# Police sirens, wind patterns, and unknown unknowns are keeping cars from being fully autonomous



## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

https://qz.com/1027139/police-siren...are-keeping-cars-from-being-fully-autonomous/

With all of the hype around self-driving cars, it may seem like mass-market availability is just around the corner. Waymo's cars have logged over 3 million fully autonomous miles on the streets of Texas, Arizona, and California; Uber's have been ferrying passengers around Pennsylvania and Arizona; and during TED2017 in April, Elon Musk boldly promised that Tesla's would reach full autonomy by the end of this year. As of May, 44 companies are involved in developing self-driving vehicles, according to CB Insights.

*But let's be clear: The leap from the current state of autonomous vehicles to the day you'll be shuttled around by truly driverless cars is bigger than you think.*

*The main obstacle can be boiled down to teaching cars how to operate reliably in scenarios that don't happen often in real life and are therefore difficult to gather data on. Anything from strange weather occurrences and other vehicles' unpredictable driving patterns to more common but irregular situations, like emergency vehicles and snowfall, can pose a data problem. Without consistent opportunities to encounter these situations during average training sessions, self-driving cars often must undergo specialized training for those scenarios, which takes time.*

Last month, for example, Waymo began targeted emergency-vehicle detection training for its minivans. To ensure a safe testing environment, the Alphabet's self-driving car unit partnered with a local Arizona police and fire station in a low-traffic neighborhood to record visual and audio samples of fire trucks, police cars, and motorbikes driving by its minivans under various lighting conditions and at different speeds, distances, angles. This month, Waymo also began testing the performance of its cars in extreme heat by running them through "as many driving conditions as possible" on the roads of Death Valley. Similarly, back in February 2015, the then-Google project sent its cars to Washington state to seek out rain, after California's drought provided little opportunity for adverse weather testing. Last January, Ford sent its cars to Mcity, Michigan-a town built specifically for controlled autonomous vehicle testing-to log its first miles in the snow.

To train vehicles for rarer scenarios, the data collection gets even harder. In the course of reporting on the impact of automation on trucking towns, *Quartz's Mike Murphy and Dave Gershgorn spoke with a trucker who explained how the broad sides of a truck made it prone to tipping over without experienced maneuvering in the wind patterns characteristic of the western US. Given the erratic nature of the wind, it is also difficult to model. *"There are too many variables," said Terry, a fellow trucker.

*All this isn't to say that a self-driving car must be exposed to every scenario under the sun in order to function robustly. Instead, developers tease out patterns and train vehicles on the fundamental principles that would allow them to fare well in most situations. But there's a caveat: "Two situations that we as humans might find equivalent, may not be equivalent to whatever kind of software that you're building," *cautioned Michael Wagner, a co-founder of software technology company Edge Case Research. "*You sometimes don't know whether or not prior development applies to a situation. You don't necessarily know whether all your simulations are going to be realistic enough to uncover all of the different cases."*

In other words, a training data set considered comprehensive to a human may be insufficient to a machine. As a result, real-world testing is still crucial for discovering data gaps. That's why Waymo and Uber, for example, both continue to accumulate miles on real roads in addition to within simulations and controlled testing environments. During real-world drives, added an Uber spokesperson, the vehicle operator records newly discovered gaps in real-time and relays them back to the engineering team.

"There is a huge difference between building a few vehicles to run in reasonably benign conditions with professional safety drivers, and building a fleet of millions of vehicles that have to run in an unconstrained world," wrote Wagner in a 2016 paper co-authored with his co-founder. *"It's going to take a lot of work," he said. But Wagner remains optimistic that we will get there-even if it takes a decade or two.*


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

nothing from ramz or maven eh?


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## WeirdBob (Jan 2, 2016)

heynow321 said:


> nothing from ramz or maven eh?


If RamzFanz were here, I am sure he would be telling us that all the problems are solved. For example, the snow problem is solved by a big antenna with almost no ground clearance beneath the car. And the system will be able to deduce exactly what a police officer means with a simple hand gesture. If it cannot, a CSR sitting half a world away will control your car in near real time - just like they were playing GTA V.

Maven would point out a product on Alibaba that has no relevance.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

lol sounds about right bob. Yeah, uber is going to have thousands and thousands of people on the payroll waiting to remotely control your car (sounds perfectly safe! I totally would feel comfortable with some guy on the other side of the planet who may have never driven a car in his entire life taking control of my vehicle) any second the car can't handle itself. Oh, and of course, this extra overhead will translate to lower costs for customers somehow... 

I mean I'm assuming these CSR remote drivers will be in areas with super low labor costs right? Will training regarding US traffic laws and rules be provided to these people? how much experience with driving will they have? 

lol it's ridiculous to think about.


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## Maven (Feb 9, 2017)

heynow321 said:


> nothing from ramz or maven eh?





WeirdBob said:


> If RamzFanz were here, I am sure he would be telling us that all the problems are solved. For example, the snow problem is solved by a big antenna with almost no ground clearance beneath the car. And the system will be able to deduce exactly what a police officer means with a simple hand gesture. If it cannot, a CSR sitting half a world away will control your car in near real time - just like they were playing GTA V.
> 
> Maven would point out a product on Alibaba that has no relevance.





heynow321 said:


> lol sounds about right bob. Yeah, uber is going to have thousands and thousands of people on the payroll waiting to remotely control your car (sounds perfectly safe! I totally would feel comfortable with some guy on the other side of the planet who may have never driven a car in his entire life taking control of my vehicle) any second the car can't handle itself. Oh, and of course, this extra overhead will translate to lower costs for customers somehow...
> 
> I mean I'm assuming these CSR remote drivers will be in areas with super low labor costs right? Will training regarding US traffic laws and rules be provided to these people? how much experience with driving will they have?
> 
> lol it's ridiculous to think about.


This is a B-O-R-I-N-G thread, not worth the trouble to address.  Yes, this is a minor issue. The answers are obvious and have already been explained* Ad nauseam* in many other threads. I'm not going to repeat them here.  No doubt, you'll claim that as a victory.  Having said that you luddites have a great day


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## tohunt4me (Nov 23, 2015)

heynow321 said:


> https://qz.com/1027139/police-siren...are-keeping-cars-from-being-fully-autonomous/
> 
> With all of the hype around self-driving cars, it may seem like mass-market availability is just around the corner. Waymo's cars have logged over 3 million fully autonomous miles on the streets of Texas, Arizona, and California; Uber's have been ferrying passengers around Pennsylvania and Arizona; and during TED2017 in April, Elon Musk boldly promised that Tesla's would reach full autonomy by the end of this year. As of May, 44 companies are involved in developing self-driving vehicles, according to CB Insights.
> 
> ...


And in the summer
When the geo magnetic storms erupt.
Solar flares . . .
And all self driving cars veer off the road at once causing Thousands of casualties and swamping emergency rooms nationally . . .

Vision : requires looking beyond the Now

Experience: tells you where to Look.

I will Never trust a car that can be corraled by a roll of aluminum foil and 4 sticks !


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## RamzFanz (Jan 31, 2015)

Yawn.


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## WeirdBob (Jan 2, 2016)

RamzFanz said:


> Yawn.


If you are sleepy, please be sure to get some sleep. Try some Melatonin, if you have trouble falling asleep.


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## Maven (Feb 9, 2017)

WeirdBob said:


> If you are sleepy, please be sure to get some sleep. Try some Melatonin, if you have trouble falling asleep.


Thanks, Bob. I learned something new.  I had no idea that Melatonin was related to sleep. Now I can read all the anti-technology posts without falling asleep.  Does it also help with fatigue while driving? I never took you for a "better living through chemistry" guy.


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## WeirdBob (Jan 2, 2016)

Maven said:


> Thanks, Bob. I learned something new.  I had no idea that Melatonin was related to sleep. Now I can read all the anti-technology posts without falling asleep.  Does it also help with fatigue while driving? I never took you for a "better living through chemistry" guy.


Always eager to help!

Speaking of (supposedly) anti-tech posts, have you read the latest from MIT Technology review about the limits of Lidar?

Got another coming up from the Luddites at IEEE.


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## oldmanuber (Mar 27, 2017)

WeirdBob said:


> If RamzFanz were here, I am sure he would be telling us that all the problems are solved. For example, the snow problem is solved by a big antenna with almost no ground clearance beneath the car. And the system will be able to deduce exactly what a police officer means with a simple hand gesture. If it cannot, a CSR sitting half a world away will control your car in near real time - just like they were playing GTA V.
> 
> Maven would point out a product on Alibaba that has no relevance.


I had police officer in Dallas giving me hand gestures a few months back that confused the sh** out of me. He thought he was being specific, but what he meant and how I took it were just opposite enough to cause an accident. Of course, when I did the wrong thing, he became an ass.


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## elelegido (Sep 24, 2014)

heynow321 said:


> https://qz.com/1027139/police-siren...are-keeping-cars-from-being-fully-autonomous/
> 
> With all of the hype around self-driving cars, it may seem like mass-market availability is just around the corner. Waymo's cars have logged over 3 million fully autonomous miles on the streets of Texas, Arizona, and California; Uber's have been ferrying passengers around Pennsylvania and Arizona; and during TED2017 in April, Elon Musk boldly promised that Tesla's would reach full autonomy by the end of this year. As of May, 44 companies are involved in developing self-driving vehicles, according to CB Insights.
> 
> ...


This hits the nail on the head. I used to be a software developer of management information systems. Nothing as complicated as the software used in SDC, but one concept is comparable: when designing and building a software solution, there are three different types of unknown:

A) things that you know you don't know
B) things that you think you know but don't
C) things that you don't know, that you don't know even exist.

A is usually the easiest to solve. B is harder and C is harder still. In closed environment business systems there are limited inputs with definable parameters and limited outputs. SDC on the other hand operate in an open, unlimited environment and for that reason, solving the B's and the Cs is exponentially more difficult. Also, it's impossible to predict how long it will take to solve all of the technical obstacles to driverless SDC when it's not known what all the obstacles will be.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

A small plane crashed on the roads in everett wa recently. How is that going to be "modelled" or how will cars come across that situation enough to know what to do? (inb4 millions of people will just be at call centers ready to drive remotely lololol).


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## Oscar Levant (Aug 15, 2014)

heynow321 said:


> https://qz.com/1027139/police-siren...are-keeping-cars-from-being-fully-autonomous/
> 
> With all of the hype around self-driving cars, it may seem like mass-market availability is just around the corner. Waymo's cars have logged over 3 million fully autonomous miles on the streets of Texas, Arizona, and California; Uber's have been ferrying passengers around Pennsylvania and Arizona; and during TED2017 in April, Elon Musk boldly promised that Tesla's would reach full autonomy by the end of this year. As of May, 44 companies are involved in developing self-driving vehicles, according to CB Insights.
> 
> ...


I don't think they are grasping that the variables are almost infinite. 99.9% of predictable stuff it can deal with, but that .1% in a critical moment can kill you and it won't take much to spook the market.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

Oscar Levant said:


> I don't think they are grasping that the variables are almost infinite. 99.9% of predictable stuff it can deal with, but that .1% in a critical moment can kill you and it won't take much to spook the market.


Exactly. Human brain can handle that.1%, computers cannot


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## Uberyouber (Jan 16, 2017)

Infrastructure and road construction cost would be astronomical. You would have to build separate toll roads for self driving cars. It ain't going to happen.


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## RamzFanz (Jan 31, 2015)

heynow321 said:


> A small plane crashed on the roads in everett wa recently. How is that going to be "modelled" or how will cars come across that situation enough to know what to do? (inb4 millions of people will just be at call centers ready to drive remotely lololol).


Have you ever seen a plane crash? These are outlier situations easily resolved with either passenger guidance or remote guidance. It's silly to think plane crashes will be considered in SDC programming other than to have options in one in a trillion unusual scenarios.



Oscar Levant said:


> I don't think they are grasping that the variables are almost infinite. 99.9% of predictable stuff it can deal with, but that .1% in a critical moment can kill you and it won't take much to spook the market.


People have already died in Tesla's using autopilot and sales are through the roof. Planes fall from the sky and we still fly. SDCs will only have to be safer than humans and that's a pretty low bar.



heynow321 said:


> Exactly. Human brain can handle that.1%, computers cannot


The things these cars will be able to do dwarf anything a human could. 360 degree constant vision, night vision, radar, location within a centimeter, trillions of calculations a second, on and on. We are no match.

If human brains are superior, why do 1,200,000 people a year die at the hands of human drivers?



Uberyouber said:


> Infrastructure and road construction cost would be astronomical. You would have to build separate toll roads for self driving cars. It ain't going to happen.


SDCs do not need infrastructure changes. Some may be added over time for convenience, but they are not needed.


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## Maven (Feb 9, 2017)

elelegido said:


> This hits the nail on the head. I used to be a software developer of management information systems. Nothing as complicated as the software used in SDC,


The most dangerous software on the planet may be Microsoft Excel, according to Forbes.
Many people think other tasks are more complicated:

Designing a general purpose operating system
Complete mapping and all possible interactions of the (a) human brain and (b) genetic code
Defeating the seemingly infinite varieties and adaptability of (a) cancer and (b) viruses

Creating a self-aware computer (discouraged since if it decides humans are hostile, which we are, then we may be wiped out before realizing the danger).



elelegido said:


> but one concept is comparable: when designing and building a software solution, there are three different types of unknown:


Great list, that may be expressed more simply 
A) things that you know you don't know "Humility"
B) things that you think you know but don't "Arrogance"
C) things that you don't know, that you don't know even exist. "Failure of Imagination"


elelegido said:


> A is usually the easiest to solve. B is harder and C is harder still. In closed environment business systems there are limited inputs with definable parameters and limited outputs. SDC on the other hand operate in an open, unlimited environment and for that reason, solving the B's and the Cs is exponentially more difficult. Also, it's impossible to predict how long it will take to solve all of the technical obstacles to driverless SDC when it's not known what all the obstacles will be.


Do you think the time frame is dependent or independent of the amount of resources devoted to solving the problems?


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## elelegido (Sep 24, 2014)

Maven said:


> Do you think the time frame is dependent or independent of the amount of resources devoted to solving the problems?


I used to show this expectations management graphic to clients who wanted their IT development project to be delivered yesterday for a bargain basement cost _and_ expect the software to actually work. The yellow circle is the project and it can be moved anywhere in the triangle. One option is fast development done cheaply, however quality will suffer. Or, high quality and fast, but it's going to cost.

I think that the SDC projects are like every other development project in this respect.


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## Maven (Feb 9, 2017)

elelegido said:


> I used to show this expectations management graphic to clients who wanted their IT development project to be delivered yesterday for a bargain basement cost _and_ expect the software to actually work. The yellow circle is the project and it can be moved anywhere in the triangle. One option is fast development done cheaply, however quality will suffer. Or, high quality and fast, but it's going to cost.
> 
> I think that the SDC projects are like every other development project in this respect.
> 
> View attachment 148653


Not a fan of blue triangles, with or without a cute yellow dot. If forced to stick with the triangle then I expect the cute yellow dot to reside near the triangle's high-cost apex for the foreseeable future. Can your theory be explained using a Mobius Strip, maybe for the political and social issues?


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## elelegido (Sep 24, 2014)

Maven said:


> Not a fan of blue triangles, with or without a cute yellow dot. If forced to stick with the triangle then I expect the cute yellow dot to reside near the triangle's high-cost apex for the foreseeable future. Can your theory be explained using a Mobius Strip, maybe for the political and social issues?


It's not a theory; it's simply the old maxim that you get out what you put in, presented for corporate types who like looking at Powerpoint slides.


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## d0n (Oct 16, 2016)

Mentioning trucks blocking lidar from looking at the light color?


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## Oscar Levant (Aug 15, 2014)

RamzFanz said:


> People have already died in Tesla's using autopilot and sales are through the roof. Planes fall from the sky and we still fly. SDCs will only have to be safer than humans and that's a pretty low bar.


Yes, people buy Tesla's, but the autopilot feature is not the motivation for buying a Tesla, so strike that comparison.

Planes fall from the sky and we still fly no doubt to the simple fact there are no alternatives as quick as airplanes.

Any more false comparisons you'd like to offer?



RamzFanz said:


> The things these cars will be able to do dwarf anything a human could. 360 degree constant vision, night vision, radar, location within a centimeter, trillions of calculations a second, on and on. We are no match.
> 
> If human brains are superior, why do 1,200,000 people a year die at the hands of human drivers?


Most purchases are emotion driven, not fact driven. If that were not true, commercial advertising would not be appealing to emotions, it would have some academic guy on TV spouting numbers, but they know products wouldn't sell if they did that. The point is, your numbers really are immaterial to the market place.


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