Comment by Fricken

3 years ago

This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away.

The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do.

(However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)

35 comments

Fricken

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DebtDeflation  3 years ago

Object detection is an issue, but it doesn't only apply to "moving" objects. The current state of the art is having trouble differentiating between a "solid" stationary object like a tire or chunk of metal that must be navigated around, and something like an empty plastic bag that can be safely ignored. Regarding infrastructure, AVs also seem to have a lot of trouble with faded lane lines on roads.

  • Fricken  3 years ago

    If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.

    • n0tth3dro1ds  3 years ago

      > Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time

      This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.

      There’s also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous vehicle. It doesn’t exist.

      4 replies →

  • ufmace  3 years ago

    This pretty much. You've got to be able to rapidly identify everything you see and predict what it's reasonably likely to do, which sounds like an AGI-scale problem.

muststopmyths  3 years ago

Unless… the infrastructure change they propose is removing the “other things on the road”. Sounds brilliant. You could call that system a “rail” road as the cars would be on rails in a manner of speaking

Gordonjcp  3 years ago

This is where I see the problem being with autonomous vehicles, too. They can only react to other vehicles, they can't predict them.

Humans are good at predicting.

You don't consciously know you've seen the guy a couple of cars in front checking his mirror and his shoulder but you're hanging back because you just know he's going to pull out any second. The guy that's wavering a bit in the middle lane is about to dash across to the far lane of the sliproad that's coming up, clipping the zebra stripes a bit, because he's concentrating on the sat nav not the road, but you just know - out of all the other drivers in your space at the moment - that red Ford is the one that's going to do something boneheaded.

Autonomous Vehicles won't be able to do that, probably not ever.

_0w8t  3 years ago

I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road repairs it failed with those like 50% of times.

And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.

  • Veserv  3 years ago

    Teslas do not read speed limit signs or basically any signs other than stop signs, including not reading “Do Not Enter” street signs. It is using the wrong speed limit because their maps do not list the correct speed limit.

  • hasmanean  3 years ago

    Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to store it in a database and look it up from position.

    In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.

silisili  3 years ago

This reminds me of something the Rocket League devs said. Something to the effect that bots wouldn't be effective at the game because it's too challenging.

This is -not- my line of work, so I have no idea if that's true. But if it is, I don't see how we could have perfectly safe self driving vehicles.

andrepd  3 years ago

Teslas, despite the ludicrous promises of "full self-driving in 6 months, just you wait", completely choke if there is so much as a traffic cone or a road-work barrier for it go around.