That's pretty cool, it's great to see GM not sucking at bleeding edge software. They're getting their money's worth out of that billion dollar acquisition last March. I think Kyle Vogt is GM's MVP.
Looking at the 2016 California DMV disengagement reports, Cruise is at 181 disengages in 9,776 miles of testing in California for 2016. This can be compared crudely to Waymo's 124 disengages in 635,868 miles for 2016.
Waymo's operation is 2 orders of magnitude more advanced than Cruise, but in terms of video demos, we haven't seen much of the environments Waymo's cars are capable of navigating. Waymo has only revealed their cars driving on suburban roads, it seems only Cruise is tackling hectic downtown driving head-on.
GM, with their Lyft partnership and Orion assembly plant is, I think, in a great position to deploy early fast with 1st gen robotaxis.
> They're getting their money's worth out of that billion dollar acquisition last March. I think Kyle Vogt is GM's MVP.
Many people, including me, were critical of the acquisition; acquiring an year-old company barely having any technological breakthrough for a billion dollars sounded like a folly. Slowly, it has become clear that the impetus behind the deal wasn't necessarily acquiring the technology but bring an ardent person on board who can accelerate GM's self-driving efforts. I have a feeling this deal would cast itself as one of the pivotal moments in the company's history.
Waymo cars frequently drive the same routes several times a week. In fact if you go to certain intersections such as El Camino Real and San Antonio Rd, during the work week you only have to wait a few minutes to see one or more go by.
> Waymo is 2 orders of magnitude more advanced than Cruise
Not to say that Waymo isn't ahead, but if you look at a graph of Cruise's disengagements vs miles over time, they experienced a rapid improvement. By November of 2016 they were at about 2.6/1000 miles. Better than the total would show, but still an order worse than Waymo though.
This article aggregates the miles/disengagement in a nice table at the bottom. Definitely worth a glance. Waymo is 8x better than the nearest competitor (which, as mentioned, is probably an unfair comparison since we don't know enough about comparibility of those miles driven)
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...
A lot of the roads near me are two lane, but have cars parked on both sides. This requires a lot of hand gestures out of the window to other drivers as we negotiate the roads.
We also have a lot of single track roads with passing places. This also requires a lot of non-verbal communication between drivers.
Are there any videos of self driving cars attempting this sort of road?
Very impressive, I'm wondering how it was able to get around the white truck that was double-parked? Does it have sensors on the mirrors and point straight out? I imagine it would have no information as to oncoming cars, with the truck blocking almost everything, so I wonder what the algorithm is for that.
At around 1:54 in the video, it comes to a stop light that is in front of a Shell station's gas price board. It actually took me a second to notice the stop light. There is another light on the left side of the screen, but it still made me think.
Is it likely just using some image recognition and a confidence level to determine when it is safe to go?
If so, could the system be fooled by a sign that is meant to always look like a red light? Or worse, a green light to trick the system to run a red?
Eventually, I expect we'll have some national standard for wireless transmitters on traffic signals, so they can send a message (timestamped and cryptographically signed with the state's department of transportation's public key) to the cars to tell them unambiguously when to stop and when it's safe to go.
(This could help human drivers too; just add a red/yellow/green light to the car dashboard for those times when you can't see the actual light because there's a big truck in the way, or the sun is directly behind the traffic signal.)
I also expect that by the time this sees near-universal adoption, we'll already have the image recognition corner cases mostly worked out.
Possibly, but I imagine the incentive isn't really there. Someone intentionally doing that would be penalised and for minor gain. Someone could do it now to fool human drivers and it hasn't really happened.
e.g., stand in hi-vis at an intersection holding a "Slow" sign regardless of the red light above.
The system is likely capable of distinguishing a lit green light from a sign painted like one. If you're simply asking "would the system be fooled if someone nefariously hung an always green light where a red one should be" surely that is a circumstance that would fool a human as well.
Another good question is what does the car do if the stop sign or traffic light is obscured by trees?
I swear to good the city of San Francisco could car less about this issue. I've gotten to the point where I look for the painted STOP on the road, rather than the stop sign.
I assume either the computer could recognize the painted letters on the road (they are often in bad shape) or the GPS would inform the computer that a stop sign exists? So it doesn't have to look for it?
Given all the crazy corner cases I know they have covered I cannot imagine they don't deal well with emergency vehicles. For example, I know Waymo has put a ton of work into just covering the cases when motorcycles are lane-splitting and overtaking them at high speed [0]. I'm sure they deal with ambulances just fine.
Maybe the real question is "do they?" - maybe they don't? Or maybe it's a problem being worked on. I can't say I've heard of anything in this domain; it might be one of those problems/challenges which could be worked on, a paper written up, and some kind of solution presented that might net a win for whomever tried.
I'm sad to say this, but I think GM is going to crush Tesla in the long run. GM knows about building cars, tech becomes cheaper and available over time. It will take Tesla longer to learn how to build and mass produce at a cheap price than for GM to have all the tech they need to match up with Tesla. Initially I was worried that Honda would be the one, but they don't seem to be taking the electric and self driving car serious. GM has their volt/bolt with decent range, I happen to work at a company that shares a lot with some of the auto manufacturing suppliers for American car companies, and I see them testing their self driving cars sometimes. Oh and they have a bunch of Teslas for inspiration I suppose. :)
> The Cruise car makes a left turn and then gets stuck behind a delivery truck. It waits as a couple of other vehicles overtake it
I suppose I'd probably notice if I was a semi-engaged driver, but not as much if I considered myself "just a passenger" in an autonomous vehicle. It looks like barely more than 30s elapses there.
I'm not sure I would have done anything different than the computer did. I'm a cautious driver and have been in similar situations where I felt it was prudent to take a moment and really try to see past the truck to look for any oncoming traffic. I've then had an impatient driver behind me decide to zoom around.
That video was impressive. It shows great situational awareness.
Here's what I wonder about the future. Is there a point in which consolidation will take place in the auto industry as a result of superior self-driving performance and capabilities? Meaning -- can the value created by self-driving software be more of a factor than the other existing assets of a GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, etc?
So, silly question - why are these technologies not being made broadly available as driver assist tools while we work our way up to L4 driving automation?
If we're really concerned about making driving safer, this seems like a good compromise until we get to broadly available (and affordable) L4.
> So, silly question - why are these technologies not being made broadly available as driver assist tools while we work our way up to L4 driving automation?
Well, they are. Lane departure warnings, auto braking, self parking are all incremental automation/assistive technologies that have been rolling out slowly and will continue to.
Advertising stuff now is a kind of marketing aimed at hiring and in building enthusiasm for a company like GM that as seen as a has been (not picking on GM, they are simply the topic of this article!).
I think your real question is, "why aren't I seeing these features on current model year cars?" It's about the structure of the car industry. For example, when I worked with <car company X> on brake-by-wire in 1996 it was for the 2004 model year. They had a team with functional steer by wire -- I still haven't seen it in production! This is a combination of historical industry practice, a focus on safety, and regulatory constraints. A mixture of good and bad.
I think having partially self driving cars that require active driver engagement are a huge safety problem, because if drivers are able to just sit there and not doing anything 90% of the time, they just aren't going to pay attention ever. Some driver aids like automatic braking are probably fine, but 'getting from a to b' is probably something that shouldn't be available until it's as reliable as a human driver.
Isn't this sort of the Tesla approach where they slowly increment improvements in certain settings?
Years back when Google started testing its cars it gave their employees the chance to use their very preliminary technology during their commute. They made it explicitly clear that the driver still had to be ready to take absolute control of the car at any moment but what they found was that their employees were doing the absolutely the opposite: playing on their phones, reaching into the back seat, etc. That's why Waymo has been adamant that they'll only release their tech when it's 100% ready.
> Misconception 1: Driver assistance systems will evolve gradually into fully autonomous cars
> [...]People often argue that such assistance systems need to be supervised by the driver. This makes sense for assistance systems that operate for a few seconds or minutes (such as a parking assistant) but it can not work for systems that drive continuously. Humans are not capable to maintain the state of alert for hours and hours which would be required to immediately counteract possible deficiencies of a driver-assistance system or to take over from it in a split-second.
> We can only entrust the driving task to a driver assistance system when we are sure that this system can handle all situations which arise suddenly and require immediate reaction. This means that driver assistance systems operating continuously on a highway need to be able to cope with rare situations including pedestrians and bicyclists on the highway (they do appear sometimes on highways), accidents unfolding, animals, sudden rainfall etc. Gradual evolution of such systems is impossible; they need to be extremely capable from the first day on which they are put into operation.
We have the basic optical and radar lane assists and similar on current models, but as long as I have to keep my hands on the wheel I'm not going to want to have (or pay for) spinning lidars and other expensive tech that I assume this requires.
I assume there's a cost issue? This stuff was expensive to develop, and kind of a luxury, so they probably want to charge as much as possible, which then delays adoption.
At 1:04 [1], it stops for a few seconds before the intersection. Seems to be due to the white car that is parked in opposite direction as all other cars so it waited for ~20 seconds to confirm that the car is indeeded parked? Should a no-motion indicates it's not moving? Why wait for so long?
While certainly impressive, keep in mind that it's only one video showing one of possibly thousands of trials with possibly thousands of difficult corner-case situations where the car got stuck or acted improperly. One video doesn't prove anything, especially not one with a person ready to take over at any moment.
There isn't really any planning. San Francisco never removes stop signs, but just adds them steadily as neighborhoods request them. Eventually they are turned into traffic lights. (I imagine "traffic signals installed" must be a performance metric for someone.)
A downside of having stop signs at almost every corner is that drivers seem to forget how to drive in areas without them. They assume that if they approach an intersection without a stop sign then they can drive through it at full speed, instead of looking for cross traffic and pedestrians.
Looking at this space, I honestly expected more drive by wire and remote VR pilot type intermediary solutions than full autonomy. I wonder if remote control will be completely bypassed or if certain sectors will still benefit from this.
As I was watching this video I thought about how much further along with self driving cars we could be if the data was open source. Sharing this type of information between companies would increase everyone's velocity and get us that much closer to real world driverless vehicles.
At some point the vehicles will have to talk to each other anyway (ie. car-to-car network), so we might as well formalize it.
Let's do a small road trip around CA starting and ending in SF, avoiding the tolls and seeing some nice scenery.
Head north over the Golden Gate Bridge, immediately losing cell service. Decide at that time (no cell service) to make a stop at the Nike missile launch site, passing through the long single-lane tunnel w/o crashing into an oncoming car. Head back to 101, continue north, driving through 3 trees: Chandelier Tree, Shrine Tree, Klamath Tree. Yes, actually drive through each tree. Go back south to Redwood National Park, and then head east on Bald Hills Road, half of which is a gravel road. Pass through Hoopa. Make an unscheduled stop at the overlook to the original Hoopa campsite. Head to Weaverville, pass by the trailhead to Mount Lassen, then to Reno and on to Lee Vining. Stop at Mono Lake, in the dirt "parking lot", for one of the canoe trip tours. Head back north to Topaz Lake, then head west down US 4. Try not to get run off the 1.5-lane road by a logging truck. Head to San Jose and then north up to SF, neatly avoiding the bridge tolls.
For bonus points, do this when the state mandates snow chains for Lassen and/or US 4.
Or any other location in the US also! Try a Boston winter, or Houston's unending road construction. It feels like we're creating self driving cars that are experts at driving in SF.
Until I see autonomous vehicles testing in blizzard conditions, or even a moderate snowfall, it's relegated to the West coast. This eliminates nearly 2/3 of the US population (who live in areas where snowfall occurs).
We're at least 5-7 years away from them testing in these conditions.
As in the first video there is a ~30s delay when stuck behind a truck. Which I think is reasonable and most human drivers take far too many risks. Seems to be than humans will learn to drive better thanks to self driving cars :).
[+] [-] Fricken|9 years ago|reply
Looking at the 2016 California DMV disengagement reports, Cruise is at 181 disengages in 9,776 miles of testing in California for 2016. This can be compared crudely to Waymo's 124 disengages in 635,868 miles for 2016.
Waymo's operation is 2 orders of magnitude more advanced than Cruise, but in terms of video demos, we haven't seen much of the environments Waymo's cars are capable of navigating. Waymo has only revealed their cars driving on suburban roads, it seems only Cruise is tackling hectic downtown driving head-on.
GM, with their Lyft partnership and Orion assembly plant is, I think, in a great position to deploy early fast with 1st gen robotaxis.
[+] [-] shubhamjain|9 years ago|reply
Many people, including me, were critical of the acquisition; acquiring an year-old company barely having any technological breakthrough for a billion dollars sounded like a folly. Slowly, it has become clear that the impetus behind the deal wasn't necessarily acquiring the technology but bring an ardent person on board who can accelerate GM's self-driving efforts. I have a feeling this deal would cast itself as one of the pivotal moments in the company's history.
[+] [-] pb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beamatronic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PetorianBlue|9 years ago|reply
> Waymo is 2 orders of magnitude more advanced than Cruise
Not to say that Waymo isn't ahead, but if you look at a graph of Cruise's disengagements vs miles over time, they experienced a rapid improvement. By November of 2016 they were at about 2.6/1000 miles. Better than the total would show, but still an order worse than Waymo though.
[+] [-] sf_rob|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|9 years ago|reply
We also have a lot of single track roads with passing places. This also requires a lot of non-verbal communication between drivers.
Are there any videos of self driving cars attempting this sort of road?
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fuzzwah|9 years ago|reply
https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-...
[+] [-] NAHWheatCracker|9 years ago|reply
Is it likely just using some image recognition and a confidence level to determine when it is safe to go?
If so, could the system be fooled by a sign that is meant to always look like a red light? Or worse, a green light to trick the system to run a red?
[+] [-] elihu|9 years ago|reply
(This could help human drivers too; just add a red/yellow/green light to the car dashboard for those times when you can't see the actual light because there's a big truck in the way, or the sun is directly behind the traffic signal.)
I also expect that by the time this sees near-universal adoption, we'll already have the image recognition corner cases mostly worked out.
[+] [-] ghughes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|9 years ago|reply
e.g., stand in hi-vis at an intersection holding a "Slow" sign regardless of the red light above.
[+] [-] jrlocke|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|9 years ago|reply
I swear to good the city of San Francisco could car less about this issue. I've gotten to the point where I look for the painted STOP on the road, rather than the stop sign.
I assume either the computer could recognize the painted letters on the road (they are often in bad shape) or the GPS would inform the computer that a stop sign exists? So it doesn't have to look for it?
[+] [-] rhcom2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jboggan|9 years ago|reply
0 - http://extremepowersportssa.com/google-self-driving-car-proj...
[+] [-] cr0sh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|9 years ago|reply
As a customer I'll still be happy with multiple choices driving prices down and offering a better service than buses and taxis.
God I hate buses in the US. Public transport is very broken.
[+] [-] segmondy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyldfire|9 years ago|reply
I suppose I'd probably notice if I was a semi-engaged driver, but not as much if I considered myself "just a passenger" in an autonomous vehicle. It looks like barely more than 30s elapses there.
[+] [-] markkanof|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalneal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golfer|9 years ago|reply
Here's what I wonder about the future. Is there a point in which consolidation will take place in the auto industry as a result of superior self-driving performance and capabilities? Meaning -- can the value created by self-driving software be more of a factor than the other existing assets of a GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, etc?
[+] [-] falcolas|9 years ago|reply
If we're really concerned about making driving safer, this seems like a good compromise until we get to broadly available (and affordable) L4.
[+] [-] gumby|9 years ago|reply
Well, they are. Lane departure warnings, auto braking, self parking are all incremental automation/assistive technologies that have been rolling out slowly and will continue to.
Advertising stuff now is a kind of marketing aimed at hiring and in building enthusiasm for a company like GM that as seen as a has been (not picking on GM, they are simply the topic of this article!).
I think your real question is, "why aren't I seeing these features on current model year cars?" It's about the structure of the car industry. For example, when I worked with <car company X> on brake-by-wire in 1996 it was for the 2004 model year. They had a team with functional steer by wire -- I still haven't seen it in production! This is a combination of historical industry practice, a focus on safety, and regulatory constraints. A mixture of good and bad.
[+] [-] empath75|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobkranz|9 years ago|reply
Years back when Google started testing its cars it gave their employees the chance to use their very preliminary technology during their commute. They made it explicitly clear that the driver still had to be ready to take absolute control of the car at any moment but what they found was that their employees were doing the absolutely the opposite: playing on their phones, reaching into the back seat, etc. That's why Waymo has been adamant that they'll only release their tech when it's 100% ready.
[+] [-] ndh2|9 years ago|reply
> [...]People often argue that such assistance systems need to be supervised by the driver. This makes sense for assistance systems that operate for a few seconds or minutes (such as a parking assistant) but it can not work for systems that drive continuously. Humans are not capable to maintain the state of alert for hours and hours which would be required to immediately counteract possible deficiencies of a driver-assistance system or to take over from it in a split-second.
> We can only entrust the driving task to a driver assistance system when we are sure that this system can handle all situations which arise suddenly and require immediate reaction. This means that driver assistance systems operating continuously on a highway need to be able to cope with rare situations including pedestrians and bicyclists on the highway (they do appear sometimes on highways), accidents unfolding, animals, sudden rainfall etc. Gradual evolution of such systems is impossible; they need to be extremely capable from the first day on which they are put into operation.
http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=774
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilasX|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzythinker|9 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Vfgjemwc9NU?t=63
[+] [-] ndh2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greeneggs|9 years ago|reply
A downside of having stop signs at almost every corner is that drivers seem to forget how to drive in areas without them. They assume that if they approach an intersection without a stop sign then they can drive through it at full speed, instead of looking for cross traffic and pedestrians.
[+] [-] dmritard96|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zaheer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Corrado|9 years ago|reply
At some point the vehicles will have to talk to each other anyway (ie. car-to-car network), so we might as well formalize it.
[+] [-] 1024core|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tropo|9 years ago|reply
Head north over the Golden Gate Bridge, immediately losing cell service. Decide at that time (no cell service) to make a stop at the Nike missile launch site, passing through the long single-lane tunnel w/o crashing into an oncoming car. Head back to 101, continue north, driving through 3 trees: Chandelier Tree, Shrine Tree, Klamath Tree. Yes, actually drive through each tree. Go back south to Redwood National Park, and then head east on Bald Hills Road, half of which is a gravel road. Pass through Hoopa. Make an unscheduled stop at the overlook to the original Hoopa campsite. Head to Weaverville, pass by the trailhead to Mount Lassen, then to Reno and on to Lee Vining. Stop at Mono Lake, in the dirt "parking lot", for one of the canoe trip tours. Head back north to Topaz Lake, then head west down US 4. Try not to get run off the 1.5-lane road by a logging truck. Head to San Jose and then north up to SF, neatly avoiding the bridge tolls.
For bonus points, do this when the state mandates snow chains for Lassen and/or US 4.
[+] [-] a_t48|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chomp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karpodiem|9 years ago|reply
We're at least 5-7 years away from them testing in these conditions.
[+] [-] Jimpulse|9 years ago|reply
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3399315/The-d...
[+] [-] justin66|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dorianm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|9 years ago|reply