sensor technology.
Uber could even just come to an agreement with Google, and license the technology.
[1]https://www.recode.net/2015/12/6/11621176/google-ventures-ow...
read up on Sergey Aleynikov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov and there was no malice in that one.
Elon Musk publicly said Tesla is 2 years away from full autonomy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIwLWfaAg-8).
Chris Urmson (who was CTO of self-driving cars at google in 2009-2016) said it's 5 years (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtgBySRrN0Q).
Personally I think we're 1-2 years aways from initial commercial rollout and it'll grow very quickly from there.
I think you're very optimistic. Bear in mind that Musk often over-promises on timelines (for instance, he said the new in-house autopilot in the Model S would have parity with the old outsourced one by the end of 2016, it still doesn't), and it will take sometime to regulate and legislate a whole new set of laws and structures around self driving (especially around matters of liability in the case of accidents).
I can imagine in 2 years we see more complex and intelligent implementations available for the general public that can manage route mapping and full autonomy in an ideal situation (you'd better hope its not snowing), but where drivers are still required to be present and have their hands on or near the wheel at all times.
1. Some people just enjoy driving their cars, tinkering with them from an automotive perspective and the like, self-driving cars will inhibit that due to their heavier reliance on software, design differences and lack of modification abilities as opposed to today's vehicles, self-driving cars won't gain acceptance from that crowd for a while.
2. The first accident that is caused by a self-driving car will cause a major set-back in the eye of the public, airplanes are over-engineered for the sake of redundancy and safety and I don't believe that level of detail will be applied to self-driving vehicles, honestly. Government standards will be met and companies will achieve the best safety ratings they can because it just doesn't hurt your product to have that as a selling point(I purchased my last vehicle for my family almost solely on it's high safety ratings) but sooner or later a self-driving vehicle will cause a casualty or injury.
3. Control and change, it is a complete paradigm shift for transportation as a whole and it will take a while some people to want to adapt or change with the times, a lot of cars are driven for sentimental reasons, the self-driving car tends to pull away from the romantic image of a vehicle(road trips come to mind as an example).
4.Cost, Self-driving cars bring a whole new level of technology to the consumer, how will that be handled from a financial perspective? Car dealers aren't known to be consumer friendly. Will there be economy models available? What about the individuals who just can't afford a self-driving car and are fine with a non-self-driving vehicle, individuals who can't afford to purchase a new car at all?
In New York City, a taxi driver takes home maybe 50% of the money collected in fares after costs (whether depreciation on their own car, renting a taxi by the day or week, gas, etc.) That may be high but it's a nice round number.
If we take this as a general rule of thumb (and NYC cabbies make more than the average), that means you could but cab fares by roughly 50% by eliminating the driver. Maybe that forces a behavioral change on the part of some urbanites. But I can pretty much guarantee you that cutting cab prices by 50% will minimally affect behaviors in most places.
And that's not even counting the many places where having the most rudimentary cab services is barely a cost-effective business today.
Sure, you can speculate about optimized taxi designs (which aren't especially relevant to non-core urban areas with high car ownership today) but small electric vehicles could exist without self-driving too.
IMO this is an academic exercise for at least a couple of decades in any case but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Snow, of course. I live in Salt Lake, and I think it's going to be hard to automate a car to drive as well as a good, experienced snow driver.
I've hydroplaned once.
I've had a malfunctioning traffic light that gave me a green left turn arrow across oncoming traffic that also had a green.
I've seen an unattended baby stroller go coasting across a crosswalk just as the light turned green.
I somewhat often take my car onto dirt roads. Sometimes I have to be rather conscious of the clearance and where the rocks are so that I don't rip the bottom out of my oilpan. I also have to think carefully about how I approach the sandy patches so I don't get stuck.
My brother in law had his front brake lock up on one side while driving at freeway speed.
I've had the vehicle in front of me break an axle and drop a rolling tire on the road in front of me, while it went down the road dragging the brakeshoes on the ground. That happened on a cloverleaf; the driver of that vehicle did well not to roll it.
Maybe the worst I've seen: A pickup dropped an extension ladder in the middle of the freeway. It was rotating, and as it rotated, it grew in length. A bunch of cars were having to dodge it, plus dodge the cars that were dodging it.
There are a lot of crazy things that can be thrown at you while you're driving. Programming a computer to be able to handle all of them as well as a human is really hard - you first have to think of all of them.
* Auto-dimming touchscreen
* Automatic windshield wipers
* Autopark - perpendicular
* Display cars in other lanes
* Side collision avoidance
* Side collision warning
* Sign recognition
It's also still steering itself off the road in places AP1 worked fine. There are videos over at r/teslamotors on Reddit or the TMC forum.
That seems crazy that automatic windshield wipers aren't enabled... my 2008 Honda Civic has those!
Didn't check /r/Tesla and /r/SpaceX lately so I don't know what the current value is, but Elon Time coefficient used to be something around 1.7 or 1.8 ;).
I think it will be easy to get to the 80-90% but the last bits are going to kill this. Bad weather conditions, night, extreme situations, etc. Self driving cars have to drive better than the median, because the median includes drunk and elderly drivers dragging it down. I'm sure a self driving car will drive better than a drunk but that's not the goalpost, the goalpost is you and me, intelligent rational drivers who basically never have accidents (that are our fault). This is going to be very difficult as the situations that arise often times require an intelligent decision, intelligent prediction. I just don't see all those machine learning dumb systems getting there, not removing the wheel. And until the wheel is removed its useless. A car that drives but requires me to be aware enough I can take over on a split second is not self driving, so the bar is very high.
The impression I got from your statement was that you consider fully autonomous vehicles not far off. I disagree.
The point I was making was that the vehicles you see driving around are literally fair-weather vehicles.
A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.
I agree that there are difficult regulatory issues to figure out, but don't underestimate the technical hurdles.
And my point still stands. How do you define a "fully autonomous vehicle" is an important question. Consider the following three possibilities:
- Drives better than the median human driver in average weather conditions on half of the roads in the US (alternatively, for harder goals, replace with US+Europe or World) - Drives better than 95% of people in 95% of weather conditions on 95% of roads in the US - Drives better than any human in any weather conditions on any road in the US
I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.
>A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.
Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and have more experience driving in the snow than I do. And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or undisciplined drivers.
Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).
For context, we know that the first goal (better than average driver in half of road conditions) is now achievable by teams of 1-3 people on a tight budget in O(months) (and really, maybe weeks), since people have done that and posted it on the internet.
> I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.
I agree on the first and third milestones. Or kinda -- perhaps the first milestone is only reached for California, or for US highways yet.
I think you underestimate how difficult the second milestone is. The variation is tremendous, even merely within the US, to say nothing about the rest of the world.
> Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and
I'm sceptical. I think there will be so much ambiguity, both through road situation and through human interaction which we interpret with comparable ease, that the car may be stumped. And we set the high hurdle of forgoing steering wheels, so we need some other, yet to be devised way to give the car hints safely and efficiently.
> have more experience driving in the snow than I do.
I wasn't thinking about handling the car (I can easily believe that a computer does a better job of that), but rather about decreased visibility, no visible road markings, etc.
> And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or
Fairly easy I guess. Just be defensive, put a bit of distance between you and them.
> undisciplined drivers.
Much harder. Not from a safety perspective (again, just be defensive), but from a I'd-like-to-arrive-at-some-point perspective. Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you), and computers will (inherently, perhaps) be worse at that than humans.
> Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).
Except, again, that humans will be able to judge body language or the rules of a game the children are playing, and anticipate instead of being confined to reacting (which the computer will indeed be better at, I agree).
Perhaps my pessimism also stems from the fact that the oh-so-smart driving assistants in my car are so shitty (read my other posts if you're interested) :-)
EDIT: Thanks for the interesting discussion so far.
My anecdotal experience shows that there exist vehicles capable of tooling around on highways and city streets without the need for human interaction.
>but from a I'd-like-to-arrive-at-some-point perspective. Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you), and computers will (inherently, perhaps) be worse at that than humans.
There's a good video I've seen about how the Google cars can increase their assertiveness until they can go.
>Except, again, that humans will be able to judge body language or the rules of a game the children are playing, and anticipate instead of being confined to reacting
Not if they can't see the children because, as I said, they're behind trees.
>Perhaps my pessimism also stems from the fact that the oh-so-smart driving assistants in my car are so shitty
Indeed, that's why I clarify that Adaptive Cruise Control isn't the same thing as an autonomous vehicle and you shouldn't use one to judge the other.
That's one of the things that most strikes me about driving in Manhattan. In large areas of Manhattan, at least at certain times of day, you have to be almost insanely aggressive from the perspective of tooling around Mountain View on the average day. Otherwise, you're not going anywhere and are going to have everyone blaring their horns at you. (Plus, pretty much every pedestrian will take advantage of your timid driving to cross the street in front of you while you're hesitating.)
You got what I was aiming for, yes.
That plus difficulty in understanding streets obscured by a cover of snow, etc.
> Less prone to be overconfident in their stopping/steering abilities.
Very true. Computers have weaknesses, but vanity is not one of them :-)
> I'd probably trust a computer in the snow vs. most humans.
I have a car (2016 model) with several fancy assistants.
The lane-following assistant (which only works in very limited, benign conditions anyway) is regularly confused by shadows on pleasant days. Or by puddles on less pleasant days.
The car-following cruise control has missed a 40t semitrailer and would have merrily accelerated right into it.
The car-following cruise control regularly panics because it suddenly interprets guardrails or street signs as cars. On an empty road. This is not nice, because it has braking authority.
The computer in my car, at least, can absolutely not be trusted.
Even if it can only navigate between SFO and Mountain View, that's ready to deploy as a commercial venture. There will be an adoption ramp anyway. It will just follow the driving difficulty gradient.
In practical terms, it's ready now. Driving people home from the ski area in a blizzard will be the final task, but it doesn't need to be solved to put both Uber and GM out of business.
I (and others, I believe) were arguing when a car we would want to buy could forgo a steering wheel.
You're right that e.g. Uber could have a steering-wheel-less fleet that they simply retire in adverse conditions, sooner than that.
I wasn't aware I did that.
> but those sorts of cars are imminent for at least early adopters
without steering wheels? Dear God I hope not.
I use driving assistants in my car, but I'm painfully aware of their limitations. These days we absolutely still need a steering wheel. In my car for mundane situations, in Elon's miracle machines maybe only to park in an utterly unmarked field at a festival or whatever.
I dunno, maybe some kind of wheel in front of the human, which they could turn left or right to command the car to change direction ;-P
Thinking specifically about: Weather, Supply shocks (morning/evening rush hour, concerts, professional sports games, parades)
Running water is very reliable. AWS can't keep a reliability zone working that reliably, and that's a rather easier problem than transportation.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-qa-moore-20170511-html...
"The decision hints that Alsup’s pending decision on a preliminary injunction might not be favorable to Uber. . . it could effectively halt Uber’s self driving development plans entirely while the trial plays out."
In context of Travis' view "What would happen if we weren't a part of that future? If we weren't part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way," he said." (1)
(1) https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/travis-...