Waymo has demonstrated solutions for many of the edge cases you mention. This video is from 3 years ago: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=530
Regarding snow, it maybe a difficult problem, but if cars can't see road markings, neither can humans, so how do they do it? Sometimes by following a car in front. Though far from real autonomy, my Tesla doesn't need to see road markings for autopilot to work, it will fall back to following the car in front.
And.. Why does Waymo have to solve this inclement weather problem now? Surely it would be better to demonstrate safety in good weather, then light rain, then heavy rain, then light snow? They can just refuse to operate in bad weather unless they are confident about it.
I think I've seen at least a prototype Waymo car (it was exhibited in the Computer History Museum) that was designed without the steering wheel and pedals for a human to use. That wouldn't work so well given that the car might pull over and be unable/unwilling to drive anymore. (Maybe you can put an expected upper limit on how long the weather will remain bad ... Nah, storms can last for days, by which point a human who didn't bring food and water could be in bad shape.) I guess you could rely on being able to call AAA. Though a bad blizzard might be exactly the case where AAA would have a hard time reaching you. The human being able to take over eventually seems like an important feature. I guess that is the way all the cars in the field (that I've seen) work.
Does anyone happen to know if self-driving cars are practicing "pull over and stop" maneuvers? For some reason I've never heard of it. I think it is the only potentially reliable fallback mechanism if the car encounters, say, weird terrain it knows it can't handle. (I don't think you can assume the human will be able to respond within n seconds.)
It'd be fine - you just need to have some backup option. A small joystick or two behind some panel, or screen control, or perhaps you control the car with a phone app. It's like having an emergency spare tire - you just need a minimal driving UI that can be used in case of emergencies but users otherwise don't need to see or deal with. It can be inconvenient and speed-limited, since you don't expect to use it much.
Though if there's decent connectivity an obvious intermediate option is remote operation. Some human who is really good at driving might take over for a bit, driving your car from the comfort of their own home or office if you're not comfortable doing so yourself using the backup control pad.
Maybe we need driverless cars that can show panic faces when they don't know what to do and be coached by a friendly citizen what to do? It would be super cute.
Sadly, no one seems to have figured out a way to economically motivate human drivers to do this.
- human drivers in demanding situations
- sensor and compute package planned for autonomous driving
From there it is mostly a question of
1. getting permissions to collect the data
2. finding some efficient way to store -> sift for interesting situations -> magic happens here -> lots of regression testing -> self driving car -> profit!
I would think?
I think it comes down to being able to model the world around us, having a model for human behavior, animal behavior, etc. If we see a baby deer, we look for the mother deer.
It feels like we're also really good at creating multiple open-ended stimulations in the back of our mind about how things might play out, where they can easily be paused or fleshed out depending on which became more probable or if we want to learn something. It's kind of a running background process.
30,000 deaths per year suggest that humans fail at these edge cases all the time. Maybe ate their best a human outperforms a machine but as any person who drives if other drivers are at their best.
I mean yeah, compared to medieval statistics, it's great, but in comparison to the other non-medical ways to die you face as a 21st century American? automotive fatalities are quite high, and the problem deserves a lot of focus.
You could also make it harder to be qualified to drive.
I view autonomous cars as the 'lazy technocratic' solution to a problem caused by total government mismanagement.
(I mean, I agree that reducing miles driven is also a good goal. I'm just saying, making safer cars is a lot easier than talking people into allowing higher density construction and cities built around transit and walking rather than around cars)
A minimum 14 years of "human learning".
Anyone who's seen a Waymo car drive around the valley knows they're much safer than human drivers. They're annoyingly good, because for instance they just never miss a bike and are careful around them, and if you can't tell why it's a bit annoying.
But I've always come away from such incidents with a feeling of "I should have seen that". I've yet to see them screw up even once.
And yet you can't drive from SF to San Jose without seeing a human driver screw up.
I don't think anyone is debating that in perfect conditions the computer cars can sometimes out perform the worst drivers.
If your concern is terrible drivers killing themselves and others, what you should be arguing for is much stricter standards for obtaining a driver's license. Probably removing 'full coverage' insurance and only allowing liability would go a long way as well. Can't keep wrecking your vehicle if nobody's buying you a new one.
Or for keeping a drivers license.
>Probably removing 'full coverage' insurance and only allowing liability would go a long way as well. Can't keep wrecking your vehicle if nobody's buying you a new one.
I disagree... a used car is pretty cheap. Cheaper than full coverage, if you have a bad record.
I think this should be attacked by increasing the minimum liability coverage. right now, in California, you can drive with homeopathic levels of liability insurance... $35K isn't going to cover very much hospital time/time off work if you hit someone who has a good job. The minimum liability coverage should be 2-3 orders of magnitude higher.
Of course, for either of these things to be politically possible, we first need a society where it's reasonable to get from A to B without a car. An idea that is fought against daily even in relatively dense places like where I am now.
Self-driving cars might be able to beat that, but most of the self-driving car models aren't even close to 100 million miles driven.
(from page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... )
Furthermore self-driving cars are at this point ONLY driving through areas with a lot of pedestrians. You'd expect them, therefore, to have much higher accident fatalities than normal vehicles. Why ? They're always around pedestrians. Instead, in the first years of operation, they're safer than humans.
Even with Uber's less than stellar safety practices, and Tesla's ... well ... how do I put this politely ? [1] seems a good link. Let's just say Tesla owners could be more careful, especially since they signed a contract stating that they would be more careful (and youtube has much worse than that video). Given that that's how people use self-driving cars I would argue that's pretty damning for human driving skills.
It's just as easy to come up with any sort of contrived situation for which a machine would outperform a human.
Why?
- They aren't as easily distracted as humans,
- you can program them to stick to the rules even if slowing down results in problems for the passengers
- you can program them to care about any neighborhood, not just the ones we live in
† CA driver's handbook page 37: http://driveca.org/cms/assets/uploads/2014/09/dl600.pdf
HD mapping allows cars to know precisely where they are on the road even if they cannot see the lane markings below. In fact, georeferenced HD maps can pinpoint the car's location in the world down to less than 10cm of absolute precision (as opposed to relative precision)
Not to mention, any snow on the road is going to make it supremely hard for a computer to determine where their lane is, or even the road is.