https://waymo.com/safetyreport/
I would guess that they already identify and track pedestrians better than the average human driver (mostly because I expect they do it at greater distance). Whether they model kids standing by the curb better is hard to say.
If I see a child standing near the side of the road, I use more than the velocity and trajectory of the child to estimate future behavior: I look at the direction the child is facing, the overall situation (e.g. is the child playing a game?), what the child is paying attention to, and so on. A child waiting at a bus stop is a dramatically different scenario than a child looking across the street at a puppy. A short adult standing on the side of the road is dramatically different than a child.
This is a hard problem involving multiple levels of recognition and inference. I have little faith that it is solved. My suspicion is that the “engineering solution” is used (i.e. slow down when a human-probable object is near the road). That might work, but will lead to a car thar drives like a paranoid senior citizen with bad eyesight.
I have a suspicion that we’re going to look back in a decade and realize that most of these problems are fundamentally intractable, and that the best any system can do is react via human-encoded heuristics. If so, the path to full autonomy will be an asymptotic one; it will not happen quickly, but through decades of gradual refinement, with lots of fatalities along the way.
I think that the always-sensible speed choices of the automated system will result in a much larger reduction in pedestrian fatalities than any increase from the lack of subtle inference you are concerned with.
Intractable problems can be solved sometimes, just not reliably or in bounded time. If we get to the point where self-driving cars depend on human-encoded rules for reaction, we’ll simply be trading one set of messy heuristic behaviors (people) for another (robots with bad sensors and limited domain awareness).
Will the automated systems be “better” with enough time and investment? Perhaps. But dreams of a fatality-free automobile future will remain science fiction.
i'm pretty sure that during millions of miles of say Waymo's video captured, there has been a lot of people (incl. children) stepping off the sidewalk to cross the road - you don't need that to happen right in front of your car - so their system analyzing the images does recognize the pedestrians and thus their potential for movement.
The solution for self driving cars is easy. Don't ever put yourself in a position where physics prevents you from breaking in time.
They can do this by driving conservatively and not doing dumb things like driving around a corner quickly.
Nobody wants a self driving car that's always driving like a student driver.
Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive.
Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much.
>Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive.
>Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much.
A car behaving will be like a student driver (or delivery truck) at every intersection at which it needs to pull into traffic could easily double or triple your commute time depending on your commute.
Pulling out into traffic should be something that a driver-less car can be much better at. If it isn't at least as good as the average perspective customer people won't buy it.
I would say this is particularly critical metric for taxi fleets since they do a lot of driving on city side streets. People will take taxi with the human if it's faster.
You can already look at Uber pool, which is a direct tradeoff between cost and speed.
The '03 Crown Vic has long since paid off it's capital costs and the cab company gets to blame the driver if things go far enough south for lawyers to get involved.
Until some mythical future where self driving cars are so good and common that the "progressive" states start providing financial disincentives for people to operate their own vehicles (which would be a pretty major about face the vast majority of all transportation and infrastructure related regulation to date) I don't see where the driver-less taxi has a cost advantage in the foreseeable future. Your insurance premium is in large part based on the presence of everyone else around you.
It doesn't matter if the cars cost 100K, the driver wages still are larger than the capital costs.
If you don’t anticipate the possible movement, you will be too slow. I have very little faith that we are anywhere near systems that can handle this kind of situational awareness, because it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce.
The average level of human intelligence is a lot higher than most casual observers realize.