Waymo's big self-drive car report

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/5-things-we-learned-from-waymos-big-self-driving-car-report/

by aurelianito • 9 years ago

102 43 9 years ago

arstechnica.com

CamelCaseName• 9 years ago

Can anyone comment as to how realistic the last line is?

But it's clear that Waymo is aiming to bring its product to market soon—likely in 2018, if not this year.

jfoster• 9 years ago

They've had cars driving all over the place for years. If they've got the driving part "done", the other parts of it are about product stuff; how to request rides, in-ride experience, etc. They definitely would've had that all happening in parallel with refining the autonomy tech. I don't have any information, but it seems plausible to me that it could be 2018.

ManuPop• 9 years ago

They have mostly been driving in sunny areas with very nice weather. Driving with strong weather hasn’t really been tackled by anybody yet. Additionally the legal side is still not (officially) resolved.

mathattack• 9 years ago

Indeed. Insiders, please share!

majestik• 9 years ago

There’s a big difference between running a project like this in “R&D mode” vs “full on production mode” and I mean that from every angle: hardware, software, operations, legal, etc. So I’m skeptical on a 2018 delivery.

Call me cynical but this looks more like Google gave Waymo a deadline and now they’re trying to ship a MVP to keep the funds coming.

zaphar• 9 years ago

Google doesn't do deadlines. They also don't announce until it's ready. It's deeply ingrained in their culture. They dabbled with a deadline a couple times and the results were a disaster. I know technically waymo is a different company but it incubated in Google itself. My experience with how Google operates runs counter to your experience.

This is all anecdotal on both of our parts of course but I wouldn't bet against Waymo on this. They have what looks like a massive head start against the competition here.

neom• 9 years ago

Quite. Sidewalk labs flow product + waymo + wayze = very safe. Cities are super keen to move on it.

agildehaus• 9 years ago

There are recent rumors they'll be launching in Phoenix soon. That they're releasing details like this at about the same time as the rumors is a promising indicator those rumors may be right.

nopinsight• 9 years ago

Waymo's car safety systems engineered in from the ground up bode well for their reputation and also distinguish their system from other vehicles with self-driving "tacked-on".

The latest statistics suggest that Waymo's car requires about an order of magnitude fewer interventions from safety drivers. If these systems are a key reason for that or will further boost their safety records, it will be a long while before competitors can catch up.

"Waymo says it has done extensive work to make sure that computer crashes don't lead to car crashes. All of the key systems on its cars—the computer, brakes, steering systems, and batteries—have backups ready to take over if the main system fails."

"Safety-critical aspects of Waymo's vehicles—e.g. steering, braking, controllers—are isolated from outside communication," Waymo writes. "For example, both the safety-critical computing that determines vehicle movements and the onboard 3D maps are shielded from, and inaccessible from, the vehicle's wireless connections and systems."

Roritharr2• 9 years ago

I wonder how the different error modes are detected so the redundant systems can take over.

SSLy• 9 years ago

mutual watchdogs?

icebraining4• 9 years ago

For a glimpse of that, this interview with a responsible for System Health Management for NASA rockets is interesting: http://omegataupodcast.net/100-system-health-mgt/

imron• 9 years ago

are shielded from, and inaccessible from, the vehicle's wireless connections and systems."

Does this mean totally isolated with no connection or generally inaccessible but only really at the software level and if you overflow the right buffer with the right bytes you might be able to connect.

taneq• 9 years ago

Wow, finally someone taking vehicle system security seriously! I always find it terrifying that most car manufacturers seem to have no problem with tying safety-critical systems in with the entertainment system and pushing OTA updates to them.

tyingq• 9 years ago

Waymo does seem very disciplined.

However, on this:

"Waymo's car requires about an order of magnitude fewer interventions from safety drivers."

I'm a little skeptical about using interventions per x-distance as a metric for comparison.

There's just too many different things that could skew that. Like driving the same routes over and over. Or more/less stringent rules about when to trigger intervention. Or choosing when not to drive, like poor weather. Or purposely choosing difficult scenarios and edge cases for your routes.

KKKKkkkk1• 9 years ago

What does it mean to "tack-on" self driving? Did Waymo engineer their physical vehicle differently from other companies in some way that helps self driving? I don't think they ever claimed this.

kyrra2• 9 years ago

This article links to another one of their articles that talks about another marketing step waymo took in the last week, the partnership with a number of organizations to help shoe where self driving cars can help various people in our society.

https://letstalkselfdriving.com

taxicabjesus• 9 years ago

"Passengers cannot select a destination outside of our approved geography, and our software will not create a route that travels outside of a geo-fenced area, which has been mapped in detail," Waymo says. The Information reported earlier this month that Waymo's cars will initially be made available in the area of Chandler, a Phoenix suburb.

I saw one of their minivans a week or two ago. Chandler is mostly "new" construction - New strip malls, newish neighborhoods with nice sidewalks, etc. It's also relatively well-to-do. Average incomes are much higher than in Mesa, which is just to the north.

Phoenix (other side of the Salt River) has nice areas, and it has ghettos. I wonder where the geofence's lines are drawn. Certainly they'd include ASU/Tempe...

I wonder how these would work for passengers who need to get their illegal plant products, dealers of which don't always live in neighborhoods with nice sidewalks. Mostly those passengers didn't tell me what they were actually doing, but sometimes I figured it out.

pgodzin• 9 years ago

It's certainly smart to start this as a ride-sharing service rather than DTC ownership model. By being able to choose which trips it is confident in taking, it removes a lot of the remaining question marks that would come up by a car owner trying to take it anywhere.

skywhopper• 9 years ago

The question is: can this be a viable commercial product if it doesn’t actually do what people expect from a taxi service? And how extensive is the deployment going to be that people will choose to use Waymo over just driving? If I have to plan ahead or wait 15 minutes for a car to arrive, I’m a lot less likely to even try the service.

golfer2• 9 years ago

They have to start somewhere. It sounds like this will be an initial rollout.

Obviously they won't be limited to Chandler Arizona forever.

icebraining4• 9 years ago

If they do it right, the user doesn't have to care. You call a car, and either a self-driving or a non-self-driving one will show up, depending on the trip you selected.

But that's for the future; for now I'm pretty sure every car will have a driver, even if just as a backup/supervisor.

Animats2• 9 years ago

Link to actual report.[1] (When you're posting a link to something important, post the link to the real document, not some pundit blithering about it. Yes, you may have to do some digging to find it when the pundit outlet doesn't provide a link.)

There's not much new here if you've been following what Waymo is doing. Chris Urmson's SXSW talk from 2016 [2] covered most of this material in more detail. This is more of a PR-level version of that content. The new material covers mainly the limitations Waymo is imposing on their system. It works only where they have very detailed maps of the road system, with more information than even StreetView. This is conservative, but not a bad decision for initial release.

They have a button to call customer service. (That's so unlike Google.)

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way... [2] hhttps://youtu.be/Uj-rK8V-rik?t=6

whyenot• 9 years ago

OP linked to a news article that presented a pretty good summary of the report along with some additional context. It was not "some pundit blithering about it."

I don't think there is anything wrong with linking to a news article like this that is published by a reputable news source such as Ars Technica. Not everyone is going to have the time to read a 43 page report, especially if it's not clear why they should be reading it.

cs2818• 9 years ago

It would be nice if Ars Technica would provide a link to their source material (unless I'm just missing it).

I don't understand why so many news sources skip out on providing references.

0xbear• 9 years ago

Come back to me when it can handle fog, snow, heavy rain, and areas it hasn’t seen before. Until then it’s just overgrown version of driver assistance.

visarga• 9 years ago

Passengers cannot select a destination outside of our approved geography, and our software will not create a route that travels outside of a geo-fenced area

If all our movements will be subject to continuous monitoring and approval, then SDC's won't be anything better than taxis or planes.

tehlike2• 9 years ago

monitoring is one thing, but this particular line seems to me like a safety measure. If you haven't trained in a particular geography, initially, you might want to be a bit more cautious.

disclaimer: google employee, but no knowledge of waymo things.

usrusr• 9 years ago

Part of me admires their sober approach to safety, but another part is extremely skeptical of the implied reliance on mapping. Reality changes all the time, so your technology should better be able to deal with outdated models. But if it can, shouldn't it be able to cope with an absent model just as well? If it does need a pre-made model of reality, I am not convinced of its ability to deal with unexpected change. In sports climbing terms (hope I use them correctly, not being one): how bad is the car at onsighting a road that it needs beta so desperately to flash it?

Maybe their "onsight" capability is just very slow and the first Waymo to meet a change has to onsight it at hardly more than roomba speed (or worse: mturk?), sharing the knowledge ("beta") with the Waymos that come later, but then you still have to reliably detect that your model is outdated while driving regular speed while all false positives would considerably harm the relationship with other road users.

Zaheer• 9 years ago

From this report I get the sense that Tesla, Cruise, et. al. are years behind compared to Waymo. Can anyone that has more knowledge comment on the state of self-driving companies today? Ex. The level of failure redundancy they highlight I haven't seen by Tesla which promises the current Model S's etc they sell have full autonomy capability. I may be missing something though...

MrQuincle2• 9 years ago

How will people react? I think it's too early.

+ Jealous cap drivers, truck drivers, neighbors can easily put some chewing gum or paint on one or a few sensors. The system will be too brittle to cope with that, so all the time your/the sweet self-driving car doesn't even want to start.

+ Joyriding and pranks. Put your silly little brother or the dog who you've to babysit in the car. Bye bye!

+ Criminality. Just put your drugs on board or a corpse. Or do the companies that own these cars use them as remote cameras all the time?

+ Insurance. Just set up a situation perhaps with multiple cars where the self-driving car slams in your insured car. Use some doll etc.

+ Destruction. Do the same to cause the car falling into the river or crashing into something you dislike.

+ Vandalism. Graffiti etc. will be recognized much later than with a human driver.

+ Theft of sensors or other car parts can be orchestrated on a location the car first drives to.

CreepGin• 9 years ago

All of these can apply to existing public transportation or car rentals.

In Waymo's case, they can solve or alleviate these problems with live cameras and strict passenger screening process.

tdb7893• 9 years ago

Most of these things with self driving cars already apply to normal cars. Also with self driving cars having tons if sensors and Internet connectivity you should have a good scan of whoever messes with one and quick police response if anything goes wrong. For stuff like bogus insurance claims they could just add a few internal sensors in the car or something to make sure a real person is in there. None of these problems really seem all that insurmountable

MrQuincle2• 9 years ago

To argue that the legal context is exactly the same for self-driving cars as for normal cars seems unjustified.

I'm not arguing that it is insurmountable. I'm just saying that it's too early. Most of these things have not been worked out, which seems unnecessary.

szczepano• 9 years ago

I think Tesla idea of tunnels with self driving cars is more competent then those autonomous vehicles driving on roads with other cars. At least they got some data from their cars with real world usage not predictions.

golfer2• 9 years ago

Waymo has hundreds of vehicles logging millions of self driving miles on the road. They have plenty of data.

Tesla's "tunnels": I assume you are referring to elon's Boring Company? How many decades of tunneling do you think that will require before it even covers a fraction of routes people want to take?

icebraining4• 9 years ago

Tesla, the company that already got people killed?

Waymo has real world usage, both from self-driving cars which already use real streets, and from their worldwide street mapping fleet.

Besides, real world data is only as good as you can capture it, and Teslas are much more limited in that regard compared to Waymo's LIDAR.

Waymo's big self-drive car report

Related Stories