edit: I say this as someone who very much wants to see this class of science & technology succeed, but I often wonder if we're 2 or 3 Fields Medals away from really getting fundamentally closer to success.
Even the best tech today can only drive reliably and safely in good daylight weather conditions, with no chance of protests.
When you drive on the freeway, everyone's going the same way (or at least you'd hope), the configuration of the road is well known, lines are consistent, etc. It's all the little things that need to be accounted for - opposing traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, random obstacles, and any number of other road, traffic and obstacle configurations that exist, that make consistently and safely driving elsewhere difficult for autonomous systems.
Google/Waymo did a pilot - letting employees commute - and canceled because the system was too good and staff stopped paying attention.
This is a clip, there was a longer clip and description in a Waymo CEO speech in the past year or two.
Most California weather driving is very mundane and boring. ...but the moment you throw an outside variable into the mix - the computer cannot identify objects, and therefore cannot predict outcomes.
We're still teaching them to recognize Stop signs. How are they supposed to distinguish between a floating plastic bag and a 5 year old child?
So they started Adding curves in the road. Not much, but it improves the engagement factor. Gives the person something to do.
It sounds horrible to have to be fully alert, yet nothing to do.
In programming, I can’t stand shadowing people for more then few minutes before I want to start driving the code myself.
I can appreciate why the lay person may believe them to be similar, but it's hard to express just how much more challenging even the most basic form of driver assistance technology is in comparison to an autonomous vacuum.
The biggest challenge is speed. Just look at the napkin math of detection range of sensors versus stopping distance of a car. The higher the speed, the more range you need... and lidar, radar, etc. all have a fixed maximum detection range.
The rule of thumb is 50m for radar/lidar depending on how much you are willing to pay for the sensor. To stop the car safely, will take 56m at 100km/h.
Then ofcourse, the rest of the struggle is all in exception handling (getting from 70% to 99%).
Comparatively, the iRobot can use the dumbest and cheapest sensors and still be fully aware of everything around it in its relatively slow path of travel. It also does not need to predict the paths of travel of everything around it. It's enough for it to slow down or stop, especially at such low speed. If it hits something or fails to recognise an obstacle, it's not really a big deal. In comparison, lives can be lost in the car and there will be enquiries and legal battles.
I would put good money on the camera based automation delivering the best product at the end of the day, but requiring an order of magnitude more research and development than a comparitively "dumb" lidar setup. The lidar setup will have better immediate results, but probably will never reach the 99.999% effectiveness that everyone is chasing, and will probably never be safe at higher speeds.
On a freeway, that's terrifying.
It _seems_ like lots of parallel systems, each with the capability to reduce speed or stop could cope with city traffic about as well as a tourist. but, uh, I guess $2.5B says otherwise.
I do think Musk was (in part) wrong about LIDAR - I imagine that it could provide a valuable source of supplemental data to be used in training and classification.
Even on identical systems, different parameters will create totally different outcomes.
Maybe it has 'sudden movements' because it's actually a lot after and designed to react to things that Waymo would just plow right through. Maybe they're using crappy non-production sensors. Maybe they are entirely relying on instruments and not indirect data like GPS. I have no idea really, other than to say, these are very sophisticated systems and given the obvious opacity of the work ... it's going to be hard to tell what's what.
This is a scary prospect.
For for that matter, ever 3 or 30 miles would also be really bad in my book.
There are possibly opportunities on freeways but anyone who expects to be able to get robo-Ubers door-to-door for decades is likely to be disappointed.
Here's a video of Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov claiming that he's perfectly comfortable putting his children in a Waymo car without a driver: https://youtu.be/fZHDvKw0QTA?t=952. Whether he's bluffing or not, we don't know.
You're VASTLY underestimating how much progress is being made by companies that aren't Uber.
3-10 years is a more realistic timetable than decades.
"People overestimate what they can accomplish in one year, and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10".
After all, writing an AI is just a summer project for couple of interns.
Thought Tesla was considered first, in part because Tesla's fleet collects an orders of magnitude of data greater than others.
I’m open to being convinced that I’m not correct here, but it’s really difficult for me to see how Tesla is anything but 1000x ahead of everybody else.
It reminds me of people who build great models on Jupyter Notebook, but have no clue how about the data engineering that goes into serving those models (90% of the work).
Do you own a Tesla? We previously had a car with ACC/ALC and I don’t find it to be even close to the same thing, but that’s me.
Comma.Ai’s device is great. It’s better than anything anybody else (Waymo/Cruise included) has put out there.
Soon as it was in 2016 [1], 2018 [2] in Feb 2019 [3], Mar 2020 [4], or July 2020 [5]?
They have been hyping this up for years, why should I still believe those claims that it will soon be here™? Not only that but they have already advertised and sold "full self-driving" for people that can't use it yet, no beta, no alpha, just doesn't exist and is a paid feature. How far is this from fraud?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/19/watch-a-fully-self-driving...
[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/03/hiding-between-two-anno...
[3] https://electrek.co/2019/02/28/automatic-driving-city-stop-s...
[4] https://electrek.co/2020/03/04/tesla-self-driving-features-m...
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-s-model-x-aut...
Yes you can. At least my ap1.5 s70d does a fair job on quite a lot of roads and I expect that ap2 is better.
> And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I do have a Tesla (without full self-driving) and it comes to a complete stop when cars in front of me stop on the highway.
One example of a stopped vehicle: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-...
https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
> “ Just before the crash, a large vehicle — a sport utility vehicle or pickup truck — changed lanes in front of him, the driver told the NTSB.”
And how does Waymo handle these scenarios?
The radar returns on stationary objects are discarded AFAIK because of poor radar resolution leading to inability to precisely locate objects both horizontally and vertically, leading to roadside and overhead signs being mistaken for cars.
Common auto radars have limited vertical discrimination, and this is partly intrinsic due to radar wavelengths.
To throw you a bone, I do think that the names of the software lead people to believe that it's something more than what it is. Full self-driving is going to do things like swerve to avoid an obstacle in the middle of the road and it probably doesn't do that right now. But if we go back to the original post, the discussion was about comparisons to Waymo and Cruise. I'm not sure I trust their "more advanced systems" to do that either, and on top of that they haven't made a single production car that works in Erie, Pennsylvania and drives in the snow, changes lanes automatically, and navigates on and off ramps.
Tesla is making progress toward general self-driving, which is far and away more valuable in my opinion. Even if that progress is incremental. I look at it as more of a safety feature and something to make driving on the highway much easier.
If we want to take this a step further, I'm actually not a fan of self-driving cars because it makes it too easy to drive everywhere, and I view driving as a problem. We should be walking.
Hoping the AP rewrite closes some of the gap... we will see!
You don't really need 1000x real examples of a scenario, if one still image provides enough information for you to mimic it in simulation. (E.g. toppled barrel, weathered paint color and reflective stripe, in front of exit guard rail)
Whether you think they're sandbagging or behind the curve is largely a question of whether you're a fan of Tesla.
Pretty sure my wife would claim that I'm worse than that...
The most shocking detail:
> Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-third of a mile on average.
That's really bad. While there are no uniform standards for what a "bad experience" entails, my general sense is that Waymo and Cruise (widely considered first and second) are doing 10-100x better by that metric.
Another damning bit:
> Uber couldn’t even get the prototype to drive a one-mile stretch between the unit’s two Pittsburgh offices, with the goal of shuttling employees back and forth
I don't even know what to say to that. If you can't make your cars work reliably on a known, one-mile stretch of road, what have you been doing for so many years?
[Disclaimer: I work for Lyft, but not on the self-driving car program.]