Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-26/alphabet-s-waymo-will-test-self-driving-cars-in-wintry-detroit

by kbyatnal • 9 years ago

370 234 9 years ago

bloomberg.com

stretchwithme2• 9 years ago

Hopefully, at night and where there are no street lights as well. The more corner cases, the better.

I still would like to see more races. In the snow too.

https://electrek.co/2017/02/18/self-driving-car-race-crash-b...

CabSauce• 9 years ago

Have no fear, there aren't any working street lights in Detroit.

robotnixon• 9 years ago

Detroit is the largest city in the US fully lit by LED streetlights with over 65,000 installed since 2014.

Its easily recognizable from space:

https://twitter.com/astro_kimbrough/status/82136198923045683...

rmason• 9 years ago

That's old news my friend. All the streets in Detroit have functioning streetlights now, LED's no less.

goda90• 9 years ago

And heavy rain, heavy rain at night with street lights reflecting off the pavement right into the cameras, black ice, fog, giant snowflakes, high wind snowstorm, etc etc.

bjl• 9 years ago

And blind corners, and police directing traffic.

code_duck• 9 years ago

It's not really a normal place to be testing in traffic in many ways. During the daytime and, sure, I guess self driving cars can get used to the absence of left turns on highways and the 'turn arounds'!

At night, I was told by friends who are locals when staying there, as have other visitors I've talked to, that you do not want to stop at traffic lights in many areas of Detroit at night, at all. One person told me he was pulled over while stopped at a light and told this by a police officer, even.

Apparently, in these fairly deserted semi-industrial areas, stopping at a red light simply makes you a target. I was also instructed to leave room in front of me to move my car if someone tried to enter my car at a traffic light, and to be ready to roll up my window on someone's arm if needed.

neom2• 9 years ago

I'm curious to see if we'll see the Dubai style autonomous drone taxi service thing come to the US at some point. At least in major cities. Personally I'm in favour of less cars and more walkable/bikeable urban spaces. https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2017/10/03/flying-taxis-du...

skywhopper• 9 years ago

It would need to actually exist first. A hovering drone is not exactly a taxi service.

stephengillie9• 9 years ago

Self-driving cars feel like they are still in the early Alpha stage, while self-driving robots are already in production in Amazon's warehouses.

Why are companies going through the great expense of constructing full-size mock-ups if the domain problems haven't been solved on smaller mock-ups? Is there a fundamental difference between a 400 lb self-driving robot and a 2-ton self-driving robot - beyond the advertising novelty of being inside the car? Edit: If both robots are outside on a driving track, not in the Amazon warehouse.

And if "snow-vision" and other problems have been solved with smaller robots, or in other domains, why do news articles like this treat the topic as though it's entirely foreign and to be feared, instead of helping readers associate these concepts with existing concepts to drive acceptance?

Shivetya• 9 years ago

well that indoor robot has the advantage of fully mapped environment to operate within, low speeds, and people who know how to work around them.

going to be fun watching them deal with snow. though their approach has tended towards detail mapping. someone is going to figure out a break through in marking roads or perhaps they will get sensible and start with limited access highways first.

stephengillie9• 9 years ago

Snow is increased visual noise. How do humans deal with it? We disregard it. How difficult is it to program computer vision to do the same?

Self-driving cars are at the intersection of numerous solved domains, yet integrating these remains strangely difficult for the largest companies in the world.

neom2• 9 years ago

Thankfully snow is cold, cars/living stuff is hot, and IR is fantastic.

gph2• 9 years ago

Is there a fundamental difference between a 400 lb self-driving robot and a 2-ton self-driving robot

There's a difference in environment. How can you seriously think "Well if they have self-driving robots in controlled warehouse scenarios, what's the novelty of self-driving robots in unpredictable and often treacherous real-world public road scenarios?"

stephengillie9• 9 years ago

Beyond environment, is there another fundamental difference?

contrahax• 9 years ago

Does an Amazon warehouse have thousands of pedestrians and high speed moving objects whizzing around them constantly, unknown regulations on their movement only visible via signs, and constantly evolving route types/conditions? Do Amazon robots need to figure all of these things out while moving at 80mph? Software for a robot to carry packages around a warehouse that was constructed for that purpose isn't even comparable to self driving cars.

deelowe• 9 years ago

The self driving robots have to have facilities specifically constructed and/or configured with the constraints of the robotic system in mind. No one makes a go anywhere, do anything self navigating robot.

The application of robotics in industry is still very much more akin to industrial automation than it is true autonomy. There's a ton you have to take into account to design a system that works well. In practice, this means that traditional automation is typically still the better solution than full autonomy.

maxvu• 9 years ago

IIRC, Amazon's KIVA have a central schedule that they use to stay out of each others' way, not sensors. I don't think that that comparison works out.

I also don't get that tone from the article, either.

dontreact• 9 years ago

I’m confused. What kind of smaller mock-up are you imagining? I bet that Waymo considers lots of cases of driving solved (controlled environment parking lot) and we are seeing just another step up in terms of the scale of the problem.

stephengillie9• 9 years ago

If you're just working on computer vision and world mapping, why do you need something bigger than an RC car? I started with a sonar sensor and an arduino on an RC car in 2012, and had a working prototype, but never secured funding (and eventually became homeless).

username223• 9 years ago

How about interacting with pedestrians and cyclists? They could start with couriers, food delivery, animal control, city litter pick-up, janitorial services, etc. Of course they won't do that, because it's not "disrupting mobility," but merely eliminating some tedious, low-paying jobs.

caconym_2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure I totally understand your point but a) a robot scooting around a flat concrete floor in a controlled environment is completely different from a car driving on real roads, and b) if they're ready to start full-size tests in these adverse conditions then they must think they're pretty darn close to having a viable product, given the possible consequences of failure. It's not like they haven't already done a massive amount of R&D to get to this point.

stephengillie9• 9 years ago

So these "beta tests" are just ads.

gervase• 9 years ago

I think there are two separate issues that you raise that are essentially independent:

1. What evaluation metrics should we use to measure the advancement of self-driving technology?

2. How can we measure the public's level of acceptance for these technologies, and what impact does media coverage (positive or negative) have in that respect?

For example, I would not personally gauge that SDCs are in early alpha. However, I live in a suburb of Phoenix, where Uber, Waymo, and Cruise [0] are all conducting extensive testing; I usually observe between 15 and 30 distinct SDCs during my 20-minute commute. I expect this familiarity has (by design, I'm sure) made me more comfortable with SDCs than most. I also assume that the environment is somewhat simpler than other metro areas, as we have very little precipitation and a mostly grid-like street layout.

My judgement of these cars is that they approximate the behavior of an extremely stodgy, overly conservative, but ultimately very alert driver. For example, they respond well to being cut off, dealing with late light changes, or unpredictable pedestrian behavior, while dealing poorly with things which require decision-making, such as making a right on red, or preemptively changing lanes to avoid the frequent stops of a bus. In other words, they've been optimizing for safety, and not trip efficiency; I think that this is probably the right order of priorities at this stage of development.

Given this, I would be comfortable taking driverless trips around town, on surface streets; I would therefore classify the current state of development as early beta more so than early alpha. However, this is a subjective assessment, not based on any objective metric.

At the same time, I read the news too, and I think we are observing the clash of two competing agendas. On one hand, you have the tech companies painting an overly-rosy picture of development, probably to soften up the market to increase (eventual) penetration.

On the other hand, you have overly-pessimistic outlets preaching various types of doom (job loss, trolley problem, etc) in order to drive clicks through fear, or (cynically) to poison the market and buy time for later technical entries to catch up to the leaders.

Both of these tactics will have varying levels of receptivity with different groups, roughly corresponding (I expect) to the Rogers adoption curve [1]. Therefore, I expect we'll continue to see both optimistic and pessimistic coverage for quite some time.

[0]: In this order of development progress, in my opinion

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

stephengillie9• 9 years ago

I forget that truckers and delivery drivers see these not as angels coming to save them from the tyranny of driving, but rather see them as devils, coming to steal their jobs away. And so media outlets have to "wear kid gloves" when reporting these articles.

0xbear• 9 years ago

Exciting. Test it in rainy Seattle and freezing Alaska, too. If this works, this would show real, tangible leadership in the field. No one can do this yet, and autonomous driving tech is not to useful if it craps out in inclement weather.

stephengillie9• 9 years ago

Seattle can have "grey-out" conditions, where spray from other cars combines with the rainfall to dramatically limit visibility. It's rather terrifying to drive through, where you can only see for about 20 feet in any direction. Autonomous driving that entirely relies on computer vision will fail just as poorly as human eyes - multiple sensor types are necessary. How many types of sensor does this car have? I wish the article would have gone into that detail.

gyc• 9 years ago

And maybe some kind of communication/message passing between vehicles maybe useful. For example, if a vehicle senses black ice in a certain part of the road, it can pass that information to other cars so they know to slow down when going over the same part of the road. So something like Waze but for road conditions.

jvolkman• 9 years ago

Waymo recently released a large "safety report" in which it discusses the sensor suite.

https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way...

astrodust• 9 years ago

Are these cars using only visual data? I thought many used some kind of LIDAR as well, where that might cut through visibility issues depending on the wavelength used.

tomkarlo5• 9 years ago

Why would we expect computer vision to perform as poorly as human eyes? The input sensor is just part of the system - human eyes aren't very good sensors (narrow FOV, narrow set of usable wavelengths, etc) and the human brain isn't very good at detecting things (gets distracted, fooled, etc.) Anyone who's been using Google Photos search will tell you if often notices objects in the image that you didn't even register when you took the photo or viewed the image.

I'd expect the opposite - a self-driving car might outperform human drivers significantly in conditions where we tend to underperform - poor visibility, longer braking distances, poor steering control - because it will be more effective at adjusting than a human.

CobrastanJorji• 9 years ago

Heavy fog and rain would most likely be bad for Waymo's camera systems and its LiDAR systems, but Waymo cars also have radar, which would probably keep working pretty well. I'm not sure how well the car would perform if only radar was working well, though.

lern_too_spel• 9 years ago

autonomous driving tech is not to useful if it craps out in inclement weather.

This is the wrong way to think about it. An autonomous transportation service that works only in great weather is already a multibillion dollar opportunity. The revenue from providing services in places like California and Arizona can fund expansion into harder areas.

Nobody said that PCs were useless in the 1980s because many parts of the world didn't have reliable electricity. Nobody said web search was useless in the 1990s because most of the world didn't have Internet access. Likewise, you don't have to solve for driving in monsoon rains or Indian traffic before you can print money with autonomous vehicles.

akgerber• 9 years ago

Detroit still seems like an easier environment than Uber/CMU's Pittsburgh, home of barely-maintained brick roadways with blind corners on 20%+ grades and icy winters.

j-walker• 9 years ago

Don't forget the 'Pittsburgh Left'!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left

tomschlick3• 9 years ago

That is actually a pretty decent explanation of the practice and the reasoning behind it.

Thankfully, the PGH left is starting to die off as they install newer traffic light systems with dedicated turning lights/lanes.

lukejduncan3• 9 years ago

Not as odd, but there's also the Michigan Left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_left

tomschlick3• 9 years ago

home of barely-maintained brick

There are very few brick roads in Pittsburgh. Most are in older sections of the city where the residents have lobbied against a paved road for one reason or another.

And I would imagine steep hills and icy conditions are exactly what you want to test self-driving cars on to see how they handle it.

graphitezepp• 9 years ago

To be pedantic, I think saying there are very few is misleading. There are very few outside of older neighborhoods like you say, but there are plenty of small brick/cobblestone roads around. Just not many heavily traveled or particularly long ones.

ntsplnkv24• 9 years ago

There are very few brick roads in Pittsburgh. Most are in older sections of the city where the residents have lobbied against a paved road for one reason or another.

Many places still have brick. It's not a majority, but it's not a couple of historic district streets either.

mbesto• 9 years ago

Detroit is also interesting because it's Delphi's backyard (the other unknown horse in the whole autonomous vehicle race).

excalibur2• 9 years ago

Not to mention its six radio stations, all of which are country. A brutal environment for anyone to drive through.

colordrops• 9 years ago

I believe there are a few companies working on piping music through the internet.

kibwen• 9 years ago

I'd have just let this joke slide if Pittsburgh wasn't a pivotal location in radio history due to KDKA. :P So let me just say 105.9 The X for life (as long as Mark Madden isn't bloviating, anyway).

bennettfeely• 9 years ago

What? This isn't accurate at all.

stannol• 9 years ago

Pretty much anything in the US is easy. Try Indian cities, Italian villages or the Russian countryside. I’m absolutely certain that not a single one of the so called “self-driving” cars could handle even the most simple challenges in these environments.

KGIII• 9 years ago

The US is pretty big. I have neighbors that ATV and snowmobile the last few miles to their house, except during the very few months that they can wrestle an old Jeep up there. Google Maps isn't very helpful.

seanmcdirmid3• 9 years ago

I bet self driving cars are first adopted enmasse in Asian cities (primarily Chinese ones) given need. Even though the driving (and pedestrian) habits seem to imply otherwise, the chance to optimize limited road infrastructure will just be too juicy for the politicians to pass up. In fact, lots of companies are working on self driving cars in china right now for this reason (also, it’s much more likely given china’s autocratic government).

meatmodule• 9 years ago

I get a chuckle out of these threads. Humans are _unbelievably_ bad at driving in the snow. If the only thing a self-driving car does in a whiteout snow storm is come to a halt, it will already be dramatically safer than human drivers. You can just hard-wire the car to not do stupid things. Taking human judgement out of the loop has many wonderful outcomes.

https://youtu.be/rhZCyQ3emQg?t=121

benaiah• 9 years ago

This is a bit aside from your main point, but stopping on a road in a whiteout snow storm is _incredibly_ dangerous due to the cars behind you being unable to see you until it is much too late to stop. I grew up driving two-lane highways in Alaska with frequent semi traffic, several times in blizzard conditions (to the point where the only way to follow the road was to drive on the flat part of the just-fallen snow). You could pull over to the side of the road, but you may not be able to get back on the road depending on your vehicle and the snow level (and in remote, cold areas this may be deadly itself).

You could say "just don't drive in blizzards", but on a long drive you may often end up in a blizzard when you started in clear weather. Frequently this happens in areas where there are no safe places to stop for miles.

I'm not an expert on self-driving car sensors, but it's not hard to imagine that they could be made much less weather-dependent than the human eye. Driving through blizzard conditions is incredibly disorienting and terrifying, so the potential of better-than-vision detection of roads and traffic is IMO the most promising way for self-driving cars to handle snowy conditions.

tomkarlo5• 9 years ago

Potentially, a self-driving car (or even Google Maps nav and a regular driver) would not have this problem - it would simply not drive itself into a situation where it's both in heavy snow and a place that's not safe to stop. I've had a few times in California where I started a long drive in sun and warm weather and ended up stuck in a snow-storm mid-drive (hello Sierra passes)... it would have been nice if either my car or my map software warned me this was likely before we set off.

randyrand2• 9 years ago

Luckily I live in a mostly flat snowy state, but you quickly learn that you should never go up or down a hill when it's snowing.

Seattle would be impossible.

excalibur2• 9 years ago

So you're saying we should keep an eye on Craigslist in Detroit for rare gift opportunities this Christmas.

dsfyu404ed6• 9 years ago

Here's my bet. Their software designed to drive conservatively and likewise it will be way too hair trigger with the brakes for use in the snow without bringing a lot of changes of pants.

That's assuming they can deal reasonably well with the reduced visibility and change in behavior of other drivers.

They'll probably also slide on a few right turns before they get the settings fully dialed in.

srcmap2• 9 years ago

Personally, I prefer to see Google/Waymo start deport 1-2 thousand self driving cars/minivans in Silicon Valley near Google and FB's headquarters.

The near team (in 1-2 years) goal should be getting 20, 50, 95% of their own employees off the personal cars for the daily commute.

Their parking lot should be empty after 2 years.

notyourwork• 9 years ago

I feel like this is too short sighted. That will inherently happen if they are able to tackle different terrain in different weather conditions. Google has offices in more than just Silicon Valley.

secfirstmd• 9 years ago

Yeah, I really want to see them handle the mess of Dublin roads and traffic!

wtvanhest• 9 years ago

Where would the cars go once they drop people off?

srcmap2• 9 years ago

Become Uber car and start make $.

Or charge themselves if it is really idle.

cbhl2• 9 years ago

Getting tech employees off cars doesn't need self-driving cars. Google is perfectly happy to have shuttle buses, and pay for them, provided that housing is sufficiently dense, and there is a place where the buses can legally pick up and drop off employees.

barrkel2• 9 years ago

Probably the biggest problem with using mass transit is latency; having to wait around doing nothing until your transport arrives. It's a constraint on your schedule and adds a certain amount of stress to your day. And if your desired departure or arrival time don't coincide closely with the schedule, you're going to waste a bunch of time even if the transport is quick.

Subways solve this problem by running every couple of minutes. Buses generally don't solve this problem well because traffic and alighting / loading delays cause them to bunch up. But on-demand self-driving cars can solve this problem, as long as there are enough of them close enough.

(It's also the problem Uber solved.)

stale20022• 9 years ago

provided that housing is sufficiently dense

LOL! What magical fairly land is this?

Convincing local governments to allow more housing to be built, so as to solve the housing crisis? That's crazy talk!

Building self driving is an easy problem compared to the impossibility of THAT.

lhorie3• 9 years ago

I'd much rather they figure out snow conditions. Driving in a snowstorm is challenging even for experienced human drivers, and I'd feel far safer in a autonomous car that has been shown to handle snow well than one that merely dogfoods with employees in sunny California.

erikpukinskis2• 9 years ago

Why? If the cars never leave the Bay Area why would you feel safer knowing they have snow capabilities?

I’d rather they get them working maximally safely in a confined environment than pretend to be universally safe when they’re obviously not.

bitmapbrother• 9 years ago

Personally, I'd like to see these self driving cars routinely tackle more challenging climates than those that you can suntan in for the majority of the year. The snow covered streets of Detroit should yield some interesting data.

linkregister2• 9 years ago

This sounds like a nightmare. Employees who would have walked, biked, or bused would now be added to traffic. It sounds way more convenient to be picked up by a company car than to bike, especially if it’s raining.

Google having full parking lots doesn’t harm Mountain View and Sunnyvale traffic as much as extra trips do.

myself248• 9 years ago

About time.

I build autonomous/ADAS testbed cars in Detroit and it's astonishing the stuff that the California cars get flustered by. LIDAR is baffled by snow, RADAR sensors get packed with slush if they're mounted too low, etc.

falcolas• 9 years ago

And that doesn't even cover the complete variability of traction from one yard of pavement to the next in winter, or the legibility of road markers.

There's a lot of challenges, and I'm glad they're finally getting to it.

gt_2• 9 years ago

I expect traction to eventually be one of their strong suits. Machine learning on weather conditions and traffic patterns should work. I’ve got a unique amount of snow-driving experience in most every region of the globe (many years working for a snowboarding magazine) and my hunch is a computer could do this wonderfully. Much of these things should be very predictable with delicate sensory input, and roads have predictable problem spots.

One particularly problematic variable that will undermine weather calculations and traction will be the complications of road de-icer. In high-altitude inland regions, de-icer is not used, with a few exceptions after storms are long gone and the temperature has warmed. These regions should be a piece of cake for autonomous vehicles. Detroit in mid-winter probably resembles this for a few months due to low temps but humidity will destabilize de-icer during early and later winter. And, temp fluctuations resulting from humidity, coupled with high snowfall, necessitates the use of de-icer to prevent the city from getting buried in. In coastal regions like CA, de-icer more predictably melts and cleans the roads. In regions like Chicago, de-icer will hve every effect imaginable, both creating ice and melting it multiple times a day. But if a road is not de-iced the traction will follow a different pattern. I can’t imagine how a self-driving car could determine this. To further complicat things, de-icer can often create ice and be counterintuitive in only shaded parts of the road. De-icer is used so differently, an so often foolishly in different regions.

c0nsumer• 9 years ago

Hey! I think I know you. Hello!

beager3• 9 years ago

IMO if you solve for inclement weather and snow you've brought the capabilities of autonomous vehicles to a nationally viable level.

Tarq0n• 9 years ago

Is there progress being made on letting cars self-drive on unmarked and dirt roads? I imagine that would be important for users in less developed areas.

akira25013• 9 years ago

I wouldn't be that optimistic.. I grew up in Duluth, MN. A city that in 2 miles goes from 600' ASL to 1400' ASL, there are some roads with a greater than 10% grade to them. It snows there, and not just any snow, lake-effect snow. You really do need a special set of skills and roadway awareness to navigate inclement weather in cities like this.

Detroit is a great step, but I'd really like to see some more challenging areas handled before I'm convinced.

peterjlee• 9 years ago

As a human driver in California, I honestly don't know how to drive in the snow.

freehunter2• 9 years ago

Most human drivers in Michigan don't know how to drive in the snow either.

abledon• 9 years ago

Snow Tires, and drive 10 miles below speed limit.

greglindahl• 9 years ago

It's a mystery to me why people assume that California car companies don't test their cars in Tahoe, which has snow. Where we go skiing. Does Detroit not have areas within driving distance that have radically different climates? California does.

The article even says it: "But it won’t be Waymo’s first foray on dangerously snowy streets: the company has previously tested its vehicles in winter conditions outside Lake Tahoe."

jonknee• 9 years ago

Tahoe even seems more challenging because of the steep and windy roads.

smelterdemon• 9 years ago

Time to find out how well autonomous cars will deal with potholes

helipad• 9 years ago

I was just thinking how they'll need to make use of gyroscopes.

* Car has detected only 3 wheels touching road * Car is on Woodward * Proceed as normal

ilaksh2• 9 years ago

Is Waymo still planning to launch soon in Phoenix? They were going to start offering rides to the public this fall without the employee in the car. Or did they change their mind? If anyone has ridden in those vans I am curious to know how well their early rider program is performing in terms of not needing the human driver to intervene. I check the news for a Waymo launch every day, because it will be one of the most significant events in the history of self driving cars.

faitswulff• 9 years ago

From the article:

Starting in April, Waymo began testing a free service with select passengers in Phoenix, using some of its 600 minivans from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV.

rhino369• 9 years ago

But right now there is a driver in the car ready to take over. If they can do it without drivers being in the car, then driverless cars are just around the corner. I'm skeptical.

ilaksh2• 9 years ago

Yeah that's old news. I am referring to recent articles from a few weeks ago where someone suggested that there was at least a rumor that they might launch without any actual driver to the general public in Phoenix this fall sometime.

dpandya• 9 years ago

This is pretty damn amazing.

HN is a pretty critical place most of the time but sometimes it's valuable to take a step back. The challenges associated with building a car that can drive itself are pretty insanely difficult (even something as straightforward as "how do we get the training data?") and the fact that we're now at a point where there's a possibility of self-driving cars working in snowy conditions is pretty awesome.

wil421• 9 years ago

I would be hesitant to consider it a self driving car if it can’t drive in adverse conditions.

jdashg• 9 years ago

I would gladly take it if it only worked on one of the 300 days of clear skies I get a year.

90% of the way to true "self driving" is plenty to revolutionize things.

Arnt• 9 years ago

Hypothetical test: You and a Waymo car try to drive to the main road from my parents' house on a random January morning. It's a harsh test, but no harsher on you than on the self-driving car... so if you're hesitant, are you hesitant about yourself as a driver, or just about the car?

viraptor• 9 years ago

It's ok, context matters. There are places were you won't get snow - ever. So it's not something you'd worry about when deciding if the car is self-driving.

ehsankia2• 9 years ago

A car that can do a single drive is one thing. A drive that reaches a level where millions of people can do millions of drives with no issues, that's an entirely different problem. We've seen many many videos of "single drives" working well.

the8472• 9 years ago

with no issues

Demanding a probability of zero can make anything impossible. And you're not even asking for zero fatalities, you're asking for zero "issues", whatever those may be. That is a wildly unrealistic demand. Human drivers are not that reliable either, especially in bad whether conditions.

bsaul• 9 years ago

Your comment made me wonder whether i hadn't miss anything : are car actually able to drive themselves in clear condition at the moment ?

I've seen the demos of the start ups in the valley, the local experiments, but i'm still waiting for a single real-world deployment, even limited to local driving, such as city to city taxi driving, or item delivery.

On the other hand, i did hear of the trouble with tesla's autopilot "2" not driving properly on regular roads under the sun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg).

w-m• 9 years ago

Except for a bunch of small buses that go at walking speed in a very limited area there are no commercial autonomous cars currently deployed.

There are self-driving cars that drive themselves well in clear conditions, but these are the R&D cars with an expensive sensor suite on the roof and a bunch of processing power in the trunk that can't be found in production cars.

brailsafe• 9 years ago

I feel like this is a nice start, but Canada and more mountainous regions of the PNW will be the real proving ground. North Dakota, Minnesota and so on. At least in terms of generalized technical achievement, not in serving the most people in most situations. Winnipeg is a hellscape for driving in the best of times. Driving through the prairies in a snowstorm was one of the scariest experiences of my life, as well as the rockies with a thin layer of ice, intense grades, little to no road markings.

As a recognized tangent to that tangent, there's a big problem up here in the real North ( where basic necessities of life are ludicrously expensive. In part, at least possibly, due to transport costs. Would be amazing if self-driving vehicles could regularly deliver goods up there with no human risk on ice-roads. May be a pipe dream though.

rambleraptor• 9 years ago

I'm curious if we'll see the Detroit economy take off as a result of more self-driving car work in the area. It seems like Metro Detroit hasn't seen many of the tech gains that the coastal tech hubs have seen.

dswalter• 9 years ago

Michigan is a great location to test self driving cars, because the lake effect makes the temperature fluctuate around freezing. This means we go from icy to wet frequently. It also helps that we get a decent amount of snow, giving us a much wider range of driving conditions than the Bay Area.

QAPereo• 9 years ago

There’s also the benefit of roads in every state of repair, from pristine to essentially abandoned by the government.

benatkin• 9 years ago

The singularity is near.

hawski• 9 years ago

Could the camera use the clear view screen [1] instead of counting on windshield and wipers? Maybe it does already, I don't know.

Clear view screen is a round window that is usually located on a normal window. This window rotates at ~1500 RPM, thanks to that it will not be covered by snow or rain. It is used on ships and in locomotives.

It looks like this: https://youtu.be/uIwWnWvikkQ?t=24s

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_view_screen

cbhl2• 9 years ago

One of the biggest challenges with self-driving cars in snow is the snow in the environment -- for example, how do you see the lane markers so that you stay in your lane?

eco3• 9 years ago

I imagine they'll just have to do what humans do. Follow existing tire tracks if available. If not, just intuit where the road using your best judgement. It's not terribly unlike driving on dirt roads (though harder, surely) which autonomous cars already did surprisingly well in the first two Grand Challenges (no lane markers there either).

freeone3000• 9 years ago

This is also a human challenge. You follow the tire tracks. If there are no tire tracks, guess. You can have a margin of error of half a lane and be within human parameters.

bm13623• 9 years ago

Like others have said, the vehicle will localize using GPS, LIDAR, other image features and then attempt to continue in it’s route. If the confidence is low the system will most likely just take no action.

I did the self driving car class on Udacity and it was super effective as a primer for how these systems work in general and framework for solving these problems.

randomdata• 9 years ago

for example, how do you see the lane markers so that you stay in your lane?

As a human in a snowy region, who has been in some pretty dicey conditions, I measure the slope of the road. Roads are typically shaped like a triangle, so if your car changes it’s rotation on the axis that is your direction of travel, you know you are outside of your lane. Even my smartphone has sensors for that kind of measurement.

DamnInteresting• 9 years ago

I wonder if it would be workable to have a half-automated mode for these conditions...the human steers, and the car does all of the rest (accelerating, decelerating, etc). Or the human could have a binary go now/stop now control, with the software handling the details.

Dylan168072• 9 years ago

That seems dangerously fast to put on the outside of something on a normal street.

purplezooey• 9 years ago

Lived in Detroit for several years and spun my car many times even as an experienced snow driver. Should be fun.

sbrin• 9 years ago

its impressive to see this coming full circle back to Detroit

wiremine• 9 years ago

"Having lived through fourteen Michigan winters, I’m confident that there are few better places that will prepare our self-driving cars for winter conditions"

Lived in Michigan for 30+ years myself, on the West side of the state. We get a lot of lake effect, and it's only 3 hours from Detroit. It's also 6 hours from the middle of the U.P., where they get _real_ snow. And if they really want to, they can go into Canada.

Should be a good set of real-world tests.

lukejduncan3• 9 years ago

I lived in Downtown Detroit for a two years. Unless things have changed since 2011, there aren't many streets outside of a narrow strip of Mid Town where the city actually plows the streets. I'm curious how examples of government mismanagement like this get highlighted. I can see the headline in the Detroit Free Press now "Snow No-Go Zone: Waymo won't drive East Jefferson until the city plows it."

joosebox• 9 years ago

Uhh yeah, things have changed since 2011.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/02/07/detroit-mayor-announc...

lukejduncan3• 9 years ago

That's pretty nice!

orf• 9 years ago

As a society, are we ready for self driving cars? It seems to signal the start of the next industrial Revolution, with truckers and taxi drivers going extinct, with more industries to follow. Machine learning has so far been kind of in the background, with this it's very front and center and will directly impact millions of people.

Also, I've always wondered, if self driving car crashes who is legally liable? Is it the programmer or the occupant?

Waterluvian• 9 years ago

I'm not an expert in perception or autonomy, but I've always had a loose sense that winter driving would be an order of magnitude more complicated for autonomous vehicles. It had me worried: what if technology presents a future where the world is split up into industry regions based on climate? You have some serious costs associated with doing business in a region that has winter.

"Available in Canada (summer only)"

"Shipping to winter regions is far more expensive because we need to use human drivers half the year. So we generally avoid focusing on them."

Not a new problem. Geography has always strongly impacted industry. But interesting to think of it from this perspective.

I'm excited to see attempts to tackle the truly difficult form of autonomous driving.

mrtron• 9 years ago

The rules for driving in snow are pretty simple. Go slow, pump the brakes, give a bigger safety cushion for obstacles.

The problem is likely around vision. A lot of winter driving is done at an unsafe level of visibility.

It is probably better having non static rules for roads. Snow should reduce speed limits, and white out conditions should be used for emergency travel only.

Unless you can utilize radar to obtain better visibility than human drivers, in which case you could probably drastically reduce the number of winter accidents.

dghughes• 9 years ago

Context is a major part of driving it worries me when you see these videos of self-driving cars slamming on brakes a metre or two from a pedestrian. A human driver would see the person at the side of the road whether it's a marked crosswalk or not. There are visual cues we humans know which mean "I'm going to cross the street now" such as a pedestrian turning their head towards the driver to make eye contact first, holding out one arm while looking both ways. Slamming on the brakes at the very last moment isn't what I'd call a success.

As a Canadian who lives in the very snowy Maritimes I have a lot of experience with driving in the winter. I started driving at age 14 and my job as a teen, 20s and 30s required me to drive in all conditions. Winter driving has to be instinctive there is no time to think and as noted above also depends on context.

If a pedestrian walks out from the side of the road and that road has a curve maybe even a downhill curve what now? Slamming on the brakes even ABS may not help. The inertia and being on an angle may (my guess is will) cause the vehicle to slip towards the outside part of the curve. If the vehicle is in the right lane it would slide into oncoming traffic.

Counter-steering at the very instant your vehicle starts to fishtail is a learned skill that has to be instinctive. And when to use that technique or when not to use it.

Slush is I think one of the most dangerous things a winter driver will face. A driver who drives into a line of slush that may be left on the center line can easily have their vehicle jerk violently to the left. It can be a situation where you have less than half a second to react.

Brakes on a curve has to be one of the most common problems with inexperienced winter drivers. I see it all the time even with drivers who I know have been living here all their lives.

Who will scrape off all the optical sensors in the morning? I've had ice so thick and so hard to get off you'd swear it was concrete glued to your windshield. Not to mention the slush, snow, dirt-salt-water mix constantly splashing up. Anyone with a backup camera knows it's a constant battle to keep it clean or it's useless.

It will be interesting to see the results but I think there is far more to self-driving in the winter than on clear, dry roads in warmer climates.

venturis_voice• 9 years ago

The problem with self driving cars is that you can never rely on a human to take over at a moments notice. Google perfected the self driving car over a decade ago but found that once on the motorway (Freeway for my transatlantic cousins) they literally switched of, rummaged around in the back did everything other than be able to take over the wheel at a moments notice. So google had to go back to the drawing board and design a car that could drive literally everywhere! We covered the topic in part of our recent podcast. If you'd like to listen debate or disagree! Skip ahead to 23.03 minutes.

http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/tech-teams-productivity...

Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit

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