Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour(venturebeat.com) |
Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour(venturebeat.com) |
The key part of this is, how well does it box everything in the environment? That's the first level of data reduction and the one that determines whether the vehicle hits things. It's doing OK. It's not perfect; it often misses short objects, such as dogs, backpacks on the sidewalk, and once a small child in a group about to cross a street. Fireplugs seem to be misclassified as people frequently. Fixed obstacles are represented as many rectangular blocks, which is fine, and it doesn't seem to be missing important ones. No potholes seen; not clear how well it profiles the pavement. This part of the system is mostly LIDAR and geometry, with a bit of classifier. Again, this is the part of the system essential to not hitting stuff.
This is a reasonable approach. Looks like Google's video from 2017. It's way better than the "dump the video into a neural net and get out steering commands" approach, or the "lane following plus anti-rear-ending, and pretend it's self driving" approach, or the 2D view plane boxing seen from some of the early systems.
Predicting what other road users are going to do is the next step. Once you have the world boxed, you're working with a manageable amount of data. A lot of what happens is still determined by geometry. Can a bike fit in that space? Can the car that's backing up get into the parking space without being obstructed by our vehicle? Those are geometry questions.
Only after that does guessing about human intent really become an issue.
The note in the top-right says its 2x.
It's bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we've fought put together.
I'm one of those people who say, "Self-driving cars can't happen soon enough." But I don't think that justifies e.g. killing Elaine Herzberg.
Ask yourself this, why start with cars? Why not make a self-driving golf cart? Make it out of nerf (soft foam) and program it to never go so fast that it can't brake in time to prevent collision.
Testing these heavy, fast, buggy robots in crowds of people is extremely irresponsible.
Human driven cars are dangerous to the tune of ~36,000 deaths per year. Every year without the implementation of full self driving we pay some large percentage of that number in lives. Self driving cars won’t make it out of the lab without real driving on real roads in real scenarios. Taking appropriate precautions (a human safety driver, maybe two) and testing in the real world might save more lives overall than keeping the vehicles in a more lab-like setting for longer, and missing some of the complexity of the real thing.
I can live with it. Human drivers annoy me so much that throwing the dice on autonomous cars is not a big stressor to me.
I think this narrative has run out of steam at this point, by the way. Waymo's valuation has gone from $175B to $105B to $30B since 2018. Zoox specifically is now laying off engineers.
I'm firmly in the "Perfect for freight, questionable value for consumers" camp WRT autonomous cars. I also think it's irresponsible to do this but the reality is, they are doing all the socially "appropriate" things, like get approval from the city.
Do you want this to stop? Then we're going to have this people test their self-driving cars in a real environment. The more we delay this, the more people are dying because of car accidents.
They're not a fantasy, they've occurred. The reason we can count them on one hand is because few cars currently drive autonomously and there is a fail-safe human at the wheel who (most of the time) is paying attention to the road.
Even if autonomous cars are better than human drivers they will still inevitably strike and kill pedestrians and vehicle occupants; they are not a magical solution to vehicle collisions.
I forgot how annoying it was.
Certainly, Elaine Herzberg wouldn't have been killed by that car if it wasn't there, eh?
Don't test killer robots on the public.
I have no idea about their business model and how COVID affects that, though.
Are you saying that the numbers are inaccurately reported, or accurately reported but just don't tell the whole story?
Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to deal with an imperfect world.
More to the point, this falls into the category of safety-critical systems, with the added wrinkle of potentially being used daily by millions of people. Unlike many domains where software is applied, 80% of the way there doesn't cut it, nor does 95% or 99% or even 99.9%.
(Leaving aside the fact that, for all of us not actively engaged in autonomous vehicle R&D, we likely have absolutely no idea how close we are to success here, or even what all the relevant goalposts would be.)
Regarding object permanence: I was impressed overall with their detection. Still, you could see kids walking close to parents blink in and out of awareness of the car. Now I'm not saying humans are very good at tracking a multitude of actors. So at some point the machines will be "good enough". But that point seems way off when significant objects like kids can just disappear from awareness when they pass behind a stroller.
And about the ad-hoc reasoning: They have the whole city mapped out! Including traffic lights and turn restrictions. I'm not even clear whether they try to detect the signs at all. I'd assume that they have an operations center that hot-patches the map with everything cropping up during the day. So the cars would send in unexpected changes to the road and they would classify those changes and patch the map. Meaning the car is tethered to that feed and not autonomous in the strictest sense. Sure, such a center would be marginal cost given a large enough fleet. Still it's a subscription you'd need for your own robocar.
They mention a lot of things they are prepared for. And I can't help but think "oh they're really good" when they say "detect backed up lanes" or "creep into intersections". But that always leaves the question what happens when they're not prepared for something. When the rules don't fit. Can the car go over a curb if the situation warrants it? Does it back out of a blocked off section? Is it even able to weigh whether backing out is an option at this point?
so I'd like to see a "what we're currently stuck at" video. But I understand one can't very well attract investors with such a video.
The boxes they draw are very wobbly and dimensions expand and contract directly with sensor input. Maybe they only show fused output (in itself an achievement) and there is a later step they don't show. That would be weird though because if they want to brag about their model they would definitely show it if it was any good.
No. That isn't how yellow lights work in the US. If the light turns yellow and you have enough space/time to make a safe stop you do it. There's no need to predict the remaining time on yellow phase. We don't need robot cars bending these rules.
I often find myself slowing down to a stop then awkwardly realizing I’m stopped with multiple seconds of yellow remaining and drivers honking behind me.
Maybe my brakes (or reflexes) are just too good?
Suppose your 4 seconds from a yellow light traveling at a high speed. You can slam on your breaks and make a very abrupt stop, or you can cruise through that light and continue on your way.
If the light is about to turn red you should probably slam on your breaks, because you risk being t-boned in the intersection.
If you have time to get through the yellow light/before the cross light turns green, you should keep going because slamming on your breaks is mildly dangerous.
The law isn't nuanced enough to understand this, with good reason. You don't want to make a bad call about the safest action made in good faith illegal.
Just try to put one of this vehicles in a situation with varying road width, no markings, snow with no sticks to mark the edges so you really have to pay attention to where the road actually is. What would this do if you meet a car on such a road? Try to figure out who should go back, and maybe go back to the latest plase where its wide enough? Do random tests to check for grip every now and then? It also needs to know whether the road is salted, understand if the salt is working and so on and on and on...
* someone parked on the side opens their door too quickly and collide with the zoox car.
* there is a car not moving in front, and the zoox car cannot see what's in the other lane without backing to get more insight
I'm also super impressed at how it can understand where the lane is in this 5 lane intersection that crosses a tram line. Even I couldn't understand where I would have had to drive!
This is actually one of those things that's easier for an AV than a human since they have localization and full lane maps of the city.
SF intersections are hard, though, and the computer seemed to handle them about as well as I would've.
I think background music is important. Especially on such long explanatory videos but often it becomes a reason for me to turn off a video if the music becomes to aggressive.
Presumably Zoox deployments in other cities would work similarly, "cheating" by baking in local driving rules and road maps. A consumer-owned self-driving car would likely be able to do something similar by downloading the local ruleset and maps on the fly, assuming one exists.
Companies actually put this kind of footage up without ever reviewing it?
This demo is not informative as to the readiness for scalable L4 deployment
Edit to add: After that I started watching it, it's actually a video of an impressive AI.
Lots of things come to the Bay Area and Los Angeles before anywhere else. Partly that's because coastal California is an innovation hotbed. Partly because it's a single large rich market. Since one of these that succeeds entirely in the safe parts of California would be an incredible game-changer on its own (door-to-door small-group spikable public transit!), it's still amazingly exciting.
And while lots of Americans view many things as unchangeable, that's not the case in many other places. In China, if you were to talk to public planners about how autonomous vehicles will handle detours, they'll just say, "Oh, we'll use transmitters to tell you. We can sign the transmitters so you know they're trustworthy." Everything about the universe is mutable.
Yep, no ice road truckers will be autonomous in the next year, and that's okay.
Because every time I hear this kind of thing I keep finding myself asking why/whether mass transit systems aren’t just the same end state?
A look at the local weather could see where a storm is and give an estimate of when it will be able to automate leaving and require a person otherwise. I think there are pragmatic answers to extreme situations.
But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are you asking for something better than humans can do?
Ask Canadians, Swedes or any other people living in a location with long winters.
And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year. It's not unreasonable to hold self-driving cars to the same standard.
Ok... What if I were to tell you that there is a solution to this?
The solution to this, is simply "dont drive in those conditions".
A self driving car can't get in a wreck that is caused by snowy roads, if it simply doesn't drive in the snow.
Self driving, during perfect conditions is still extremely valuable, because it turns out that there is a whole lot of driving that is in perfect conditions.
So, you would do things like prevent the taxis from running, if there is any chance of rain at all. I am sure that there are lots of places where rain is not an issue, and rain could be predicted ahead of time. Not everywhere. But still in many places.
did you see that 5 lane intersection going over a tram lane? I myself had no idea where I would have driven there.
I am out of my depth in terms of the topic we are discussing so I might be quite wrong.
> Waymo's valuation has gone from $175B to $105B to $30B since 2018. Zoox specifically is now laying off engineers.
Waymo.
But yeah, it does look as something to re-analyse.
At that point there are cheaper and easier ways to do that, which by the way are already happening. If you buy a modern car they have very impressive look ahead/smart cruise and lane keeping systems.
I'm a firm believer in Elon Musk's vision for public transit, wherein you may own an autonomous vehicle that is hired out for rides by others via something like Lyft. If you choose to own a car, it'll sit at your house when you choose, but can go out and make you money while you have nowhere to go. At this point, you can imagine that there are detractors from this idea - namely those who would profit from owning all the vehicles, those who manufacture traditional vehicles, and the fossil fuel industry, to name a few. Those people are the ones who will keep us in a state of limbo as long as possible from a legal and infrastructural standpoint. We have to decide that this future is better than the one we're in. It'll have a vast impact on pollution, anthropological contributions to climate change, and human equality and prosperity.
All we have to do is start demanding progress and stop accepting mediocrity.
The co-founder, Tim Kentley Klay was somehow able to get Jesse Levinson on board, and Jesse Levinson had no problem getting infinite street cred on board. So they were able to attract a lot of key, original robotics talent before the hype got out of control.
For a long time though, they were low on funds, so they did lots of closed course testing, and it wasn't until they closed a large funding round that Zoox began on public roads, and they performed quite well right out of the starting gate.
Now Zoox and it's competitors are lost in an endless wasteland of testing, development, and validation. It's futile to attempt to do a comprehensive analysis between the different players, they all have their quirks, but Zoox has built all the critical infrastructure needed to do full scale testing, and they're eyeballs deep in it like everyone else.
However, Zoox has stormy waters ahead financially. They need another $2 billion to stay abreast in this never ending race. It's getting harder to visualize scenarios where that happens.
What nobody can do well enough to build a competitive and scalable robotaxi service is prediction in multi-agent scenarios. The AI for that just doesn't exist.
On top of this, there's a liability and ethics issue. We accept teenagers for getting drunk and killing people, but we cannot accept an autonomous car that cannot navigate a roundabout which would otherwise be easy for a person, sober or otherwise.
So in the scenario where predicting pedestrian/cyclist behavior holds up progress for a few more years. And given how the market has turned in SV and beyond, what's your read on how the space will play out? For example, car companies can't keep funding Aurora/Cruise/Argo because they will be facing very tough consumer climate, so the fight for funding internally will be even fiercer. Softbank funds Nuro and its portfolio of companies (WeWork and others) have been duds.
Google is expecting a bad 2020 ad revenue wise, unclear what will happen in 2021. The founders stepped out last year and the narrative has been that Google is less focused on "moonshots" and more on core ad business.
Is there any other deep pocketed investors that will finance development of AVs for another 5 years? Who will acquire the ones that are independent? IPO doesn't seem likely for any of them correct?
The uniformed don't know what 'scalable L4 deployment' is, so they can't jump to that conclusion.
I don't even know what this means, so I doubt the uninformed know the definition.
There WILL be bugs and un-modellable sources of error. The real hedging in these situations is the safety driver. The death of Elaine Herzberg is very regrettable, but the fault ultimately lies with the safety driver and the training that was offered to her. She was on her phone, like 1000's of drivers are now.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing.
I mean build a machine that, in the real world, can't hurt people.
Make it light.
Make it soft.
Program it to limit its speed such that it can always stop before colliding with whatever (whoever) might leap out in front of it.
If the top speed is five miles per hour, so be it.
The safety driver is wrong too. But she was there because Uber wanted to put car-shaped robots onto public streets.
Really the insane thing is that we mix car and pedestrian traffic at all in the first place. Oddly enough, it's the result of a deliberate campaign of propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s "Adam Ruins Everything - Why Jaywalking Is a Crime"
> Adam reveals the derogatory origins of jaywalking and explains how the auto industry made it illegal.
You are not really testing though. The whole point is to build a machine that can go the speed limit. You can test all you want at 5mph, but let me assure you, most of the real issues will show up when you go 45 in the real world.
I assume much of the training is done in simulation or within a controlled environment but unfortunately the only way to train for city driving is to gather as much real world data as possible and that means "testing in production" with a hopefully alert humans (one for backup) behind the wheel.
Really, the problem is the rush to market not the idea itself.
I don't think so. 'As good as humans can do' would be useful.
I don't understand why you'd have that opinion. If it's no riskier and relieves people from having to drive then that seems like a net benefit to me.
If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D, time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the public transit and/or active mobility solutions of the near-future.
I've been exactly where you were, driving the Coq highway in British Columbia at night in a blizzard, following two red dots in front of me. I had (mandatory) snow tires on a rear wheel drive BMW. I also had my family in the car.
It was probably the single stupidest thing I've ever done driving a car.
Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe that's what an autonomous car would do.
That sounds like it solves the situation nicely.
Making bad imitations of KITT from Knight Rider is not the solution here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming is cheaper and easier, for example.
Look I want robot cars, okay? I even want them ASAP.
As soon as possible without testing robots on public ways.
Build a fake city, populate it with people who have signed waivers, test there.
Sure it's expensive but at least you don't risk killing more innocent people with your experimental car-shaped robots.
I mean, what if I built a television with H.E.M? (Human Eradication Mode) If it escapes and kills someone, isn't that my fault?
Maybe if I put a human in there, give her a phone to distract her, and call her "Safety Driver", I can deflect any blame for my robot's killing spree onto her and get away with murder scott free! It's the perfect crime!
Okay, sorry, I got a little carried away there. But I hope my point is clear: Safety: Yes. Robot Cars: also yes, but obeying the First Law of Robotics. Testing robots cars on innocent people: hard no.
Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?
You have a robo-taxi that works when it's not raining, which is still pretty good (assuming it can safely disengage/pull over if it thinks the weather is getting bad).
> Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?
I and many other Americans live in places that don't have any public transit, so a few robocars that only worked during the day would be a huge improvement.
I appreciate the general point that autonomous driving that only works under some conditions would be useful. But I think it's more along the lines of handling highway driving under most circumstances which already pre-supposes a licensed sober driver that can take over control with a minute or two notice.
I already have an option for local driving. It's called taxis/Uber/Lyft and robo versions won't be all that much cheaper.
Also, predicting the weather a week out isn't the same as giving an ETA when you can see a map of the storm happening live. That is a completely separate scenario.
yes you do. There is a whole lot of driving that happens in perfect conditions.
Think "Truck driving, on long highways".
Replacing half of all truck drivers is still a trillion dollar industry.
And for your robo taxi situation, you can simply only allow the robotaxis to run half of the time.
Human drivers, can simply get in their cars, and be paid to drive, when it is likely to be unsafe driving conditions. IE, surge driving/pricing.
But there absolutely would be days/times/places where the robo taxi would be perfectly safe. And these days/times/places could be predicted easily, ahead of time.
IE, in arizona, I am sure that it is safe most of the time, and there would not be any issues with snow.
Robotaxis are Rube Goldberg machines, there are so many moving parts. The running joke at Waymo for a while was "How many engineers does it take to operate a self driving car?"
Everybody was convinced deep learning would give us all the magically brilliant AI we needed to make this work. With perception and classification problems the robotics industry was able to go from "impossibru" to "holy shit it works" over the space of a couple years, it was really exciting. In hindsight it's easy to see that the exciting and game changing breakthroughs were in fact a long time coming, and that the real rate of progress in open world robotics is in fact excrutiatingly slow and bespoke. Nobody has an ace up their sleeve.
I could envision a scenario where a city council of a less populated city with lax regulations could deploy robotaxis to their economic advantage. Do you think we'll get there soon?
It's possible that for self driving to work road systems will have to be more formalised to remove the ambiguous situations you've described. I can't imagine it working well in China or Indonesia where traffic flows much more like water in a stream and lanes are merely just suggestions.
Sure. Thats my point. And that is still very valuable.
Sure, eventually, when the machines and sensors and algorithms and so on are good enough. When the infrastructure can be rebuilt to accommodate them (e.g. Boring company tunnels for auto-trucking, sensors and comms in the roads and signage, &c.)
The rush to market is the whole problem. Not the ultimate concept.
I want a machine that can take my mother to her doctors appointment now that the dementia has gotten to the point where she shouldn't take the bus on her own anymore.
Let the experiences with the toy cars guide the incremental graceful adoption of faster machines.
> most of the real issues will show up when you go 45 in the real world.
Right! So don't go 45.
“ I want a machine that can take my mother to her doctors appointment now that the dementia has gotten to the point where she shouldn't take the bus on her own anymore.“
This meanwhile is already happening[1]. We’ve been testing on toy cars for 15 years. We’re not ready to remove the safety driver but we are ready for the road.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16874410/voyage-self-driv...
Yes! Exactly! Robot-shaped cars that weigh multiple tons at travel at 45mph are a bad idea! It's too soon.
> Asking for the infrastructure to change to adopt AV’s is a pipe dream. Never going to happen.
Sure it will. There will be "smart dust" in the asphalt, etc.
> This meanwhile is already happening
Fantastic!
> We’ve been testing on toy cars for 15 years.
How about 30?
If my robots go out into the world and kill people I'm going to feel bad for making killer robots even if they look like cars, have people inside them, and everybody else is killing people with their cars.
Is that so goddamned crazy?
Don't make killer robots.
"Am I going crazy? Or is it the world around me?"
> We’re not ready to remove the safety driver but we are ready for the road.
That sounds wrong on the face of it to me, but let's grant it for the sake of argument.
Build yourself a city, populate it with people who have signed waivers, and use that as your test lab.
Self-driving Lark? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobility_scooter
As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, but when operated by AI it randomly kills 1/100000 patients. Yet I'm 100% certain even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market.
Hmm I don't agree I think people would go for that.
Even if you want this, the best way to get the government to move is to deploy, prove customer demand/appetite. Everythings going just to plan and early statistics are showing fewer people will die with each autonomous car on the road (with zero infrastructure changes).
The killer robots are already out there, they are being driven by distracted humans killing 35000 people per year (who signed those waivers?!). This is trying to rapidly fix that problem.
"How about 30?"
Yup. Like I thought, moving goalposts. If we did 30, you'd say why not 45? So I gotta move on.
In the given example "driving in a parking lot +rain" it's completely reasonable to pass the buck to the human driver. In your example "driving +rain" you can't because that situation occurs well more frequently.
That wasn't AI - it was a concurrency error, wasn't it?
You shouldn't discard technology because sometimes it's wrong. It can be better overall.
I think people's idea of what a computer should be doing has changed a lot since then, due to the common knowledge of AI applications.
Perhaps we're close to the situation where when a person makes a mistake they're asked 'why weren't you using the computer?' I've seen this happen myself.
People like me are only looking forward to completely autonomy -- I am forbidden to drive, you see.
And it gives me some perspective... I believe society would benefit enormously if it didn't treat "everyone can drive" as a truism. If you were to break down what the concept "drive" means in terms of simultaneous tasks a human most be capable of performing you would quickly see how utterly ridiculous it is -- with devastating results in how urban environments have transformed and how many deaths are on the roads.
This thread is about automated driving from a systematic point of view, it isn't about you.
> if it didn't treat "everyone can drive" as a truism.
No one said that or implied that anywhere here. You hallucinated some sort link between this conversation and your own frustrations.
- The handoff of control to a person is well-defined and not too sudden
- You accept that autonomous driving is essentially a convenience and safety feature with a competent driver behind the wheels at all times. No using an autonomous car to drop little Jimmy off at soccer practice. (And no summoning a shared robo-taxi service.)