
Volvo is reportedly scaling back its self-driving car experiment - sundaeofshock
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/14/16776466/volvo-drive-me-self-driving-car-sweden-delay
======
reacharavindh
I don't understand this approach to get level 5 automation right away. It's
too wide a scope to implement. Why don't we start with an experimental inter-
city highway where cars could run with full automation?

You drive up to the highway, and then relax until you need to get off - sounds
like a great start to me. You can equip that highway with a boat load of
sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines. After a
few years, build more such highways with the lessons learnt from the
experiments.

~~~
ghaff
By and large, there's no particular reason to think purpose-built highway
infrastructure is needed for autonomous vehicles. Maybe to alert for
construction zones but we're pretty close to having autonomy on limited
access, well-mapped highways today.

The problem is that, while this would be a really nice car feature (and
probably great for safety), it does nothing for the people who don't want to
own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call.
Unfortunately for these folks, the autonomous highway driving is relatively
near-term while door-to-door autonomy is probably decades away.

~~~
leemcalilly

       it does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call. 
    

Classic disruption (not in the sense that it is often used) would be to start
with a niche so limited that it doesn't seem useful to almost anyone, and then
expand from that use case.

If you could make a Tesla owner's commute from SF to Sand Hill Road a much
better experience (via autonomous-only toll road), I'd say that's one hell of
a start.

~~~
Aloha
This process to build such a highway in california is beyond even the
considerable means of Elon Musk - just the land acquisition and environmental
review costs are staggering.

~~~
njarboe
Thus the Boring Company was born.

------
mtgx
> And in some areas, we are finding that there were more issues to dig into
> and solve than we expected,”

Who could've thunk it?! The people who think we're going to have _real_ Level
5 autonomous driving in 2 years (not the "we're bullshitting you with Level 5,
but it's really more like Level 3.5" kind) are insane.

There's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could
encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of
the time by 2019-2020.

I'll be impressed if they even deliver Level 4 (working perfectly only on some
types of roads) by 2020. But I think even then car makers will "encounter the
unexpected".

It's going to take many years to test these things. And no car makers seem to
even mention how they're going to address all the security issues self-driving
cars will have.

~~~
icebraining
_There 's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could
encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of
the time by 2019-2020._

I like how you added "by 2019-2020", as if doing the right thing 100% of the
time was ever possible - let alone the goal. Of course, it isn't - Level 5 is
just as good as a human. And extremely rare situation won't be handled well by
a human either.

~~~
sytelus
Problem is that self-driving company would get blamed for accidents for _all_
of its cars. So imagine if you had 100,000 cars going around and you got sued
for accident on every one of them. This aggregation of blame is core issue
which otherwise gets distributed among millions of human drivers. This
invariably requires that self-driving car must be many many magnitudes better
than regular humans.

Even if companies figure out way to not get sued, its only matter of time
until some very serious tragedy happens such as pregnant woman wearing same
dress as color of sky crossing the road getting killed or car running in to
school kids. Then there are obvious malicious usage such as modifying car
sensors to fool self-driving system and purposely run in to people (cars as
weapon scenario). One such thing and it could likely be the trigger for large
public outcry, heavy regulations and finally game over for self-driving cars.

I think it might be more desirable to approach self-driving cars in more
evolutionary fashion. We can start with self-driving only in less than 25
miles/hr scenarios such as heavy traffic OR sunny days on highways. Then we
can start equiping our road networks with dedicated self-driving lanes,
supportive beacons on roads and so on. Then gradually move towards make all
lanes self-driving.

~~~
icebraining
Isn't that exactly what Volvo was doing, though? The self-driving system would
only be available on certain pre-selected freeways.

------
todd8
I like to drive around thinking about what it is like to be a driving (human)
computer. Every time I touch the brake because I see a kid standing a few feet
from the curb and a small dog on the other side of the street is running, I
wonder when an electronic computer will understand that the child might dart
across the street after the dog.

Of course, I've learned these things from growing up human, but only one
computer needs to conquer a driving challenge, maybe driving on a snow hidden
road (watch out for barely noticeable ditches on the sides of the road), and
then all self-driving cars can do it. It will be interesting to see how long
it will take to achieve level 5.

~~~
user5994461
The computer has 360 vision. It should be easy for it to see the child and
notice it jumping onto the road.

The situation is super dangerous with human drivers anyway. Children are too
small to be noticed and they don't hesitate to jump in front of cars.

~~~
irq11
360 vision doesn’t change physics, and even the best vision system doesn’t
help you when a child darts ten feet in front of your car.

If you don’t _anticipate_ the possible movement, you will be too slow. I have
very little faith that we are anywhere near systems that can handle this kind
of situational awareness, because it requires classification systems and
object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce.

The average level of human intelligence is a lot higher than most casual
observers realize.

~~~
maxerickson
Waymo models "dynamic objects" and predicts what they are going to do. There's
some diagrams of it in this report (page 9):

[https://waymo.com/safetyreport/](https://waymo.com/safetyreport/)

I would guess that they already identify and track pedestrians better than the
average human driver (mostly because I expect they do it at greater distance).
Whether they model kids standing by the curb better is hard to say.

~~~
irq11
A marketing document does not convince me. But even if I take this at face
value, they’re talking about estimating future movements based on current
trajectory, which is fine and good, but not the scenario raised by the OP.

If I see a child standing near the side of the road, I use more than the
velocity and trajectory of the child to estimate future behavior: I look at
the direction the child is facing, the overall situation (e.g. is the child
playing a game?), what the child is paying attention to, and so on. A child
waiting at a bus stop is a dramatically different scenario than a child
looking across the street at a puppy. A short adult standing on the side of
the road is dramatically different than a child.

This is a hard problem involving multiple levels of recognition and inference.
I have little faith that it is solved. My suspicion is that the “engineering
solution” is used (i.e. slow down when a human-probable object is near the
road). That might work, but will lead to a car thar drives like a paranoid
senior citizen with bad eyesight.

I have a suspicion that we’re going to look back in a decade and realize that
most of these problems are fundamentally intractable, and that the best any
system can do is react via human-encoded heuristics. If so, the path to full
autonomy will be an asymptotic one; it will not happen quickly, but through
decades of gradual refinement, with lots of fatalities along the way.

~~~
maxerickson
"human-encoded heuristics" contradicts intractable.

I think that the always-sensible speed choices of the automated system will
result in a much larger reduction in pedestrian fatalities than any increase
from the lack of subtle inference you are concerned with.

~~~
irq11
If you think heuristic contradicts “intractable” You don’t understand the
meaning of the word.

Intractable problems can be solved sometimes, just not reliably or in bounded
time. If we get to the point where self-driving cars depend on human-encoded
rules for reaction, we’ll simply be trading one set of messy heuristic
behaviors (people) for another (robots with bad sensors and limited domain
awareness).

Will the automated systems be “better” with enough time and investment?
Perhaps. But dreams of a fatality-free automobile future will remain science
fiction.

~~~
user5994461
The heuristic is quite simple. Drive slower when there are children around, to
leave enough time to brake if something unpredictable happen.

------
rospaya
Can someone point out what are the major issues for self-driving cars? What
are the main things stopping GM/Volvo/Google from deploying a fleet of cars?

~~~
vladislav
The process of autonomy, at every time instant, may be broken down into the
following: 1) sensor observation, 2) perception, 3) intent modeling, 4) path
planning, 5) control action. 1) Sensor observation is the collection of video,
radar, Lidar etc. data. 2) Perception is the interpretation of that sensor
data into a meaningful representation of the 3D environment, both static and
dynamic, tasks like object detection, localization, tracking, semantic
understanding (think of it like computing a physics enginge for the world). 3)
Intent modeling is the prediction of what the moving objects might do in the
future (e.g. is that car just drifting a bit, or it is about to merge into my
lane?) 4) Given the outcome of 2) and 3), path planning is answering the
question of where should I plan to drive the car through my estimation of the
environment and how it might change? 5) Control is the execution of the
planned path, by manipulating the steering wheel, gas and brake etc.

Of the different aspects of autonomy, perception and intent modeling are the
unsolved pieces, with the other aspects being relatively well understood. The
quality of your sensors (resolution, dynamic range, depth range for
Lidar/radar etc) affect the difficulty of the perception task, as does
computational power, but even with perfect sensors and high compute the
problem is difficult (recognizing the difference between a rock and a crumpled
piece of paper requires algorithmic processing of sensor data). The difficulty
of perception is best illustrated by pointing to the field of computer vision,
which is essentially focused on solving that problem. What seems easy to a
human is quite hard for a computer, but really it's only easy at the conscious
level, while in fact 70% of the human brain is dedicated to solving the vision
problem at any given time.

All the steps after perception rely crucially on it. If perception were
perfectly solved, intent modeling is also a difficult problem, but it is
relatively easier than perception, as it involves reasoning in a lower
dimensional state-action space, albeit with partial information. To make a
comparison, intent modeling for diving in urban environments is perhaps harder
than beating humans at Go, and may be as hard as beating humans at poker.

If perception and intent modeling are solved, the execution of path planning
and control is relatively well understood.

To summarize, the main issues are perception and intent modeling, and these
are fundamentally difficult AI problems. So the main thing holding back
GM/Volvo/Google is algorithms.

------
thisisit
Isn't this how most experiments are supposed to work? You start with a broad
assumption and work towards it. Then you find issues and start scaling things
down to focus on some finer issues.

In the meantime, business executives and media work hand-in-hand to try and
hype everything and promising stuff which cannot be delivered in a short
amount of time.

~~~
Fricken
The thing is Volvo's experiments haven't been going as well as others.

In the race to build a functional autonomous vehicle some companies are
getting it done, and others, in spite of big promises, several years of
effort, and scaled, well capitalized operations have very little to show for
their efforts.

Everybody still has a lot of work to do, but the operations that can, at the
very least, demonstrate as proof of concept their cars handling just a few
miles of of uninterrupted driving in dynamic environments have cleared the
biggest hurdle. Following that big hurdle is the validation process, which is
tens of thousands of smaller hurdles stretching out as far as the eye can see,
but so long as they've cleared the first, biggest hurdles, you can be
reasonably confident they'll get to a minimum viable product eventually so
long as they keep at it.

I have confidence in Waymo, GM, and Zoox. With everyone else it's either too
soon to tell, or I don't have enough information, or they're sucking:

[https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw](https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw)

~~~
jamesblonde
I think you are on the right track here. I know some of the people hired by
Volvo cars to work on this, and I am not aware of them recruiting top ML
researchers to work on this and I suspect they are just not good enough people
there. Waymo, on the other hand, will probably get it done, and done really
well.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
That's because Volvo's AV software position is a joint venture w/ Autoliv
called Zenuity. [https://www.zenuity.com](https://www.zenuity.com)

So if you're looking for CV/ML people working on the perception part of the
stack, look there.

FWIW, I work in this field now and I have fairly low confidence in the non-ML
parts of the software stack across the industry. There's a lot more to this
problem than well manicured computer-vision demos, and Volvo is a lot less
cavalier about loss of human life than almost anyone else, so it's fairly
heartening to see them realign around realistic expectations.

------
moogly
And how about those 24 000 cars that Uber were going to buy from Volvo[1]? Not
one mention of that in the article.

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-
volv...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-volvo-suv-
self-driving-future-business-ride-hailing-lyft-waymo)

~~~
mkempe
Unrelated. Uber's plan is to buy standard Volvo XC90 SUVs and add their own
self-driving implements.

------
dboreham
Is the Koolaid finally running out?

~~~
dwighttk
looks like it will run out in 5-10 years

------
Hasz
It's a great move. Why waste money racing GM/Tesla when you can wait for the
hardware to become a commodity?

~~~
mythrwy
"The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese."

------
dwighttk
over-promise under-deliver

measure once cut twice

