To add to it there are techniques like applying shadow to a bright image.
When we combine some of these techniques, the task does become possible, even in in adverse conditions.
Also, various techniques often complement each other. For e.g. We may derive a steering angle out of a Machine learning system, and we can cross check that against the lane detection, vehicle detection (no collision) etc.
To think of it, we when we drive ourselves, we just use the eyes. So there is a view that cameras alone are sufficient. But definitely as Radar and Lidar complement the cameras and make the driving system more robust. As Lidar gets cheaper, we are bound to see it being used more even in camera only approaches.
As i understand it, the newer ones use a machine learning based approach and different hardware than the old ones. Does this mean tesla is actively working in parallel to develop two completely different self driving car softwares, one built on ML and one around a more traditional heuristic approach?
Scary stuff, really. No consumer wants (or needs) autopilot "features" - at least not from a marketing standpoint. If you ask me, the car either drives itself or you are driving it.
It's a bit ridiculous to expect people to use these things safely. If anyone has to think about when the car is or isn't in control, I'm sorry, but you've already lost in my book. Humans just aren't that good at switching context or remembering what a product does (or what this particular version of a product does).
There are moments when you have to think about what state the car is in. But in opinion it is by far offset by how much less tiring it is to drive a long way.
I don't know, that sounds like lots of human drivers I've encountered!
I also wish that left-most and right-most lanes were special-cased, with a bit of preference towards left and right side respectively, instead of sticking to the center of the lane no matter what. Just seems safer overall, and with fairly large number of US roads not exceeding 2 lanes in one direction, seems like a pretty good rule of thumb.
In the UK you use the outside lane if you are a slower vehicle and use the inside lane(s) as overtaking lanes, with the inside for the fastest speeds (within the limit) . If you are using one of the inside lane and are travelling slower that traffic in the outside lane you can get stopped by the police and fined, and will certainly feel the ire of of other drivers.
As you can imagine, anybody intending to use the left-most lane for high-speed driving is now forced to use the brakes, execute a [rarely safe] lane merge to the right, pass the slower vehicle on the right, and then aggressively execute a merge back to the left.
Roughly 100 people die in car accidents on a daily basis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths... For further context, the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 resulted in 3,000 deaths and has led to a brief but complete shutdown of air traffic, complete overhaul of homeland security, passage of PATRIOT Act, at least one major war and countless "military operations" that don't count as wars.
That's incredibly selfish, not least because it's incredibly dangerous for the driver that has to weave into the middle lane and back again.
Seems bizarre. Then again, you Yanks also don't have kettles, so nothing surprises me ;)
Mind blown. What on earth do they boil water with?
Depending on state there are laws about using left lanes only for passing, which implies you must be travelling faster than the lane to your right. Those laws are rarely enforced though.
Is it just the state I live in (WA) or is the rule not as solid as I thought?
The lane-holding feature (autosteer) does expect you to keep slight pressure on the wheel. It has, that I can discern, four modes ...
freeway following (another vehicle in front) freeway leading nonfreeway following nonfreeway leading.
Only in the first case, you have five minutes before it starts pestering you to hold the wheel. In the other cases it's one minute.
Lane holding and adaptive cruise control in freeway following mode is a WONDERFUL feature. It drastically reduces the driver's workload in heavy traffic. And, it has speed control features that contribute to the melting of compression-wave traffic jams.
Lane holding can be a little squirrely when the road surface is dirty. I think the car sometimes mistakes tire marks for lane markings. There are parts of my regular route where I just take over from lane holding.
Snow or heavy rain? the lane holding feature goes first, then the adaptive cruise control. Snow, rain, or frost on the windshield interferes with the forward looking camera. Snow or ice on the nose interferes with the radar. Ice on the bumpers interferes with the near-field sonar proximity sensors.
Autonomous driving on the Stanford campus and up Sand Hill Road is one thing. Autonomous driving in a nor'easter snowstorm on winding Atlantic Coast roads is another. We shall see.
I admire and support people who tackle hard problems fearlessly. Tesla's doing that.
It's like saying we shouldn't have released seatbelts because people moght not have used them. Or maybe we shouldn't have released vaccines because you still need booster shots.
Safety features, even incremental ones, make the world safer for everyone.
the data already demonstrates that autopilot reduces collisions and fatalities. to argue that it doesn't put you in league with climate change deniers.
This needs empirical support. All of us are human, and are susceptible to false senses of security. Most of us are not good at assessing real-world risks and probabilities. If the autopilot software is good enough to drive the car successfully for months on end, drivers will start to trust it. It will be very hard to stay vigilant and aware, with eyes on the road at all times and an alertness level on par with manual driving.
In other words, an otherwise “good” driver can easily be lulled into complacency by a system that’s really good, but not perfect. It’s an uncanny valley that is worth discussing.
the fact that safety features such as seatbelts and airbags save lives is undeniable. they didn't lead to uncanny valleys of complacency for anyone but drivers who chose to abuse those features with wreckless driving. the data for AP already indicates this trend will continue with ML drivers.
However, since the number of features is quite small, I'm sure owners will quickly get used to what the car does and doesn't do. The autopark and summon is surely going to run over far fewer children than human drivers do in those situations. That leaves just adaptive cruise control and lane changing. Well, if you forget to change lanes because you trusted the car, you still won't crash since the front crash detection (and your eyes) should protect you from that. So I don't see any safety issue there.
Numerous times I've seen pilots complain that their employer requires autopilot to be used wherever possible, while they would like to fly the plane by themselves occasionally.
If we polished off the autopilot to also handle take-off and taxi, and installed it in every single plane that exists, I'm pretty sure the entire aviation industry could be completely automated.
Without consulting the literature, it just seems easy to believe that machine-like consistency 99.9% of the time is more important to safety than confusion in the 0.1%.
If the car fails to detect one in a thousand cars in front of you, or one in a thousand corners, I can see that being highly dangerous.
Let's say you change lane 5 times while commuting. That's 50 times per week. Now, are you going to pay attention well enough that you catch it twice a year just before it pulls out right into another car?
Perhaps likening it to having another person driving you would be good. If you were given a perfect chauffeur, except with the knowledge that they'll drive straight through one in a thousand red lights with no warning, are you confident you'll catch them?
Perfectly safe 99.9% and highly dangerous the other 0.1% may be overall more hazardous than human-level safe 100% of the time. Or it may not. I’m not making a claim either way. But it’s not a crazy notion that it may not be.
More data is needed. I’m cool with that data being collected in the real world with real drivers. Gotta crack some eggs...
LIDAR also does work great in the rain - provided you have multiple LIDAR units (e.g. Ford's snow-proof sensor array: https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navi... ).
What I like about LIDAR is that it will never give you false-negative data regarding object proximity (i.e. it will never tell you an obstruction in the road is not there) but visual-only cameras can be fooled very easily and definitely can give you false-negatives regarding road obstructions.
It seems inherently less safe to rely on a more homogeneous sensor array: conversely it makes sense to use as many different types of sensor as possible to ensure your design isn't susceptible to being brought down thanks to a weakness in your predominant sensor type.
That said, I think it's disingenuous of Tesla to call their system "autopilot" or imply autonomy of any kind when talking about their system. I will call something autopilot when it can drive me from door to door without me touching the wheel, in less than friendly weather conditions. Not drive in a straight line where it never rains.
It's true that a careful, experienced driver will typically recognise a rapidly emerging hazard as much as several tenths of a second faster than a novice, giving them significantly more time and space to react. However, a careful, experienced driver will also anticipate places where there are likely to be hazards and adjust their driving style to compensate.
Does a self-driving car know that there's a park just round the corner and it's half an hour after the local kids came out of school, thus increasing the risk of a child chasing a ball into the road?
Does a self-driving car understand that the group of people standing quite near the road up ahead are outside a bar at 11:30pm and thus quite likely to be drunk and suddenly stagger into the road?
Does a self-driving car know about the pothole in the cycle lane that you had to avoid while riding into town yesterday, and anticipate that anyone riding in that cycle lane today may move out into the main traffic lane without warning to go around it?
Does a self-driving car know that the news last night reported on a local black spot for "accidents" caused by people wanting to make fake insurance claims, and decide to take another route that is a little slower but avoids that black spot?
Better sensors, fast data processing, and the ability to monitor all sensors all the time are big advantages, for sure, but these things mostly support reactive behaviour. I've seen nothing so far to suggest that the better reactions currently outweigh proactively avoiding or mitigating these kinds of hazards in the first place. Obviously that might change in any number of ways in the future, but we seem to be a long, long way from that point yet.
On your second point, the important thing here is that you don't need to disperse much of this information to humans. Humans automatically recognise situations based on all of their experience, not just their driving experience. Of course sometimes external information sources like the news might be helpful, but much of it is just down to understanding context. See fresh horse crap on a country road? Someone's probably riding horses nearby. Horses scare easily. So, slow down and try to avoid anything noisy that could startle the animals. How many of today's self-driving algorithms take into account this kind of implied knowledge?
If you seriously want to play the inane game of "well if a human doesn't have it then a Tesla doesn't need it" then let's play that game and talk about the things humans have that the Tesla lacks.
What's interesting about human's vision system is that the human eyeball is, relatively speaking, poor. We have digital cameras far better than that already. It is what the human brain that does with that raw data which makes us, as a species, thrive. Most of what we believe we "see" we never actually see, our brain fills in the gaps dynamically and infers information over time.
So this human processing ability, much of it automated rather than conscious, is totally relevant if you want to have this "Tesla Vs. human" debate. It is also why Lidar might be needed to make up the massive shortfall in a Tesla's processing ability relative to the human brain.
But hey, you want to keep to the "but HUMANS don't need it" then I ask where is my 38 petaflops and 1 TB of memory...
Teslas have multiple radars for judging distance and multiple cameras that are used for stereo disparity. Also human 38 teraflops is not the same as nvidia teraflops.
I am not saying teslas are better than humans, I'm just saying teslas can drive on I5 highway from Vancouver to Mexico better than I can.
Also Lidars are really really expensive, I applaud Tesla and commaai for breaking major ground just with cameras. Convolutional neural nets have being doing phenomenal things in the past few years.
You can find other figures, but many are in the petaflop range, well above what could be realistically installed in a vehicle.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/415041/new-measure-of-hum... I don't think we know enough about how the human brain works yet to give a precise value, but just on caloric arguments I would say that the mean processing power of the brain is not significantly above what we have now in general purpose computing devices.
A in-dept report on Teslas' code and system qualification framework would be a very interesting read, I'm sure.
In the Model S configuration page, "enhanced autopilot" and "full self-driving capability" are still optional extras that together cost $8,000, so I'm not sure what they're talking about here.
Apparently, these features can also be unlocked at a future time, for a higher fee of $10,000.
It's also equivalent to those high-end network switches with 48 ports that have soft-locks to disable ports on the switch until you fork-out $lots to unlock them: it's an artificial limitation.
Autopilot Updates We just released the latest version of Autopilot. You can now experience Enhanced Autopilot features including Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Autosteer, Auto Lane Change, Parallel + Perpendicular Autopark, and Summon. Automatic Emergency Braking, Forward + Side Collision Warning, and more advanced safety features are also active and standard.
All Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. And Tesla vehicles continue to improve with over-the-air software updates, introducing new features and improving existing functionality to make your vehicle safer and more capable over time.