
Korean Competition Shows Weather Still a Challenge for Autonomous Cars - markmassie
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/advanced-cars/japan-competition-shows-weather-still-a-challenge-for-autonomous-cars
======
snowwrestler
On HN I frequently see comments to the effect that self-driving cars will be
commercially available in a decade or two, and that they will be safer than
human-driven cars. Personally, I question whether either is true, and I
strongly doubt that both can be true at once.

Humans have a lot of shortcomings--emotions, sleepiness, distraction, the
effects of drugs and alcohol--but humans have some amazing strengths too.
We've got cognitive abilities in recognizing patterns and making decisions
that were honed by millions of years of evolution, and directly trained by, on
average, decades of actually driving cars. I think it's easy for technology-
minded folks to overestimate the impact of the weaknesses, and underestimate
the deep complexity of the strengths.

We barely have fully-autonomous self-flying planes today, and I don't know of
any research showing that they are safer than human-piloted planes. And flying
is a far less complicated domain to automate than driving.

~~~
jfoutz
There are some cases where we want amazing drivers, for example ambulances.
But for an ordinary day to day commute, people shouldn't have to be at the top
of their game. I think your point boils down to variance. Human drivers have a
high variance, we all can be very good or very bad somewhat randomly.

Your point about research is really interesting. I think a large majority of
cars actually following the speed limit, looking before changing lanes, and
using turn signals will have a positive effect on overall safety, even if they
aren't anywhere near as good at dealing with extraordinary situations. It
would be nice to know what % of "good drivers" is required to minimize those
extraordinary situations, if any at all.

We've all seen that one car weaving in and out of traffic. Perhaps they do
indeed make us safer because they force us to pay attention. But they do seem
to create a whole bunch of extraordinary situations for dozens or hundreds of
drivers to deal with. It only takes the one weak driver (i'm assuming weaker
than self driving here) to panic and then the freeway is a parking lot for an
hour. That research would be interesting.

~~~
mavhc
Ambulances may kill more people than they save by driving at high speed
[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/03/21/usat-a...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002/03/21/usat-
ambulance%28acov%29.htm)

~~~
jfoutz
It seems like you'd still want to hire for the best drivers, rather than
trying to automate away ambulance driving. Coping with snow, rain and ice is
something we want emergency services to deal with. A school bus on the other
hand, meh, just don't run them in scary weather.

~~~
lotu
For a school bus you still want an adult on the bus to be responsible for the
kids not killing and eating each other. So you aren't going to have any real
savings there.

~~~
lbearl
Well, it might be better to have an adult that can actively prevent the kids
from "killing and eating each other" instead of the current state where one
person has to contend with traffic, possibly inclement weather, and dozens of
loud, obnoxious (and possibly cannibalistic) children.

------
rdtsc
One of the worst combination of weather related road conditions I've been in
-- fog and ice, at night, in the mountains.

A self driving car wouldn't have to work very hard here to do better than me.

* Check for weather conditions at altitude (not just start and destination points).

* Refuse to leave the house using that route if weather conditions are bad.

Oh well, lesson learned. On that topic does anyone know of maps software that
does that for you -- i.e. check weather not just traffic?

~~~
snowwrestler
Ha, yes, maybe self-driving cars would be safer if they also functioned as
safety monitors.

\--

"Take me to the ski resort, HAL."

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't allow you to do that. It's snowing along the way."

"Yeah, I know--that's the idea. I want to make some fresh tracks."

"Driving through the snow would be more dangerous than driving on dry
pavement. In addition, I calculate that skiing is 4.76 times more likely to
result in injury than reading a book. Please return to your couch; I will
download a new book to your Kindle."

\--

Incidentally, this was a major theme of Asimov's Robots/Foundation series--
that intelligent robots programmed to prevent humans from coming to harm would
become nannies of humanity in order to execute that command.

~~~
qwerta
I would be more worried about insurance companies. They will get way more data
and ways to sneak out of paying damages.

------
josefresco
Just drove about 8 hours and experienced heavy fog along the way. Visibility
was reduced to maybe a hundred yards. The entire time I wasn't thinking "self-
driving cars would fail here" but rather that a self driving car with it's
multitude of sensors would probably do much better considering what it could
"see" and also the reduction in "eye fatigue" as driving in heavy fog can
wreak havoc on your eyes and perception of movement (not a problem for a
computer).

~~~
rayiner
Funny. I just had my Uber driver take me on a 50 minute trip from the Kennedy
Center to Union Station, a trip that usually takes 15 minutes, because he
blindly followed the GPS straight through downtown. The entire time I was
thinking: "it's 2014 and we still haven't gotten basic route-finding right;
self-driving cars are a long way off."

~~~
TwiztidK
I think a network of self-driving cars might actually help with that. All the
cars can communicate where they are going and could agree to take paths that
reduce traffic and get everyone to their destination faster.

EDIT: Also, these features should be coming soon thanks to devices like
Automatic and apps like Waze.

~~~
rayiner
So one of the things I used to work on is software for cognitive radios:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio).
One of potential features of cognitive radio networks is that each node can
share information about its local RF environment, to allow the network to make
frequency-selection decisions based on global information. It's easy to
describe, very hard to implement. Very, very, hard to implement in a way that
works every time, like anything that goes in a car must.

Heck, we have so far to go even within the scope of the technology we have
today. One of the things I've noticed as a heavy Uber user is that drivers
tend to get confused when they're first hailed, and again when they pick you
up. GPS systems tend not to give you a good fix on your orientation until
you're moving,[1] and when you get a hail on the other side of town, they're
really not very useful for giving you the optimal "first turn." This is a
really simple thing, that's probably worth a lot of money to a company like
Uber, that's really hard to get right with existing technology. With
distributed decision-making of autonomous vehicles, you're talking about
something orders of magnitude more complicated.

[1] My wife and I get a kick every time Siri says "proceed to the route."
Which is a lot.

------
ChuckMcM
I was thinking about this when driving in the recent rain here in California.
A lot of data 'goes away' and sometimes I relied on memory of what was there
rather than actively see what was there to navigate. I haven't seen any
discussion on whether or not auto-cars would have some sort of equivalent to a
'muscle memory' of where they have been driving to help them over the rough
patches.

In the test case, if the car recognized "oh this is the course from yesterday,
even though it doesn't quite look like it, its in the same GPS coordinates"
and then try to match larger easier to spot landmarks with its previous
experience. That would certainly help it out.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
And then you get a case where something is added or removed unexpectedly and
the detection is marginal, and the car makes the wrong decision because "it
was/wasn't there last time".

~~~
glenra
Sure, but the goal isn't "perfect", it's merely to do better than human
drivers. Human drivers make that mistake constantly, so the case you're
describing is one where the cars will do MUCH BETTER than people because cars
are better at sharing information over time. So we go from a world in which
every driver independently has to update their own personal worldview and is
thus _individually_ surprised by the addition of a new sign to one in which a
few cars are surprised and have to slow down and update but within a few days
every subsequent car through the intersection automatically knows the new
data.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I really think this is key. Cars letting other cars learn from their
experience. Although that too has limits, for example if my car detects a cat
in the road that wasn't there before it probably doesn't need to propagate
that information.

------
maaaats
Which companies had cars here? I've been impressed with some European car
makers and their self-driving cars, especially Volvo. They seem to make cars
that handles true driving conditions, while American makers have idealized
conditions, especially the Google car.

~~~
maxxxxx
Once you live in California you start to forget that there are weather
conditions other than sunshine and warm. It happened to me!

~~~
001sky
The lack of skill, experience, and equipment conspire to make it much more
dangerous than the objective risk. That's why there are so many hydro-planing
wrecks out after heavy rain. And why californians need chains to drive in
conditions that are normal on the east coast.

------
therobot24
a guy in our group did clear path detection for vehicles using only vision -
his biggest hurdles were shadows and rain

his thesis was awesome though, he created shadow and rain drop removal while
also mitigating the effects of 'smeared headlights' from a wet road at night

~~~
yason
Then the same software could produce an enhanced image of the road to a human
driver, too, right?

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Probably.

I always thought that an interesting intermediate for cars would be to have a
HUD displaying wireframes around detected objects. The motivation being that
it can help, but doesn't have nearly the potential for harm as a full self-
driving vehicle.

Of course, then you end up with the same problem that we have with aircraft -
people become reliant on fallible assists.

------
zmanian
I've seen the Google self driving car on the roads on Mountain View and Los
Altos since the current storms started. Clearly they are taking advantage of
the weather conditions for data.

~~~
lallysingh
This article mentioned cameras, not the laser scanners used by the Google cars
([http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/28/google-
sel...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/28/google-self-driving-
car-how-does-it-work))

~~~
aidenn0
Google uses both.

------
brandon272
Living in a cold, snowy climate, it seems like self driving cars will never be
possible here.

Winter snow removal equipment scrapes the lines off the roads requiring re-
application every summer in my area, and a common sight in the cities is the
"re-positioning" of lanes during the winter. Drivers carve out their own lanes
in the snow, so a 4 lane road might have only 3 lanes in the winter. I find
this challenging to negotiate in the winter as no one seems sure whether they
should follow the carved out path or be in the actual lane, assuming they know
where it is under the packed snow. How could a self-driving car deal with
that?

Not to mention inconsistent, icy road surfaces with unpredictable traction and
the springtime muck of snow/gravel/salt that makes keeping the windshield
clean, much less exterior sensors and cameras.

~~~
maxerickson
Electronic stability control is already required equipment on new vehicles in
the U.S. (and around the world:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#Re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#Regulation)),
because computers using sensors are better at measuring traction than humans
are at estimating it.

~~~
nogridbag
It's also the first thing I disable when driving in the snow in a RWD car,
since the last thing I want when trying to make it up a snowy mountain road is
for the computer to cut all power to the driving wheels.

~~~
BuildTheRobots
My understanding with ESP (My Nissan has it as Electronic Stability Program)
was that it uses small amounts of single-wheel breaking to cause the vehicle
to keep the expected line during extreme manoeuvring (eg swerving around a
child running into the road, or swerving around the car in front suddenly
anchoring on).

I would have thought your issue with power being removed to the drive wheels
is actually the Traction Control system kicking in not the ESP, but then it's
possible you have one button that disables both.

~~~
nogridbag
My only experience is with Mazda's DSC (dynamic stability control) which I had
in a previous car (Mazda RX-8). I had a couple of cases where I forgot to turn
off DSC, because in that car you have to switch it off EVERY time you start
the car, and the power would be completely cut to both wheels going up steep
snowy inclines.

For most conditions like rain it's great for the average driver.

DSC caught me off guard a couple of times in dry/rain and one time almost
caused me to lose control. But in all cases it was because I accidentally left
it on while driving "enthusiastically" and wasn't expecting the DSC to yank
the car abruptly and unnaturally in its attempt to straighten the car out.

------
AshFurrow
To be fair, wet roads confuse human-driven cars, too.

~~~
bane
One of the interesting things we're finding as we start to coax machines to do
human jobs is that humans tend to not accept a machine unless it's much better
at the job than a human. For example, on many computer vision or NLP tasks,
the current state of the art is about as good as most humans.

The problem is that when they're wrong, they're wrong in ways that humans
wouldn't be, and the wrongness appears to be "broken" to us and we overweigh
these incorrect responses because they're both wrong _and_ not human in their
wrongness.

~~~
rimantas
Are computers able to recognize a cat in a picture and tell it apart from dog?

~~~
maxerickson
Yes. I'm not sure it is the best article, but this talks about recent
advances:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530561/the-
revolutionar...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530561/the-
revolutionary-technique-that-quietly-changed-machine-vision-forever/)

(discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8290441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8290441))

------
jusben1369
And my earliest iPhone's were pretty poor at getting a GPS signal and drained
my battery like a madman. Within 3 years that had all changed dramatically. So
I'm not sure how much weight I place on current results in an area advancing
so rapidly.

~~~
icebraining
Yes, but your iPhone wasn't exactly the first mobile device with GPS; having a
smartphone with GPS, Wifi, etc and decent battery life was a solved problem,
even if Apple couldn't do it at the time.

~~~
jusben1369
I guess my point is very smart technology companies focused on solving
problems usually experience rapid improvement in the first few years in key
areas of performance. So I expect with all of the attention/investment and
competition around self driving cars the advancements over the next few years
will be dramatic.

------
csense
I'd imagine it's more challenging when the road is covered in snow and the
snowplows haven't gotten to it yet.

~~~
infogulch
That's hard for _humans_ to navigate, let alone self-driving cars. Besides
driving very slowly, drivers will often estimate the lane position based on
the shape of the snow and the quantity/size of lanes and shoulder they expect.
If the snow is not too deep, rumble strips [1] can be very helpful.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_strip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_strip)

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
In our area, there are a couple roads where they have ~2.5m thin poles with
reflectors on top sticking out of the ground at the edge of the road
shoulders.

Very helpful, especially for snowplough drivers.

------
abc_lisper
Won't infrared sensors work well here?

~~~
waps
Water in the air has a large heatmass. So rain leaves a "shadow" in the
infrared. Worse: it can make things invisible in infrared sometimes too.

Rain/fog distorts an image because there's droplets in the air that function
as random lenses. This will affect infrared images just like it affects
visible spectrum images. Only things with wavelengths larger than the droplets
will be able to see through fog.

------
abdias
What will snow do?...

------
robomartin
One of the most important things I learned very early in my CS schooling was
that data (or problem) representation is, by far, the most important step to
solving a problem computationally. Your computing platform, compiler,
language, editor, memory size, speed, etc. cannot compensate for bad
representation.

While I recognize the amount of work and smarts that has gone into self
driving cars it is my humble opinion that the typical approach being taken is
fundamentally flawed.

The right approach, again, in my humble opinion, is to change the
representation of the problem: Roads have to be smart. Cars smarter, yes, but
roads need to be modified for robots. Change the problem you are trying to
solve and the solution might just become massively simpler.

Embedding technology into roads in order to facilitate robotic navigation
would solve tons of problems. Private enterprise can take care of parking lots
and private garages, and they will, when enough self-driving cars are around
to make it worth their while to install the technology.

When my kids were younger they had huge problems opening doors around the
house that were equipped with spherical handles. If their hands were wet after
washing them, even worst. So, we changed the problem: We installed lever type
door handles and even the youngest kid with hands full of soap could open the
door now.

But, hey, what do I know.

~~~
gwern
> Embedding technology into roads in order to facilitate robotic navigation
> would solve tons of problems. Private enterprise can take care of parking
> lots and private garages, and they will, when enough self-driving cars are
> around to make it worth their while to install the technology.

It is easier to have some brainiacs work very hard on making very smart cars
than it is to change local government and infrastructure everywhere.

If you ever make a plan which begins, 'let's convince every county, state, and
federal agency in the USA to change their road construction methods to add
this novel expensive feature...' you can probably drop it then and there as a
stinker.

