The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-latest-chapter-for-self-driving-car.html

by mgw • 12 years ago

391 447 12 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

jameshk• 12 years ago

The next step is highways!

genofon2• 12 years ago

as a theoretical problem highway should be much easier because few types of "street agents" can access them (i.e. no bicycles, no pedestrians, no traffic lights)

maxerickson11• 12 years ago

As far as I know, they already have a pretty good handle on limited access roads.

People use 'highway' to describe all manner of roads, I wonder if the gp is thinking about major 2 lane roads that have higher speeds but still lots of intersections to deal with.

solomatov• 12 years ago

Many cars already have dynamic cruise controls, which is basically auto pilot for highway driving. The one which are installed on BMW, brakes when the car in front of you brakes and decreases speed on curves.

antr2• 12 years ago

I love how the car understands the cyclist's hand signals. The self-driving car is going to have a gigantic impact on the world, I can't wait to see it commercialised.

bertil9• 12 years ago

As a cyclist, I was shocked to see the cyclist change his mind like that —unless he was a tester too, that’s how you get bumped– but I really hope Google Cars learn that most cyclists actually don’t signal their turn that well.

Cars don’t bother either, and the last frame show how most non-car drivers get killed: don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang. Seeing how Google taught its car to behave literally had me shout in joy an dance at my desk.

barrkel2• 12 years ago

don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang

Can you rephrase this? I can't understand it.

cake• 12 years ago

It really looks like the cyclist is a tester.

I agree, most cyclist don't signal at all, sometimes they will just subtly point with their finger.

Not the best idea to rely on the cyclist's signals.

dmm• 12 years ago

Maybe the cyclist was avoiding debris on the shoulder.

jchrisa• 12 years ago

I think it will only take a few on the road to teach motorists what legal driving looks like. Hopefully it'll have a traffic calming effect in general.

gensym3• 12 years ago

Right. I rarely drive and actually try to obey the law when I do so, but where I live (Chicago), obeying the law is a recipe for angering other drivers. Things like obeying the speed limit or stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks delay other drivers, who are quick to express their anger. In a few years, maybe they'll just think I'm in a robot car!

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals. Sure they're technically required but in any of the countries that I have been to where bikes are a frequent mode of transportation hand signals appear to be mostly optional.

antr2• 12 years ago

Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals.

I was waiting for the snarky comment. All I'm highlighting is the system's ability to recognise such intention (many times ignored by drivers). Regardless, such indications seem not to be "necessary", the GSC detects the cars direction/intention primarily via its mounted laser, rather than "looking" for left/right light indicators.

deanclatworthy5• 12 years ago

This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces.

- What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that kind of thing when learning to drive) earlier. What are the limitations of the peripheral vision of the car when checking hazards? - What if a fire hydrant bursts on the side of the road 50m in front of the car and makes the road ahead really wet? Can the cameras determine and detect quickly enough the need for different driving (and probably braking) due to a change in surface?

The sad truth of this is that whilst it's an interesting technical challenge, I really can't forsee a situation where a computer could react to all the different things that could happen when driving a car as well as a human.

rwmj5• 12 years ago

The thing is .. what happens if a cyclist falls in front of a car with a human driver? Probably the car drives over him and the cyclist dies. The challenge is to do better than that, which is a rather low bar.

alextgordon3• 12 years ago

People won't see it like that. If a human driver makes a mistake, it's "human error". If a robot driver makes a mistake it's criminal negligence -- because robots are capable of not making mistakes.

In other words, robots are held to a higher standard than humans.

maxerickson11• 12 years ago

I think the day when a computer is more reliable than the median licensed driver will quickly come. A big piece of that is because the software will be aware of and respect traffic law.

pxlpshr• 12 years ago

Wow. You are giving waaaayyy to much credit to the responsiveness of humans. Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. Lets also not forget distractions like cell phones, finding/selecting music, passengers, OTC and prescription drugs, et al.

From my perspective, I'm the only good driver on the road and everyone else needs to go back to driving school or have their license revoked. :)

privong• 12 years ago

Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system.

1 in 4 seems high, especially if you mean to the level of impairment. I'd be interested to see the source of that statistic.

john_b2• 12 years ago

"Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system"

You're going to need to provide a citation here.

gamegoblin2• 12 years ago

As I understand it, the computer has enough sensors (LIDAR, etc) that it has far better vision coverage than a human. That is, I believe it can see in all directions at once.

troels2• 12 years ago

On the other hand it might be a lot better to detect other kinds of hazards.

finch_• 12 years ago

The car has many fewer limitations on its peripheral vision when checking hazards because it has dozens of sensors all over the car, as opposed to the humans' very limited eyesight.

melling4• 12 years ago

There are over 30,0000 deaths in the US alone every year, which is actually near historical lows. I believe there are several million accidents and hundreds of thousands of injuries.

Now the computer might not be perfect but if it's 10x better, wouldn't that be acceptable?

deanclatworthy5• 12 years ago

Getting to that point is the challenge. I'm just throwing out questions and raising the point that there are some very very hard challenges to solve, where humans are probably much better.

voicereasonish2• 12 years ago

30,000 deaths a year in a country like the US is nothing. More people die from falling down the stairs. Should we ban stairs next?

nabla9• 12 years ago

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but Google cars still can't drive in the rain or in the snow. Not even on a wet street. They have driven all those thousand miles in Mountain View, Calif. in good weather.

Generally lidar's don't work well with rain or reflective surfaces.

cbhl3• 12 years ago

My understanding is that it uses vision processing algorithms on a camera nowadays, and works just fine in rain. Snow is an issue because the car can't see the lane markings through the snow -- a human drives through snow by remembering where they were or making a guess.

bertil9• 12 years ago

Indeed — I remember a projet in high-school, explaining how lidar were being used to measuring rain drops direction…

The thing is: there apparently now is a technology (at Mercedes or BMW) that uses beamers instead of front lights; a secondary camera detects droplets’ movement, predicts their fall and the beamer doesn’t shine light precisely on them. It helps light in front of you at night without shining mainly the rain. I was stunned when I learned we are now that fast. Same thing with cooking mosquitoes with lasers. I’m assuming that with those tech handy, a lidar should work properly through the rain. It leaves braking as a problem, especially on black ice — and that one is tougher.

chillingeffect5• 12 years ago

I am also curious about multiple vehicles using LDAR at the same time. Is it possible for two or more vehicles to operate using LIDAR independently, or must they synchronize with one another and how far apart do they have to be?

arikrak2• 12 years ago

Humans have very poor peripheral vision, while the self-driving car can see perfectly in all directions. I think it also has a faster reaction time. (Though either way, a car may not always be able to break in time.)

deanclatworthy5• 12 years ago

But what about distance? Imagine a cyclist travelling down a hill at 50km/h and running straight over some crossroads in a residential neighbourhood. Assuming a line of sight to the hill, a human can probably recognise that that fast moving object (that may or may not run over the cross-roads) is a bicycle with a cyclist on it quicker than a computer can do the same.

This of course, assumes the driver has good vision or is wearing any prescription they might be required to do so by law.

Gustomaximus• 12 years ago

The sad truth of this is that whilst it's an interesting technical challenge, I really can't forsee a situation where a computer could react to all the different things that could happen when driving a car as well as a human.

I agree, at least for some time. But it's not about a computer reacting to as much as a human. The question is, can a computer can do a better job overall (e.g. drnk driving or texting while driving accidents are eliminated)? So dont look for a perfect driving record, as humans have loads of accidents today. As long as the computer has less frequent or severe accidents it is a welcome improvement to our roads even if it does have infrequent limitations.

deanclatworthy5• 12 years ago

I personally think society is going to have a much harder time accepting death by software bug, than human error.

oflordal• 12 years ago

What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road

My Volvo already has a system that is better at that than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nfT9dfPi7g

deanclatworthy5• 12 years ago

Very impressive, although I'd like to throw a few more edge cases at the system than the one shown in the demo video.

mahdavi• 12 years ago

The good thing about computers is that they can simulate the future based on current physical data and make decisions in realtime, so if a cyclist fells off on front of it, computer can detect the diversion as it happens, simulate each possible scenario beforehand, and choose the one that has the best outcome. actually it can perform a lot better than humans. look at this unbeatable rock-paper-scissors robot video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nxjjztQKtY

furyg34• 12 years ago

The intermediary step (computer driving with human failsafe) is also incredibly challenging, because you are unsure of the computer's knowledge and intent (this is also what makes backseat drivers so annoying).

This computer drives much more conservatively than a human driver, so much so that I'm not sure a human failsafe driver would grok what is going on.

Waiting for a railway crossing to be completely clear before proceeding is not something most drivers do (ehem, especially at that particular intersection), and may seem like odd behavior to a failsafe driver behind the wheel. Similarly, waiting for a bicyclist coming from behind may also seem odd. For one, he may not have that information since he is less attentive in 'failsafe' mode... or many human drivers would see the cyclist and proceed a bit more quickly to make the turn to get out of traffic and free the intersection for the oncoming cyclist (and cars behind him).

On the other hand I would have probably pulled the plug on the computer driver when Mr. Indecisive-Cyclist was in the road. The computer handled it fine, but as the failsafe, am I sure that the computer will handle it well?

This intermediary stage is going to get really weird, I don't even know how you'd manage liability in this world.

maxerickson11• 12 years ago

I think the fail safe human laws are only useful to license research.

For day to day driving, the cars should either be fully autonomous or have the automated systems limited to intervening in dangerous situations (like current brake priming systems and the like). If the driver is able to take (primary) control, they should be required to be in control.

ghaff• 12 years ago

I'd actually go further. An autonomous driving system that works for routine driving pretty much has to be designed on the basis that the human "failsafe" will NOT be paying attention and will not be prepared to take over on short notice. Heck, enough people don't pay close attention to their driving today without self-driving cars.

The most obvious intermediate stage is designated sections of highways in which self-driving cars can operate without active human drivers. The question though is whether that's an interesting enough use case to push through all the legal/regulatory/etc. changes that would be required.

mortenjorck• 12 years ago

I see where your concern is: this is the sort of lateral synthesis of ideas that computers are still vastly our lessers at performing. We can fill in what we know is going to happen before the rider hits the ground and potentially react before the event happens, while the computer would have to have an algorithm in place specifically to detect a combination of rider posture, angular acceleration of the bike, identify a heavy package affecting the center of balance, and so on.

Ideally the system can compensate in another area where it does beat us, such as reaction time.

TeMPOraL12• 12 years ago

while the computer would have to have an algorithm in place specifically to detect a combination of rider posture, angular acceleration of the bike, identify a heavy package affecting the center of balance, and so on.

Or just an algorithm to detect that the rigid body in moving in front of the car is about to enter a collision trajectory. Isn't that a pretty much solved problem? There's no need for computer to "know" that the dangerous object is a cyclist.

mikeash6• 12 years ago

I don't understand why people seem to always imagine that human drivers are all Michael Schumacher or Mario Andretti.

Most drivers are terrible at driving. They're unobservant, they have slow reaction times, they have inappropriate reactions, they don't adjust to conditions, they don't understand the laws, they can't anticipate other drivers, they can't plan ahead, you're lucky if they're actually looking where they're going half the time.

What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? I'd be surprised if a human was able to react to this in less than two seconds. The cyclist probably dies. It wouldn't take much for a computer-driven car to do better than this.

What if a fire hydrant bursts and makes the road really wet? I bet the computer would do something besides continue driving at full speed the way 90% of human drivers would.

These standards are just ridiculously high. Everybody is imagining scenarios that 90% of the time would not be handled correctly by human drivers, and then saying that anything less than a 100% success rate on the part of the computer is insufficient.

orky562• 12 years ago

I'd like to think that Google isn't meticulously evaluating the situations where humans have to take over. In those cases, the software needs to be much more robust. Only way to encounter these situations is to get more cars out there in the greatest variety of markets.

dclowd99014• 12 years ago

My guess is that the car would fare much better in reaction time than any human, not just with reacting to the biker, but also with surrounding conditions (e.g., not flying into an opposing lane and hitting a car or something similar).

People have a very hard time grasping the speed of computers. Imagine you saw the world in 1/1000 speed, and how quickly you'd be able to react to occurrences.

rwmj5• 12 years ago

This is hardly city driving. Try driving in a European city. (I love this project and can't wait to buy or rent a self-driving car)

gamegoblin2• 12 years ago

Harder yet, Southeast Asia. Hundreds of pedestrians, tons of vehicle variety (some entirely makeshift), uncontrolled intersections, very little regard to any regulations.

masklinn2• 12 years ago

very little regard to any regulations.

That's an important point, I never expected lanes count and lane direction to be interpreted as suggestions until I saw people going through a roundabout on both sides at the same time.

barrkel2• 12 years ago

I think swarm-like logic might work better at that level.

furyg34• 12 years ago

In my mind structured road conditions are a prerequisite for driverless cars.

I've been in many situations where conservative driving according to the rules of the road is not possible. In the West this is more limited to dense cities and exceptional situations. In India, though, this is the rule.

If you waited for pedestrians to finish crossing or for cars to clear intersections, maintained a safe following distance, signaled before turning, waited for other parties to yield, etc, you would never leave your driveway.

It's difficult for me to imagine a computer deciding to gently nudge pedestrians with its bumper in order to proceed through a green light, which I've had to do several times while driving there.

kamaal• 12 years ago

I will give you a more harder test environment. Try driving in any major Indian city, especially in the city core.

Super narrow roads. Zero adherence to traffic rules. Kids playing on the roads, sudden reactions from people on the road when they have to cross. Unsignalled sudden breaking, turns, U-turns, people popping up in front of the vehicle from no where etc etc.

What's more how should you expect the car to react when a dog comes chasing. Or when a traffic police guy asks you to stop or take a diversion(You won't believe how common this is here). How will you negotiate frequently occurring speed breakers and pot holes. The list is endless.

I believe starting to test some where in the streets of a city like Bangalore/Mumbai would help.

skrause4• 12 years ago

I think self-driving cars will be introduced very gradually. First only highways where it's really easy for a computer, then maybe American cities. The harder the street layout, the longer we'll have to wait for this technology. So maybe American cities will get the technology a few years before European.

danpat2• 12 years ago

I don't understand why the detractors don't understand this. Many people (including some commenters here) seem to think that the technology is useless unless it can handle all possible situations.

Auto-drive on long highway sections would be an amazing improvement by itself and prevent all kinds of fatigue related accidents. The cars could just announce ("Driver, take control") as they exit the highway system.

Hell, trucking companies could just have drivers waiting at highway exits to do the last-mile driving, the long-haul sections of trucking wouldn't require a person on-board.

I don't think it would be unfeasible to install beacons designed to aid driverless vehicles either, especially on highways where things don't change very quickly. Simple posts with machine-readable signalling (visual/radio/whatever). Most signage is designed for human recognition, but I bet it wouldn't be impossible/terribly expensive to install signage designed for automated driving.

josephlord4• 12 years ago

Southern Europe in particular, Sicily was good fun; I hear Naples is even more exciting.

The interesting thing was that the drivers were quite skilled but the way they drove and the traffic moves they had to be and even with those skills there were far more dented cars around than in the UK where systems and organisation allow a lower skill level.

cliveowen• 12 years ago

Exactly, I live in Rome and you'd really be surprised by the number of bikers who drive on the sidewalk to avoid morning traffic. I don't think Google cars are prepared to respond to people merging from the sidewalk, they're just unpredictable and nothing will ever change that.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

Human drivers can't predict that either, and the Google car should have a much faster reaction time than a human driver.

alextgordon3• 12 years ago

I don't see why not. If I were writing a self-driving car I would care that

1. My car stays in lane and obeys the rules of the road

2. It doesn't hit anything

Fulfilling 2) is "easy", you just need to make sure you have sensor coverage within a safe stopping distance.

Besides, a biker is just a faster cyclist, and it's common and often legal for cyclists to merge from the sidewalk, if the sidewalk is marked for that purpose

anjc2• 12 years ago

I wonder if far more cars surrounding the driverless car will make it even more robust in some ways, for the short-medium term. If there are swarms of cars surrounding a driverless car, tricky things like hand signals and sign interpretation will be less important, as other human cars will hint at a correct traffic flow. It's surely far easier to detect the predict the motion of a gigantic car, as opposed to relying on interpreting roadwork signs.

lmg643• 12 years ago

somehow the current scuffle between uber and regular cabs seems to miss the joke. we're going to need a plan for the eventual unemployment of a lot of cab drivers, regardless of how the cab is hailed.

maxerickson11• 12 years ago

Even New York City seems to only have tens of thousands of cab drivers ('seems' because I just looked at wikipedia for a minute), I don't think they are that big a percentage of the population.

seren3• 12 years ago

I think the real markets are long haul trucking and small delivery van for the last miles. All in all it is probably a significant portions of job.

DougWebb2• 12 years ago

My step-dad was a NYC cab driver. It's true that they're a small percentage of the population, but that's not the right way to think about it. In NYC (and other US cities as well I believe) to become a cab driver requires buying a Medallion, which is a license to operate a cab. They cost a LOT of money, roughly the same as a small NYC condominium. My step-dad's cost a couple hundred thousand dollars many years ago, and Wikipedia[1] says they can cost over $700k today. They used to be mostly individually owned, but today, because of the expense, they're mostly owned by fleet operators.

The individual owners of these medallions are small business owners, and those who operate cab fleets are large business owners who employ many drivers. Automated vehicles aren't just going to put some people who drive out of work; they're going to eliminate an industry and destroy investments in a lot of businesses.

Or, maybe not. The TLC (Taxi and Limousine Commission) in NYC is a powerful lobbying group. They'll probably fight to prevent automated taxis in NYC until they're proven, without a doubt, to be safer than experienced taxi drivers. Then, they'll fight to ensure that an automated taxi requires a medallion just like any other taxi. Very few new medallions are issued each year, so the onus will be on the existing taxi owners to convert their cars into automated cars. That's probably a good deal for the individual owners, since they're usually either the drivers as well or they're paying a driver (or both, to keep the taxi on the road as much as possible.) Automation will get them out of the drivers seat, while still preserving their investment. But this is a bad deal for the regular drivers who aren't owners; they'll either be out of work, or maybe paid (less) to sit and ride along until passengers get used to the automated cars.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#Medal...

lojack• 12 years ago

Someone proposed some food for thought a little while ago that intrigued me. One day in the not too distant future it'd be completely reasonable for cabs to drive themselves and automatically accept payment via bitcoin or some other digital currency. It'd also be reasonable for them to refill their fuel tanks when empty, paying with the money they received, and additionally go into the shop whenever their diagnostics detect an issue.

At this point, they may not be self aware, but they are completely autonomous, capable of making their own living wages, and can look after their own well-being.

skrause4• 12 years ago

It will be something like a merger of traditional cab services and modern car-sharing services like https://www.car2go.com/

Most of those car-sharing services are owned directly by the large car companies like BMW or Mercedes. It's very likely that they'll eventually just become big cab services with self-driving cars in addition to just producing them.

And the number of people who actually need to own their own car will shrink every year.

arikrak2• 12 years ago

It won't be able to drive around New York if it follows the rules so strictly. It will never be able to turn. They'll have to add a setting for aggression...

troels2• 12 years ago

That's funny, but probably a very real challenge. As a (human) driver, it happens that we come across ambiguous, contradictory or just plain impossible constraints and we overcome them by deliberately breaking the rules. I wonder how they would cope with that?

mikepurvis• 12 years ago

This is part of the larger problem of roboethics—prioritizing and balancing a set of conflicting objectives and requirements. There's a neat introductory article with some video of example scenarios here:

http://footnote1.com/what-should-a-robot-do-designing-robots...

VladimirGolovin• 12 years ago

If I remember correctly, they already have one.

bitJericho• 12 years ago

There was a report some time ago about making the cars be somewhat aggressive. If I recall, they had a lot of trouble with left turns until they programmed in some lurching forward behavior.

icebraining3• 12 years ago

A video from 2011 shows it crossing an intersection (on its turn) while other cars were still crossing perpendicularly: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

peteretep• 12 years ago

Will a cyclist be able to troll you by continuing to signal in front of your car, stopping it from ever overtaking?

drzaiusapelord3• 12 years ago

This is my concern. If we treat cyclists as the sacred cow of the roads, they'll more or less have the root password to my car and be able to dictate where it stops and for how long.

I find cyclists to be much more disingenuous and reckless than any driver, at least here in Chicago where they'll put up next to your car on the right, on the shoulder to make a dangerous and illegal right, and pound on the side of your car with their fists to let you know they're there.

I don't see how empowering that group and its "cars suck, rules don't apply to me" attitudes can help.

danielweber4• 12 years ago

Google cars sometimes got stuck at four-way stop sign intersections if they literally obeyed the rules on the book. They had to be a little aggressive to get their turn.

prawn11• 12 years ago

That is a flaw I noticed with four-way stops when I drove in the US. The only way to break a stand-off once the first arrivals had moved through (and no one could remember the order of arrival) was to be the aggressive one that just went.

I'm from Australia and roundabouts solve this problem very easily. Even during reasonable traffic, I barely need to slow down at the roundabouts near my house as they're so effective. And this is at intersections about the same size as those with the four-way stops I encountered in LA.

Robotic cars can probably pass through gaps like lines of ants crossing each other if roundabouts are too difficult to introduce.

shekhar1012• 12 years ago

I saw an interesting comment on the blog post. Is anyone keeping tab on the project knows if Google in working on some sort of communication between vehicles on road. That will make the self driving cars much more accurate. Lot of 'sudden' circumstances will be predictable by the car.

gonehome• 12 years ago

This would also be better for optimal traffic routing. I remember reading about it previously somewhere, but it gets bad PR for privacy reasons so I think it's brought up less often.

icebraining3• 12 years ago

Many manufacturers are working on it, and in fact the Feds are already planning to standardize and mandate them:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/03/nhtsa-ve...

https://www.dot.gov/fastlane/v2v-cars-communicating-prevent-...

dalke6• 12 years ago

What fun it will be when someone figures out how to fake the signals and, for example, force other cars to slow down or stop.

skrause4• 12 years ago

You can do that now already, e.g. pretend to quickly step on a road while a car is approaching and watch the human drives hit their brakes. Yet I don't see that happening because the majority of people aren't jerks.

dabeeeenster• 12 years ago

As a city cyclist, the Google solution looks way safer than the current status quo...

Zigurd5• 12 years ago

Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.

rwmj5• 12 years ago

For trucks, ASL360. This uses 4 cameras around the vehicle and some simple software to synthesize an "eye in the sky" view. Actually, I'd like this on my car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKReY1tYHw

josephlord4• 12 years ago

I'm a cyclist as well as a driver and I give a lot of space to cyclists when overtaking them but I don't see that working too well. When cyclists/pedestrians get used to the system they will start to abuse it and rely on the systems to force the vehicles to avoid them/stop.

Also what defines too close? If you stray 1mm inside that zone do the brakes come on hard regardless of other traffic? What happens when the cyclist has come close to the car (overtaking either side in traffic).

josefresco• 12 years ago

I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.

bertil9• 12 years ago

I absolutely agree, and I now feel like offering to cyclists a t-shirt that reads in bold “We WANT Google self-driving cars.” and maybe, in tiny ‘Because, if you can read this, your driving sucks and you don’t respect security distance.’

nmueller• 12 years ago

I think they have a lot more work to do. I bike through Mountain View every day and over the last few years I've had more close calls with self-driving cars then the normal kind.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

As a city cyclist in Amsterdam, I have to disagree...

revelation2• 12 years ago

The fellow people over at Reddit have alerted me to the fact that the Google car is actually still breaking the law (while being a tremendous improvement over the idiots that normally operate cars):

Turning Across Bicycle Lanes 21717. Whenever it is necessary for the driver of a motor vehicle to cross a bicycle lane that is adjacent to his lane of travel to make a turn, the driver shall drive the motor vehicle into the bicycle lane prior to making the turn and shall make the turn pursuant to Section 22100 [general turning regulations]

The car must be in the bicycle lane before turning. You can not turn by crossing over the lane, and if you couldn't get into the lane before, you will have to wait to get into the lane and then turn.

This figures in nicely with the people here saying we should disregard cyclists because they constantly break the traffic laws. Are you always in the bicycle lane when turning with your car? Don't claim this is a surprising rule and not generally known; try cycling some time, you'll find the traffic laws are setup in a way that often makes it impossible to travel efficiently, safe and legally.

(If I can just add this: traffic laws for cycling are the ultimate bikeshed. Imagine a bikeshed committee, where the people on the comittee have no need for a bikeshed and no concept of how people use a bikeshed, or why. In Germany, up until some time ago, they regulated the voltage and energy source for bike lights.)

jfoster5• 12 years ago

Interesting thing about that law is that it's probably there due to the limitations of human drivers. An autonomous vehicle that is fully aware of objects on every side probably doesn't need the precaution that the law requires. It will only turn when there is no cyclist coming.

pazra2• 12 years ago

Given that the NSA will likely have a backdoor into any automated driving system, is this really a technology you'd like to see become all pervasive? "We don't like this guy's ideology - ok, let's arrange for him to have an 'accident'".

1stop• 12 years ago

They control killer robots in the sky with missiles... It doesn't really get worse than that...

pazra2• 12 years ago

That's a much more obvious way of doing away with someone though. Having a car experience a 'software failure' and driving you into a wall at 80MPH, is less so.

BrandonMarc3• 12 years ago

Minority Report comes to mind. And, I, Robot (I think). That's just a few examples of stories in which futuristic cars are conveniently control-able by the police when necessary.

0x006A2• 12 years ago

Looking forward to see how self-driving cars can handle traffic in a city like Mumbai or Cairo.

bertil9• 12 years ago

Indeed…

I just hope that problem is the same as when someone asked them, 15 years ago, how their crawler could handle websites with “tens of thousands of pages” fearing libraries would put their ressources on-line, overburden and halt their effort.

0x006A2• 12 years ago

In my experience driving is much more interactive and not so much rule based in those cities. You have to judge other drivers - there aggression and willingness to drive into your lane, there willingness to let you sneak in in front of them.

Taking traffic from all sides into account might be something that works better for self-driving cars. Knowing when its ok to force someone else to slow down might be harder. I don't expect this to be just a question of scaling up. It will require new concepts and models. You might have to choose the country like you can now choose the language for predictive typing on your phone.

protomyth• 12 years ago

I'm just waiting for them to test in snow.

Zigurd5• 12 years ago

I'm sure there will be problems, but self-driving cars might be the only way to archieve orderly traffic in cultures where it's assumed that you "make" as many lanes as the width of the pavement will support.

Consider that only a minority of cars have to behave rationally w.r.t speeds in heavy traffic to prevent stop-and-go waves.

genofon2• 12 years ago

I'm wondering how much self-driving cars will improve the system?

far less accidents, much faster, less traffic jams, more efficient, no traffic light, different speed limits etc...

kumbasha2• 12 years ago

0 day exploit kills 300 in a pileup on the freeway...

prawn11• 12 years ago

Almost 100 people a day die by motor vehicle in the US right now so while your above example would hit the media hard, unless it's a daily occurrence it's probably improving on the current situation.

logikblok• 12 years ago

Genuine question, can anybody answer how these cars will: 1) Allow for situational aspects of driving eg I need to get there quickly so might drive faster because I'm running late? 2) Protect from people intentionally take advantage of safety mechanisms eg cutting in front, stepping out onto the road?

skrause4• 12 years ago

No safety system is perfect and fatal accidents won't drop to zero (even with the best self-driving systems), so I guess people generally won't do 2) because they don't want to get killed.

spuz• 12 years ago

My guess is that it won't cater for either of those cases. It seems unlikely that Google would program their cars to break the speed limit just to save you a few minutes (speeding probably saves you a lot less time than you think it does). Also, I cannot see why anyone would deliberately and continuously take advantage of the automatic safety mechanisms on self-driving cars such that the problem would be common enough that it would cause a passenger any irritation.

sjtrny• 12 years ago

Ever heard of trolling?

TeMPOraL12• 12 years ago

I think we'll adjust laws to handle 2). There will be more than enough court-admissible sensor data from cars to sue offenders from here to the Mars and back.

yardie• 12 years ago

It's amazing how new technology is meeting old technology again. For example, the horse drawn carriage.

Typically, the carriage driver doesn't steer the horse but points it in the direction they want to go. The horse and it's little horse brain negotiates the terrain and immediate obstacles.

You never had to steer the horse to avoid driving over the cliff, it was smart enough to know self preservation. The modern mechanical car doesn't even have that level of avoidance systems. This left the driver to manage more strategic tasks. There were downsides obviously. Horses could freak out and run over a crowd of people.

gbog3• 12 years ago

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident.

I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so that we all believe a nice car is big and has this and that. Maybe these car ads will be seen in 20 years the same way we see cigarette ads right now: dangerous brain washing by a lobby gone crazy.

(Edited slightly to avoid unfortunate pun)

mindslight6• 12 years ago

Don't get your hopes up, that brainwashing is still alive and well with the first word of Google's post being "Jaywalking".

mc32• 12 years ago

Underscoring your sentiment is the origin of the term jaywalking http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w...

Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.

rthomas62• 12 years ago

I agree with you, but I think I can explain some of the rationale behind wanting big cars. Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed."

munificent2• 12 years ago

Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed."

That isn't fear, it's entirely rational behavior. This is one of those many cases where a group of people behaving individually in their self-interest results in a situation that's worse for all participants.

It would be better for everyone if we moved in aggregate to smaller, lighter cars, but no one can take that step unless we all do.

hackuser• 12 years ago

A couple of counter-intuitive thoughts:

* The smaller car will stop and maneuver more quickly, avoiding more accidents.

* I read a study years ago that said the relative sizes and weights of vehicles did not significantly impact the outcomes for the humans inside. Instead, the relative positions of the 'hard-points' did (I forget the term, but the parts that don't crumple on impact). If you rear-end a truck and its rear hard-point goes through your windshield into your head (albeit a personal hard-point), that's bad news. If its hard-point hits your vehicle's hard-point then I imagine you mostly suffer from the sudden stop, at least in modern cars.

pinaceae4• 12 years ago

because it is a multi-purpose vehicle. i drive a car to work, single passenger. i drive the car to buy stuff, with my wife, 2 passengers, plus hauling stuff in the trunk. i drive the car to various places on the weekend, wife plus kid plus shit in the trunk.

i bought it to cover multiple transportation scenarios I encounter on a weekly basis. it also has a certain size to protect me in an accident. bumping into something at 30mph needs a certain amount of crumple zone to make it survivable. physics are hard to beat.

and I haven't killed anyone so far with my car - and I've driven on multiple continents, on and offroad.

no lobby needed.

bertil9• 12 years ago

Actually, with self-driving cars, it’s likely that those four activity could be handled by different vehicles that you would only rent for the time you need them. If the law allows them to drive empty, they could go to the next user on their own, and reduce both waste parking, and inefficiencies like the ones you describe.

Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concentrated living) and where non-ownership is already commonly accepted: bike-sharing already exists in NY. Not sure where you are, but I’m assuming you don’t have city-car-sharing there. This discrepancy can come off as a result of lobbying: car companies typically appear hostile to selling a lot less cars to sharing platform operators. I know for a fact there was a lot of lobbying involved in some cases, but I doubt that was the key issues in most places where ‘transportation alternatives’ isn’t used.

gbog3• 12 years ago

Ok I actually have the same usage pattern as you and I have a minivan, which I think optimizes quite well the size.

Also, you say you didn't kill anyone. Great but how much room did cities you crossed have to plan for you? How many other non driving people had to reduce their living space for this? Not counting fossil fuel, materials used, etc.

Safety is probably the mask used by this light to hide their agenda, and it is clever. Buy maybe it is completely made up. Maybe everyone would be much safer in very different cars, maybe our human tastes have been terraformed to fulfill the avidity of some powerful lobby.

rictic2• 12 years ago

Are there any studies that back up your claims that small cars would reduce the death toll? I follow the intuition, but China has over twice as many deaths per car on the road as the United States: (36 per 100k vs 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around driving, ratio of scooters and motorcycles, car safety ratings, etc etc etc. but there are difficult tradeoffs here too. An egg-car will cause less damage in a low velocity impact with a pedestrian, but at highway speeds it will also do less to protect its passengers.

jsmthrowaway• 12 years ago

I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving.

The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup truck and so forth; yeah, that's great and all, but how about crumple zones?

john_b2• 12 years ago

"Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b"

You don't always need them. Short intra-city drives don't require a large vehicle. But most public transportation in the US is rather poor, so people buy a car that will cover their worst case usage: driving multiple people and their luggage between cities, possibly hundreds of miles. An electric egg car isn't safe or efficient for that.

There is a car lobby in the U.S. and it does have influence, but you have ignored Occam's Razor here. People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful. Creating competing services so large, individually owned cars are less useful is what projects like this and Uber are working on.

gbog3• 12 years ago

People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful.

You surely know that this cannot be true. In China, again, many rich people buy expensive luxury cars, and really have no need for them, except if you include "social status" in "needs".

I have a simple litmus test for detecting unneeded goods that people are trying to force into our minds: ads. We need normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc. Except if it is very different in the US, I think no big ads campain are selling these.

However, each product that require a heavy handed ad campaigns is certainly lacking in desirability or usefulness. And it also means these industries are spending a lot of money selling you goods, instead of spending money making these goods better or cheaper.

Anyways, my bet is that the car industry is rotten to the bones, selling worldwide dangerous and superfluous multi-tons machines that could be replaced by many other, more useful, safe and scalable transportation means. And I hope Google and others will break this industry apart as soon as possible.

tomkarlo2• 12 years ago

Great and all (and I'm a big fan of smaller, lighter passenger cars) but it only works to a point - a tiny car might not kill a pedestrian or someone else in a tiny car, but it's unlikely to do well in an accident with a semi truck, or a large fixed barrier. (And people buy cars based on how well they protect the passengers, not others.) We should have smaller cars, but with reasonable safety features.

neolefty5• 12 years ago

Also in China, and presumably in much of the rest of the world, cars are expensive compared to average income.

Car use would open up to a new class of people who wouldn't need to own it.

Actually, that's already kind of the case -- in China (some parts anyway) it's easy to find a "black taxi" willing to carry your mattress across town when you move. Maybe because labor is cheap in China.

However, I have a hard time seeing automated driving working out in China's traffic. (Maybe I'm just unaware of the sate of the art!)

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

Beijing also has:

- inexpensive (relative to the West) taxis

- great taxi-hailing apps

- good private hire apps

(and Uber launched a limited service here last week, although I have yet to try it.)

Re: automated driving, the main roads here are pretty wide compared to those in European cities, so perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. I don't know how a computer would deal with a physical confrontation after a minor accident, though.

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

I agree with the sentiment (and you've seen how small and light my scooter is) but I can totally understand why people buy larger/stronger vehicles for safety. Unfortunately, it becomes an arms race: I'd feel perfectly safe in one of those egg cars if _everyone_ had one. As it is, though, I'd be really worried about driving one because I would be more vulnerable than in a traditional car, but much less able to take evasive action to avoid collisions (vs. my scooter).

Having said that, I'm writing this on the bus, which can take me to most places in Beijing if I'm not in a hurry.

danpat2• 12 years ago

I assume that someone has done an analysis of how the sensors will interact when there are many self-driving cars on the road?

Because many of the primary sensors are active (radar, lidar), will they work when they're surrounded by 50 other cars also blasting out the same signals?

genericone2• 12 years ago

When 50 other cars are nearby actively communicating with each other about the road conditions that they each see, only a representative subset of those cars need to correctly identify road conditions and report them to the entire group as a road-conditions map. Cars in the group validate the observations and risk-factors reported by other cars. Then each car independently makes its driving decisions based on this shared-data based on its relative position in the group.

In this way, being surrounded by hundreds of other cars is a plus, and leads to more data by which to determine safe self-driving behavior.

anjc2• 12 years ago

Are their cameras visible spectrum ones? How will it work at night? Night vision? IR?

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Night, hell tell me how it works in snow, with fully covered roads. I would love to see how they make that leap that people do when looking at situations where the road is fully obscured, but you know exactly where its at based on objects your used too (like mailboxes/trees/etc) GPS ain't that accurate.

TeMPOraL12• 12 years ago

Computers can remember more objects better, recall them faster and calculate your position against them with much more detail, as well as apply inference rules to correct for any missing/moved objects much better than humans can.

gfodor6• 12 years ago

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes.

For an autonomous car, the car will a) need incredibly far range to see this debris in time and b) will need incredibly precise lidar/radar to see the debris if it is small. At a far distance, a small piece of debris covers a minuscule solid angle on the sensor. At high speeds, you have a twofold problem that tests the limits of the onboard sensors and collision avoidance systems: objects approach rapidly, and small objects can cause catastrophic damage or cause other collisions. In the case where other cars are on the road, the problem seems straightforward since the robocar can probably see all the other cars ahead of it changing lanes in a pattern. On a deserted highway however the car is in trouble unless it can spot the debris from a very far distance, it seems. Any thoughts?

TeMPOraL12• 12 years ago

My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.

rpedela• 12 years ago

Yeah and I think a larger problem is deer or other animals running into the road especially at night. I don't know if the Google car can handle that situation yet, but the sensors should be able to see animals way before humans can.

Someone• 12 years ago

Are they? Visual acuity at the fovea is around 1 arc minute. Translating that to 150 by 100 degrees of visual field (humans have a larger visual field) gives a resolution of 9000 by 6000 pixels.

Of course, the human eye doesn't work that way: resolution drops off rapidly away from the fovea. Many electronic sensors do work that way, though. So, individual sensors may, for some tasks, be inferior to human 20/20 vision.

I googled to find out whether the sensors on Google's driverless cars had anisotropic sensors (a simple solution would be to have a wide-field and a telephoto camera), but cannot find good info. Anybody know more?

gfodor6• 12 years ago

I'm skeptical at far enough distances LIDAR is accurate, due to noise and the falloff of light's subtended solid angle with distance. I am not a sensor expert but if there is a mattress on the highway far ahead (think 0.1-0.2mi or so) I would not be surprised if am going to see it due to the color contrast and my brain's pattern recognition well before LIDAR will detect it by bouncing light off of it.

Qworg8• 12 years ago

LIDARs are not better sensors than our eyes. They are different, but not better.

The human eye is an amazing instrument. Contrast range of 24 stops vs. 16 in a top of the line camera. (Think 24 bit ADC vs. 16 bit). Follow that up with 24 bit color depth and the ability for our eyes to automatically adjust what portion of the spectrum we're focusing on, and you've got a spectacular sensor.

Qworg8• 12 years ago

Debris is a really hard problem and I don't think they can get that resolution out of their LIDAR. Camera data may serve better, but that's hit or miss.

I'd call this one unsolved.

(Source: I'm a robotics/perception/sensors guy who has worked autonomous vehicles)

jessriedel2• 12 years ago

Since you're one of the few people here doing more than speculating, could you expand on this a bit? Is the LIDAR resolution a hard physical limit, and if so what's the origin? What makes identifying the debris with the camera so hard, just the standard object recognition problem in computer vision?

bertil9• 12 years ago

Most human drivers tend to over-estimate the consequence of a collision — it’s common that swerving to avoid a wild animal poses a greater danger than hitting, for instance.

However, what a robocar can do that most humans can’t is organise the clean-up, and that’s hundred times more important, because presently, hundreds of cars will pass that debris.

Let’s say you have a radar under the chassis (not unlikely given Telsa’s latest PR issue): the car OS can warn the authorities instantly with an exact location; images from several cars can be compiled to form an exact estimate of what it is. All car with significant connectivity can be informed that this lane is closed a small portion before any physical equivalent (orange cones) has time to be set up, possibly allowing a safer clean-up if the (connected) highway detects that all cars in the next x minutes have been warned, and a brusher drone can be dispatched.

stephengillie• 12 years ago

Could we have the cars drive in such a way that the effect on air pressure as they pass would push some debris off the roadway?

mikeash6• 12 years ago

What do you think the odds are that a human will be able to handle it properly?

90% of the time, a human will either 1) not notice the debris at all, and plow into it 2) brake to a sudden stop, causing a massive hazard for all around or 3) swerve dangerously into another lane.

Just this morning I watched a car come within inches of plowing into a gigantic orange traffic barrel. He was going 30MPH on a quiet residential road but he simply was not paying attention, and braked just barely in time to stop before hitting it. And this is not some unusual thing, this is how people drive. I've nearly been run down in a crosswalk at a four-way stop sign by drivers who simply decided that they did not need to look forward while going through the intersection. And you think that humans are going to have a good record at spotting and handling small debris when cruising at 70MPH? Good luck with that.

One thing I will say about humans: when they're about to run over you at low speeds, you can usually get them to stop by shouting at them. I doubt computers can manage that yet.

gfodor6• 12 years ago

if there is a large object in the middle of the highway in broad daylight i am pretty sure humans navigate it pretty well since their eyes can see it far ahead due to color contrast, pattern recognition etc. the human visual system seems to excel in this situation and it seems to be a one where LIDAR may be at a disadvantage, where the stakes are high.

thrownaway24244• 12 years ago

Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway.

On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of people every day. A robot-driven car won't do that. It would even be acceptable if the robot car stuck the debris in the roadway at full speed, every single time, as long as it wasn't mowing down little kids at the local farmers' market every Sunday.

josephschmoe2• 12 years ago

Hitting debris, if it's severe, can endanger the driver or other drivers on the road.

scarmig3• 12 years ago

I hate cars as much as anyone, but I'm a stickler for real numbers:

In 2012, the average number of deaths per day in the USA by motor vehicle was a touch under 100, not even close to "hundreds." And talking worldwide, it'd be much more accurate to say thousands--about 3k per day.

To your broader point, I'd be curious about how many accidents occur because of exceptional or long tail situations versus the everyday. Long tail happens more rarely, but presumably is also much more dangerous per unit time or unit distance. I think autocars will handle both sooner rather than later, but there will be a period where they outperform human drivers on the everyday (AFAIK, that may be now or very soon) while being inferior, probably even substantially inferior, in exceptional circumstances. Will the sum of net deaths of those two regimes be positive or negative?

Loughla3• 12 years ago

Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people.

And I would say that mowing down little kids at the local farmer's market would be one of those 'bizarre' incidents, unless there has been a rash of farmer's market mow-downs that I'm not aware of.

I've never hit anyone, and I'd rather not let a robot wreck my car and endanger my life in a situation that would have been easily avoidable, should I have been in control. There's your counter argument.

gfodor6• 12 years ago

this response has nothing to do with my question. my question is how to address the technical challenge of the 'mattress in the middle of the highway' problem, not if we should ignore that challenge because on net we'll have less accidents with robocars.

batbomb• 12 years ago

Do your eyes have zoom and both active and passive (near or far)-infrared detectors? Because you could easily put those on robotic (or even non-robotic) cars. You could even put several on a robotic car.

Take this, for example: http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-w...

But, I think you are overestimating your own ability to see debris far away, and underestimating other bigger problems.

A much bigger problem, for example, is a two-lane highway with many blind spots in the form of hills, other vehicles, and blind curves, especially those filled with slow-moving bicyclists and animals. Think the 1 in California, or the switchback-heavy roads of ski resorts in the western United States.

pkulak2• 12 years ago

I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"

stormbrew3• 12 years ago

If every car was a robot they'd just avoid everything and the other cars would swarm around the object and the cars avoiding it. A lot of the rules of the road are designed to narrow the number of things a driver has to focus on while remaining safe.

icehawk219• 12 years ago

Along the same lines another thing that I think most of us in the US this winter (or least parts of it) had to deal with are potholes. I've gotten quite good at avoiding the potholes around me by preparing for their presence well ahead of where they actually are. In one case there's one right at the top of a hill near me and right under the passenger side tires if you don't move slightly to either side. But because of the incline of the hill you can't even see it until it's less than a few feet in front of you. I'd hope they figure out how to detect these but it seems like a pretty difficult problem.

larubbio• 12 years ago

But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.

konstruktor3• 12 years ago

If you need to know its location to circumnavigate a pothole, you are to fast to react to other, unexpected, obstacles.

orky562• 12 years ago

Not a coincidence that Google bought Waze, a crowd sourced traffic and warning detection system. They are definitely cognizant that subjective data is just as important as the objective data picked up by its sensors. This is a great use case that we should expect to be handled.

unexistance• 12 years ago

working with technology teach me one thing: technology cannot solve everything :D

So what can be done with unknown situation encountered by the auto-car? alert the human: Please take control of the car, undetermined obstruction ahead (or something to that effect)

chillingeffect5• 12 years ago

Yeah sure that sounds great, alert the human, but guess what?

The human is asleep, reading, writing, or drunk.... as has been promised elsewhere as one of the main advantages to a self-driving car.

"This future is better than the current one b/c you don't have to pay attention"

So if you're telling me I still have to suddenly pay attention, poof! up in smoke goes the advantage of this supposedly self-driving car. I can't take a nap, b/c I might have to wake up and grab the wheel when a ladder starts flying off the back of a truck towards me.

This is not a consistent picture. It's just a bunch of fairy tales. Each day dream breaks down when it relies on a neighboring, magical scenario.

konstruktor3• 12 years ago

You are thinking of the wrong failure mode. Going too fast to react to a piece of debris is something a well programmed robotic car will never encounter in the first place. It will not go faster than the limits posed by its perception (known) and road conditions (approximately known), and err on the side of caution. It knows no impatience. It is aware of its surroundings at all times, which means it may go faster if it knows it can change lanes, or slower if it perceives a lorry behind it.

In extreme situations where a human would outperform a robotic car, the robotic car will simply be slower. I would, however, assume that in most situations where somebody perceives the car as too slow, what is actually happening is the human overlooking some risk factor.

gfodor6• 12 years ago

Smart. A good lesson in identifying misplaced assumptions, thanks.

baddox• 12 years ago

Humans aren't particularly good at that problem either. I wouldn't be surprised if Google has or will soon get their autonomous cars to perform better than humans on a variety of road obstacles.

brc4• 12 years ago

There is also the likelihood of the development of 'close area' networks, where a car ahead that spots the debris (and either hits or avoids) passes down a message along the chain, so that following vehicles are alerted and all begin to slow down in unison. Development efforts have been spent on this technology for existing vehicles, with the idea of alerting a driver to a hazard before they can visibly see it. This is especially important in low-visibility fog/snow conditions where massive pileups can occur.

slazaro• 12 years ago

I still think that the best application for computer controlled cars is to have humans driving and computers handling the safety, braking when they detect danger, stuff like that. Lots of accidents like hitting pedestrians, cyclists or other cars could be avoided, and it's not as high level and difficult as what they're currently trying to figure out.

venti• 12 years ago

Autonomous car in the Berlin city center (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqL6j2D5H4

ignostic2• 12 years ago

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology.

Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) the world is going to change for the better. From there it's just a matter of optimization until a human watcher isn't even required.

Self-driving cars are worth every penny of research. They will some day be safer than human drivers. With a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes we could almost eliminate traffic-related injury and death. Some day your insurance company will probably charge you more per mile you choose to take control of your car.

Beyond safety, this could make life way more convenient and make living far more convenient. We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. That's huge! Once the cars are safe enough, you'll be able to read, write, or take a nap.

Life also gets a lot more efficient. We won't all need cars. Think about the social ramifications. We won't need all that parking space we waste at home, work, at grocery stores, or downtown. Rather than needing 2 cars for me and my wife, I could send it back to get her once I get to work - or maybe just sign up for a service that completely eliminates the need to own.

scarmig3• 12 years ago

I agree with your overall vision.

But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question."

Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted.

We absolutely have to tread carefully here.

andrewfong2• 12 years ago

I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways:

* NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently.

* Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up.

* Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.

TheEzEzz4• 12 years ago

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate.

Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.

dsr_• 12 years ago

If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".

Wilya• 12 years ago

Well, that's if you assume that Cars-as-a-Service don't need to be stored anywhere and magical disappear when they are not in use.

I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.

chillingeffect5• 12 years ago

Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses.

Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario?

First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times?

Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.

Third, subtract the time I'm waiting in my driveway with the kids screaming and my wife in labor for a car to show up from god-knows-where. Or else the premium I'm paying to get ahead of the other guys in the queue. And while we're at it, all of those times that I wanted something from the store 5 minutes before it closes? Guess what, if I can't get a car in time, that's lost productivity. Have to buy lunch from the cafeteria b/c I couldn't get to the supermarket. Unless you're telling me that in order to accept this vision of the future, I have to be perfect and plan everything. Telling me in the future no one will be able to get to the store 5 minutes before it closes is just unrealistic, undesirable and unacceptable.

Fourth, subtract again, the additional energy needed to take the car to its next destination.

Fifth, consider all of the extra cost of adding, servicing, verifying, maintaining LIDAR and servoes to all of these millions of cars. With thousands of dollars of extra parts, they're going to require thousands in extra maintenance, inspection, training and insurance. Yeah, I know that's boring. It's not an interesting technical problem, but that's the reality of motor vehicles. If anyone thinks this won't make the price of vehicles go up significantly, they've never been in charge of anything critical.

I'm not "against the future," it's just that all of these digit-heads are seeing a grandiose signal-processing problem and doing multiplicative math like yours to make it look attractive and not even operating at a practical level whatsoever.

maxerickson11• 12 years ago

That $100 is only low for highly developed wealthy areas.

Square feet of livable housing is cheaper than that in most of the country.

Undeveloped land probably mostly sells for less than $0.10 a square foot (that's still high at $4000 an acre). But that's partly because large sales of relatively isolated land will dominate the acreage transferred.

aetherson4• 12 years ago

I think it's pretty unlikely that we're going to see most of the market for family vehicles be turned into a short-term rental model. Some, perhaps! Cars-as-a-service will have some advantages over, say, ZipCar today (primarily convenience, some amount of cost as well).

But owning a self-driving car sounds pretty sweet as well. Not only will you be able to get the status symbol car you want, you'll also be able to leave your stuff in it (without paying extra to rent it for times you aren't driving). And it's better than the cars of today! You don't need to worry about parking! You can drive when drunk or tired! You never need to worry about your cars-as-a-service being unable to send you a car during peak times!

Cars are popular to own today. Self-driving cars would be more valuable to own than normal cars are today. You have to imagine immense benefits to cars-as-a-service for it to displace most of the market for self-owned cars.

fernly• 12 years ago

Yeah, but how many of those garages are packed full of stuff, with the car parked out in the driveway, anyway?

untog• 12 years ago

There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges.

Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.

Nicholas_C• 12 years ago

I'm thinking there could be an agreement you sign when the car is purchased that states that the self-driving abilities are not to be fully relied on and the driver must be fully aware and ready to take over at all times. Thus if the car ever crashed by fault of Google they can say the driver should have been paying attention. This would have a lot of downsides. For instance, DWI's would still be a thing.

dandrews• 12 years ago

Should you step in front of a Googlecar and get hurt, remember before you sue that it bristles with sensors and recording devices, and that it'll all be admissible in court.

marwatk• 12 years ago

I think this will eventually be resolved the way vaccines were with liability shifted to government. There's just too much societal good to come out of self driving cars for liability to be the deal breaker.

saalweachter• 12 years ago

Is this actually a real problem? There is a robust insurance environment around cars, with a huge amount of both pricing experience, case law, and experience with payouts for people injured in accidents. There is also plenty of experience with recalls and fatal manufacturing flaws.

Is there any reason to believe that insurance companies won't just happily write policies priced for automated cars, and everything will proceed pretty much like it does now? You drive around, accidents happen, insurance companies pay out to the injured parties, and adjust the rates on automatic cars to match the real cost to operate?

andrewfong2• 12 years ago

Legal liability seems to be a red herring IMHO. At the end of the day, it's an insurance company that pays for it all anyway, regardless of whose fault it is. And car insurance companies already have the capability to adjudicate and litigate a large number of crash-related legal challenges. If anything, Google could use the data collected by its autonomous vehicles to streamline that process.

If I were Google, I would just make some kind of deal with an insurance company to handle all scenarios where a crash occurs when a vehicle is in autonomous mode and bundle said insurance in with the cost of the vehicle.

ams6110• 12 years ago

Liability should be pretty simple. Just like now, the owner of the car is liable. In my state this is the case even if someone else is driving; not sure this is the case elsewhere but that would seem to apply to a computer driver as well as a human one. The logic is, if you allow someone else to use your property and they cause damage with it, you are liable.

Insurance (assuming the owner has it in force) may pay, but the liability still rests with the owner.

ignostic2• 12 years ago

I hear people fretting about liability as a "problem to overcome," but it's actually much simpler than the technical challenges.

People have to drive the same distance regardless. Whether it's human or computer error leading to the accident is irrelevant to your premium. To a car insurance company it's all about rates and risks.

Assuming driverless cars are shown to be safer than humans - and they'll have to be in order to get approval - your car insurance company would be stupid not to cover them. From their perspective it's simple economics. The accident rate is lower, thus the potential liability is lower.

If your insurer isn't willing to insure your driverless car, you'll switch to someone who does. If no established provider insures driverless, that's a no-brainer company to start. Similar payments in a high-margin industry with lower average payouts? Yes, please.

Liability is the easy part.

paul_f2• 12 years ago

This is not simple issue at all. Who's at fault if anti-lock brakes don't work as expected? What about cruise control? The new cruise control that auto-follows? What about lane-following technology?

We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

chillingeffect5• 12 years ago

I. You shift the goalposts a lot. E.g. in the same sentence you mix statements about the future and the present, e.g. "we will" and "today's technology".

I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology.

BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular.

II. Also, in your scenario, even if you do send that car over to your wife to use once you get to work, the same car will get more wear and tear than two individual cars b/c it's doing the same work plus more to go between you two.

III. You also mix up the moment when self-driving cars become as safe as humans with the moment they become safER than humans.

IV. You also overly dichotomize safer vs. not safer. What if they kill fewer auto drivers, but more pedestrians? What if they kill fewer adults and more childen? It's not that simple- our values are reflected in our choices to deploy technology.

fancyketchup2• 12 years ago

It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular.

I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received signal through a correlator. Besides bringing some conversion gain and allowing for more accurate distance determination (compared to a simple pulsed-ToF), PRN modulation allows you to share the channel with other transmitters (CDMA, if you will).

BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today.

Isn't this just a matter of the wavelength used by today's LIDARs? There's a huge hole in the liquid and solid water absorption spectrum in the visible range.

dclowd99014• 12 years ago

I don't understand why we're so hung up on trying to proactively create legislation around this. Why don't we let someone get maimed/killed first, and then go from there?

In the world of things, you can't foresee every possible outcome, and it's silly to draw up legislation, which has a nasty habit of becoming rather sticky, for something so potentially earth shattering.

Let it fail, turn it off remotely, and then we'll figure out who to blame and what to do next. For now, this tech is so beyond us, we don't even have a frame of reference for how to properly legislate it.

jameshart• 12 years ago

"a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes" is a long way away, though. And to get there you have to go through a long period of some self-driving cars, sharing the road with old-fashioned human piloted ones. As a human driver, I spend a lot of my time anticipating the behavior of my fellow road-users. That car coming up from the side street - did they see me? They're on their phone, maybe they didn't see me... they're going to pull out... better brake...; now I'm coming up to an exit; the car in the lane to my left just changed speed, probably going to try to cut across in front of me, better give them some room...; cyclist coming up on the right, am I going to get past him before I need to slow for my right turn, or should I slow up behind him?

Understanding and anticipating all those human behaviors seems to me to be well beyond the capabilities of current AI.

couchand• 12 years ago

I don't know, it seems to me that a computer is particularly suited to this problem. I think a computer would be much more accurate in judging the speed of the approaching bike or the car coming up the side street or in the left lane. The essentially negligible reaction time compared with a human would give significant power to a defensive driving algorithm. And I'd guess probabalistic models are a better predictor of behavior than most people's intuition.

Sammi• 12 years ago

Self driving cars see 360 around themselves at all times. Real world data is used to train self tuning algorithms that drive the cars. These cars see everything and they know everything about how irrationally other human drivers are, and they don't take any chances. They drive slowly when they identify a danger, and they react almost immediately when there is a surprise, compared to the relatively sluggish reactions of humans. And humans make mistakes, lapses in judgement, are tired, and take stupid chances all the time. Self driving cars drive perfectly all the time. Sure they can't do much if someone deliberately drives into them, but it won't be their fault.

adav• 12 years ago

There's always a more cautious option in each of those scenarios. If the self-driving car always errs towards that, hopefully it'll mitigate disaster.

Following good driving principles to the letter - accounting for stopping distances etc, like in the Highway Code (UK) - will hopefully allow time for those unpredictable road users. Humans are more risky in that we give ourselves less time to react to begin with.

neolefty5• 12 years ago

How about making eye contact? When I'm driving, eye contact & facial analysis ("did that person see me?") is significant in my risk assessment of other vehicles. That is, if I know that the other driver knows, then I don't have to worry as much. I will still be careful, but I don't have to be quite as wary.

It sounds like the equivalent of eye contact for automated traffic is the "full network of communicating cars", but there must be a middle ground with mixed traffic, where automated cars are extra-careful about manual vehicles. Will that be annoying or reassuring to other drivers?

justinpaulson2• 12 years ago

Some of the exact things you mention are covered in the video in the post. I think you are underestimating current AI.

midas0072• 12 years ago

Parking structures might become high-security, automated bldgs that people don't enter. Further, local parking spaces may be unnecessary as your car (or the car you rent) will pick you up.

jfoster5• 12 years ago

It's funny how none of the critics think about the human edge-cases. What happens when someone decides to drink and drive? What happens when someone falls asleep or gets distracted on the freeway?

The answer, of course, is that edge cases are just that. They don't impede general use, and though they occasionally cause some worst-case outcomes to occur, we all just decide to live with them.

torrent-of-ions• 12 years ago

We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing.

No you don't. That's why many people use public transport or combine travelling with exercise (bike). Self driving cars doesn't solve the real problem which is that people have the idea that cars are actually sustainable.

TeMPOraL12• 12 years ago

Self-driving Teslas charged with nuclear-generated electricity seems very sustainable for me. Make them rented on-demand instead of owned and you have a PRT system, combining the convenience of a car with efficiency of public transport.

justinpaulson2• 12 years ago

You must not live any where in the entire center of the United States

sixQuarks• 12 years ago

What happens when some asshole with some knowledge of the algorithm decides to troll commuters? For example, standing around an intersection, pretending to move forward/backward, forcing cars to just stop there.

Already__Taken2• 12 years ago

We'll all be a little bit later somewhere and nobody has to die in traffic collisions.

eric_cc• 12 years ago

I would assume the same thing that would happen to some asshole standing at a busy intersection today holding up traffic by standing in the road.

robrenaud• 12 years ago

Standing in the middle of the intersection is going to be an effective way to stop cars even if they have human drivers.

prawn11• 12 years ago

The cars will gradually edge forward until the pedestrian is no longer an issue. That trolling option is available to pedestrians now and I don't encounter it day to day.

TeMPOraL12• 12 years ago

Someone will get angry enough to call the police to deal with that asshole. Also, every car will be a source of court-admissible proof that the person in question was in fact disturbing the traffic purposefully.

scrabble2• 12 years ago

I'm wondering how a robot car is going to park in a driveway -- or in a parking lot.

elchief• 12 years ago

Probably better than everyone here.

prawn11• 12 years ago

Very easily. Not to mention that storage will be simpler as cars will be able to park closely together without requiring doors to open before moving to where you can enter them, or in elevated storage.

At some point in the future, most people will be unlikely to own a car (just use one on demand) so their driveway will go mostly unused and their garage will be used for something else also.

scrabble2• 12 years ago

The issue comes up somewhere like a townhouse complex. Maps does not contain detailed data on assigned parking spaces and the like for these areas.

This is not an issue if everyone is using self-driving cars. But when only some people are, I don't see how you'd avoid the need for cars to take over in these instances.

Same with street driving really, you already have self-parking cars, but the car would need to be able to not only determine where the parking spaces are (and deal with issues like faded parking lines) but also determine whether or not there are any laws restricting the use of that space -- not only handicapped spaces, but also time of day and week.

Again, not an issue when everyone is in self-driving cars because most of these rules seem designed to optimize traffic flow, but until that point (and maybe for a time after) these laws will remain in affect.

josephschmoe2• 12 years ago

Between truck drivers, bus drivers and taxi drivers, that's 3 million people who should look for another line of work when this starts to happen.

etep• 12 years ago

Inspirational.

robotresearcher• 12 years ago

There are lots of subtleties in in-town driving. For example, the Google car will crawl its nose forward just a bit to indicate when it thinks its turn has come at 3 and 4-way stops. This is a strong signal to the other drivers that the car is about to make the turn, and reduces the frequency of contentions inside the intersection.

It's a nice touch to have the robot replicate behaviour that most people are not even aware they are using.

cseelus• 12 years ago

Apparently Mercedes Benz has come quite far regarding autonomous driving.

In September 2013 they let one of their S-Class models drive the historic route from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany with some journalist(s) on board[1].

On this route the worlds first long-distance (194km/121mi) ride in a motorized car was undertaken in 1888 by Bertha Benz, wife of Carl Benz, who developed, what is known today as the worlds first modern automobile.[2]

This route contains interurban as well as urban parts. The prototype car nicknamed "Bertha" is not easily recognizable from a standard S-Class model, which already contains most of the systems necessary to enable autonomous driving.

[1] Google translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&pr...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz_Memorial_Route

frik2• 12 years ago

I see no Lidar. What are the sensors?

"With sensors Bertha analyzed their environment [...] detailed and peppered with additional information navigation map"

I suspect a front-radar, camera and a detailed navigation map with GPS points especially for this route.

_zen2• 12 years ago

I think the coolest thing about self-driving cars is they can create a mesh network with one another. If I'm driving to work and a traffic accident occurs 2 miles ahead on my route, with multiple self-driving cars present at the accident, those cars can share traffic information with all self-driving cars in the area. My car will then plan an alternative route around the accident before I've even seen it.

Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering.

astrange• 12 years ago

Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering.

There's little purpose in encrypting a signal like this. You're still proposing to trust random cars you've never met before, so how would you know which messages are fake and which aren't?

hrktb• 12 years ago

Jaywalking pedestrians.

There was a episode on this on the 99% invisible podcast: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...

The above page has photos and a full transcript of the episode, I very highly recommand it.

This piece reminded me of the 'problem' of jaywalking because the complexity the self driving Googe car boast to be able to handle, could also be instead reduced or anhilated by adequate urban policies. There are movements to get the car out of urban areas [1] or at least make the pedestrian the 'owner' of the street, and I think self driving cars should be positionned more as an auto-pilot for long distances, rather than attempt to make sense of the current chaos in high density areas.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/v3ff7FY.jpg ("you are the traffic", a Roumanian poster seen in /r/bycicling)

midas0072• 12 years ago

The interesting problems are:

- tracking thousands of objects' trajectories to avoid as many threat-weighted collisions as possible. (think NYC times square)

- not going too fast when visibility is blocked

FYI: When I was at Trimble Nav, there were self-driving farm equipment demonstrated c. 2000.

monksy• 12 years ago

I wonder how that deals with potholes or roads that lack the proper markings or one way streets.

Chicago has both of those.

TeMPOraL12• 12 years ago

Probably the same way humans do, only better. Computers do have memory, as well as access to external information.

intended2• 12 years ago

Reading a lot of comments here, the theme seems to be that the benefits will trickle down to the average consumer. I can see immediate cases where it's just going to go to those with sufficient economic muscle.

Less need for a garage means smaller houses, and more of them (for example).

Improved insurance? Probably the same insurance premiums (inflation adjusted), with a higher premium for more human miles driven.

If there is money on the table, it will get taken by those with the wherewithal to grab it.

jpatokal• 12 years ago

Which is why all the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution went to the feudal lords in their castles?

As a trivial counterexample, since automated taxis will be considerably cheaper than human-driven ones, they'll become an affordable commodity usable for day-to-day travel, instead of a rare luxury used only when absolutely necessary (or somebody else foots the bill).

frik2• 12 years ago

We need a DIY Lidar or a cheap Lidar. Any ideas or existing projects?

(the 3D scanning device on top of the Google car, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar )

The Lidar that Google uses costs 80k dollars, more than most cars.

The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

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