
Volvo admits its self-driving cars are confused by kangaroos - pttrsmrt
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/01/volvo-admits-its-self-driving-cars-are-confused-by-kangaroos
======
danieltillett
Lots of human drivers are confused by kangaroos and kangaroos are confused by
cars especially at night. You see an awful lot dead kangaroos on the side of
the road in rural Australia.

As an aside, kangaroos in motion are one of the most efficient and elegant
mammals. I love watching them bounding away at speed effortlessly dodging
scrub and trees - more like flight than running.

~~~
joombaga
What's the general feeling about taking the meat after a collision? Where I
grew up, people would butcher the animal if it's not terribly destroyed.
Around here there's a wild hog problem, which are edible but not very tasty,
so the local wildlife agency picks them up and they're used in soup kitchens
to feed the homeless.

~~~
Avshalom
Not being Australian: would it be legal?

I grew up in Alaska and when you ran into a moose you weren't allowed to keep
it. Instead there was a volunteer crew that was called to clean it up,
compensated with the corpse (which is how I grew up on moose).

~~~
lloeki
In France this is illegal for at least two reasons:

\- health: most people don’t know how to process raw meat or recognize a sick
animal (rabies or other illnesses)

\- safety: those animals are tough, it’s not uncommon for boars to wake up
from the concussion before, while, or after being loaded in a car, and the
last thing you want while driving is a wild, fearful, angry animal suddenly
waking up and ripping your car apart from the inside while you’re driving
(happens).

\- law: hunting is regulated so as to control wild animal population growth,
killing some has to be reported one way or another.

I suspect there is another historical reason, akin to why you can be
prosecuted for attempting to obliterate your own existence: your own being is
basically owned by the Republic (used to be the King), so committing suicide
is a prejudice to the State. I can see something like this being in effect:
wild animals are a property of the State, and killing them even with your car
is poaching. That may be why you’re supposed to turn the corpse to the
Gendarmerie (cops branch of the military).

(IANAL, correct me if I’m wrong, that just what I’ve been taught as a kid
growing in a rural area full of forests)

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ClassyJacket
I'm kind of worried by the fact that the system judges depth based on visual
cues (like a human with one eye closed does) instead of actual depth sensing
hardware, to the point that the system needs to recognise kangaroos
specifically.

Shouldn't the car stop for _any_ obstacle, even ones it doesn't recognise?
They surely can't expect to train it on every possible type of debris.

~~~
kalleboo
It doesn't sound like the problem is it's detecting specific animals, but in
how it's detecting the distance -using the ground as a reference for things
that aren't standing on the ground.

I wonder how it it handles low-flying birds.

~~~
amag
When I learned t drive I was instructed not to mind smaller critters as the
avoidance maneuver (steering away one way or the other or heavy breaking) is
more likely to cause a serious accident than the collision with the small
critter.

~~~
lb1lf
Unless, of course, you are the small critter.

(When in driving school, I was taught to ignore anything smaller than a
reindeer - but assure whoever showed up in distress after I'd put a set of
tire marks over their pet's back that I'd tried my best to avoid it.)

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kartan
> The company’s “Large Animal Detection system” can identify and avoid deer,
> elk and caribou, but early testing in Australia shows it cannot adjust to
> the kangaroo’s unique method of movement.

In Sweden there are elks and deer but not so many kangaroos. :)

An intelligent system needs to learn. To learn it needs examples.

~~~
eschutte2
Funny you say that, as I was just reading this:
[https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/motte-kenguruen-da-han-var-pa-
ve...](https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/motte-kenguruen-da-han-var-pa-vei-til-
jobb-1.13580277) (not Sweden, I know). The video does show their interesting
movement.

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hanoz
> "Although it hasn’t been tested in a kangaroo-specific environment, there
> was an instance where black swans were interfering"

I _think_ I know how to interpret that sentence...

~~~
elmar
Black Swan Farming (Paul Graham)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html)

~~~
andrewf
Literal black swans are common in parts of Australia.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan)

~~~
chris_wot
There are no native white swans in Australia. They are all black.

~~~
j0rd
Let's not bring identity politics in to this discussion.

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lb1lf
Speaking of getting confused by kangaroos...

An old favourite of mine, presumably apocryphal, involving kangaroos and the
dangers of reusing code:

[http://aviationhumor.net/combat-kangaroos/](http://aviationhumor.net/combat-
kangaroos/)

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gregw134
Why does it need to recognize specific types of animals? It seems like bad
programming practice to code (or learn) for each specific case. Is there not a
way to program cars to avoid animals more broadly, or simply objects that are
moving towards the road?

~~~
eli
I don't think I personally would deal well with a kangaroo appearing near my
car due to my lack of specific experience. They move crazy differently from a
dog or deer.

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dredmorbius
The letters in "confused by kangaroos" rearrange to spell "SOS! Fake, bouncy
dragon."

Who wouldn't be confused?

h/t Gary Matthews, elsewhere.

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dghughes
Moose must be hard to detect too I wonder how they tested for them.

Imagine a 700kg (1,500 pound) moose with velvety brown fur suddenly wanting to
cross the road at night in front of your car when you are traveling 120km/h
(74mph).

That weight is all up high too on spindly legs. It's like running into a high
table with 700kg of weigh on it.

~~~
King-Aaron
Emus have a similar effect - a good amount of mass sitting up quite high on
little thin legs. The things punch straight through the windscreen when you
hit them.

Emus have the added bonus too of running directly at you when you sound the
horn, instead of away as you'd expect. It's quite uncanny, and problematic at
a hundred kilometres an hour.

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TillE
Doesn't this just suggest that computer vision is practically impossible to
perfect, and that cameras + LIDAR would be far better for safely driving a
car? You need actual distances to objects, not just fuzzy error-prone
inferences.

~~~
sandworm101
>> You need actual distances to objects, not just fuzzy error-prone
inferences.

Humans do pretty good with fuzzy notions of where the animal is. Exact
distances aren't needed so much as reasonable estimates. If it is probably in
the "need to brake zone" then the car brakes. Plus or minus a few meters isn't
a big deal so long as you've got margins to work with. As animals are
unpredictable, Volvo certainly has wide margins.

~~~
lanstin
Plus if there is anything the human vision system is optimized for it would be
seeing and assessing an unknown large mammal.

~~~
mewse
History (and personal experience) shows pretty clearly that humans are really
bad at predicting the movements of kangaroos, though. (I've never been in a
car that hit one, but have had some close calls)

The things seem to be able to effortlessly execute 90 degree turns between
hops, at speed.

Safety lesson: if you see kangaroos travelling alongside the road you're
driving on, slow way down so you can execute an emergency stop, if needed;
they're always only one hop from suddenly being right in front of you.

Safety lesson 2: there is always another kangaroo. If you see a kangaroo bound
across the road ahead of you, slow way down; there's likely to be another
kangaroo a very short distance behind it. (And safety lesson 2 recurses and
also applies to that second kangaroo; there is likely a third kangaroo just
far enough behind it that you'll think there's no third kangaroo. And so on.)

~~~
chris_wot
Another is - don't let your dogs near a kangaroo around a body of water. The
kangaroo hops into the water, the dog follows and the kangaroo holds it under
and drowns it.

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imron
Gotta watch out for them kangaroos:
[http://www.snopes.com/humor/nonsense/kangaroo.asp](http://www.snopes.com/humor/nonsense/kangaroo.asp)

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jaimex2
I'm not sure what system Volvo has gone for, but most isn't this just a "train
more kangaroo data into the neural network" thing to fix?

~~~
jfries
From the article it seems the hopping it what makes it tricky. Their model is
that the distance to the animal is the same as the distance to where their
feet touch the ground. When an animal is in the air the feet appear to touch
the ground further away due to perspective.

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pasta
This is the first time I hear about animal detection in self driving cars. Do
other brands also do this?

Most demo's only show human interaction.

Edit: and what about flying trash, leaves and so on? Thinking about it there
are a lot of object types we interact with. Leaves for example mean nothing to
us because they won't harm us. And we know crows will fly away. But pigeons on
the other hand..

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tim333
Footage of Volvo and the kangaroos from a couple of years ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YiZ0aHINBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YiZ0aHINBI)

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visarga
Those corner cases can be solved by simulation. Off to the sims, to implement
kangaroos, deer and people in wheelchairs chasing ducks with a broomstick -
just to be thorough.

~~~
taneq
Just make sure you disable the kangaroos' rocket launchers before giving your
big demo... ;)

------
0xbear
And therein lies the problem no one talks about: all these autonomous vehicle
technologies have only been tested in non-adversarial situations. Machine
learning algorithms do not generalize the way humans do, and it has been shown
that they’re fairly easy to fool. This is an active area of research at the
moment, and no one really knows how to fix this, at least not without
deploying an ensemble of networks with different architectures.

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zinckiwi
Wallaby damned.

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hanoz
So European intelligence is confused by kangaroos, artificial and otherwise.

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joering2
Reminds me my comment from a month ago...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433094)

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
At least that is an improvement on Tesla being confused by a large truck and
hitting it at full speed.
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-
aut...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot-
death-self-driving-car-elon-musk)

