Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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