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Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected by thebruce87m on Saturday February 15, 2020 @10:38PM (#22339656)
If you’re talking about level 5 then I disagree with this. None of the technologies I see in use today can work in the same weather conditions that humans currently drive in. Things like snow, fog, and even heavy rain.

If you’re talking anything below level 5 then all we will be doing is making current human drivers worse. Some of the deaths so far have been people who knew the limitations of the technology and still got complacent. If it requires you to have constant supervision then people simply won’t do that and will die.

Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected by rmtech on Sunday February 16, 2020 @03:10AM (#22340502)
People obsess about weather conditions as a limiting factor for level 5 and it's bizarre. Bad weather conditions will favour robots over humans because the robot drivers have sensors that can penetrate fog and rain whereas humans have to rely on mk1 eyeballs that can't.

The real limiting factors for level 5 are less legible to humans. We understand the physical world via years of experience and good priors. Teslas crash straight into concrete lane separators and Ubers hit pedestrians that they know are there. In the latter case the actual reasons for the collision would strike a human as absolutely nuts - things like the algorithm not having a proper sense of object persistence or being terrible at commonsense reasoning. Yes, the Uber system was quite primitive, but the way that it broke gives us some insight into how AI drivers face a totally different set of challenges than what we would think of as "difficult conditions".

See: https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash

Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected by jefftk on Sunday February 16, 2020 @11:20AM (#22342201)
My interpretation of the Uber situation is that they were rushing in an incredibly reckless way. I think the Uber system described in the NTSB report is probably far worse than what Uber's more conservative competitors (Waymo, GM Cruise, etc) had at the time.

(Disclosure: I work for Google which is a sibling of Waymo)

Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected by thebruce87m on Sunday February 16, 2020 @09:23AM (#22341653)
Can you link to some of these sensors? As far as I know, anyone who knows what they’re doing is using Lidar at the moment which has significant difficulties with weather.
Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected by rmtech on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @09:52AM (#22413618)
Radar, ultrasonic.

The radar can penetrate fog, rain, etc. https://navtechradar.com/features/autonomous-vehicles/

Ultrasound works well up close for detecting a potential collision.

Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected by rmtech on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @09:58AM (#22413669)
Tesla will not use lidar apparently. They'll use cameras, radar and ultrasonic.

In theory you could have all four.

Re:Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected by pasttense01 on Sunday February 16, 2020 @12:00PM (#22342430)
Obviously you don't have to operate the self driving vehicles in all conditions in a ride sharing service, because you have the option of operating human driving vehicles in the worst conditions. [I also expect you would use human driving vehicles to help out in peak demand periods--you don't want to spend big money on a self-driving car unless it is going to be heavily used.]