
A First Look at How Google's Self-Driving Car Handles City Streets - jbredeche
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2014/04/first-look-how-googles-self-driving-car-handles-city-streets/8977/
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andrenotgiant
The amount of sensor data that Google could pick up from a fleet of self-
driving cars is staggering.

If Google wanted, they could use these Self-Driving cars to:

1\. Convert Streetview to show same-day photos.

2\. Bring in Traffic data that is WAY more precise than phone GPS pings.

3\. Scan for and report open parking spots

4\. Monitor for design-based congestion problems (e.g. no-bike-lane street
with lots of bike traffic, areas where speeding is norm)

5\. Track location of food trucks in real time.

6\. Monitor foot traffic by street address.

~~~
lftl
Throw in some license plate recognition and they could track individual car
locations with a pretty wide breadth.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Or track individuals with facial recognition; my understanding is that
Facebook's facial recognition algorithm is _very_ accurate, not sure where
Google's tech is in this regard.

~~~
stingraycharles
Isnt Picasa owned by Google? Their facial recognition is pretty accurate too,
not noticeably different from Facebook's imho.

~~~
chavesn
OT here, but I've used Picasa's facial recognition extensively on a very large
library of photos (about 50,000). Anecdotally, I would say it started out very
good, but, strangely, it got much worse over time.

Part or all of this effect may have been due to UI bugs or deficiencies that
didn't clearly show what it was really trying to tell me (does it really think
this is a new person, or separate for some other reason?), or didn't allow for
subtle variations on what I was trying to tell it (such as "no, but good
guess", or "this looks nothing like the person, but actually is")[1].

I can only guess why this is, but at first it seemed to be quite good at
finding new faces that looked very similar to the ones it had found so far.
Over time, it's as if the wide variety of confirmed positives reduced the
confidence in finding any new faces at all.

[1]: It was somewhat confusing whether I should select and move a bunch of
wrong faces to the right person, or just say no and let it try again. It might
have also helped if I'd been able to say "yes these are all the same person,
but I don't want to name them in my database".

------
ScottBurson
On the subject of city situations that a self-driving car might have trouble
with, I'll relate a story I heard years ago when living in the Boston area:

An out-of-state driver pulled up to a Y intersection -- for concreteness,
let's imagine this as an upside-down Y, with our driver arriving on the right
leg. There was continuous traffic flowing up the left leg and out the top,
oblivious to the stop sign on their side of the intersection. (On top of that,
there was a police car parked on the side of the road nearby, oblivious to
their obliviousness. It was clear that the social contract was that that
particular stop sign was inoperative when traffic was heavy.)

So the driver turned to his passenger, a local, and asked "what do I do? how
do I get in?" The answer came back: "You have to convince them you're
serious."

~~~
brownbat
That's the problem for the 99% humans 1% driverless scenario, the inverse is
equally troubling to me.

Driving currently involves a range of aggressiveness strategies, it may have
hit a certain equilibrium mix of insane and polite drivers.

If 99% of the cars dodge whatever you do, then you're messing with the
metagame. Suddenly driving like a maniac, forcing all the polite computers out
of your way gets you everywhere faster.

If driverless systems become common, they'll almost have to be required.

~~~
wtallis
As long as my self-driving car is allowed to report you to the Highway Patrol,
I can't see this becoming a problem. It's just another one of those issues
that's a lot more easily solved than what's been done to get driverless cars
to their current state of capability.

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erobbins
While the technology they have built is very impressive, I can't help but
think they are doing the wrong thing., in a way. I think the huge wins from
automated cars will be in interstate cargo transport.. semis that drive
themselves from city to city on the freeways and are dropped of and picked up
by human drivers over the last mile. City driving is so chaotic and
unpredictable that I'm not sure there's a win there.

For human transport, including in urban areas, I think the target should be
aerial... automated electrical air taxis that recharge themselves as needed.
Automating flight is a whole lot easier. No pedestrians, no bikes, no couches
or trash cans in the road.

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ScottBurson
_Dolgov logs the road work incident in the computer. He explains that feedback
from the driving teams is critical to the car 's development. "Every disengage
has a severity associated with it," he says. "That was not the end of the
world. We would have gotten through the cones. But it was a problem. Once we
go back we'll pull the disk out of the car. We'll import the log from this
run. This will get flagged to developers. It will go into our database of
scenarios and test cases we track. We'll have more information about this on
the desktops, but from what I saw on the screen it looks like we detected [the
cones] correctly, but for some reason the planner was conservative and decided
not to change lanes. We'll create a scenario that says, here, the right thing
would have been to change lanes, and the next versions will have it
addressed."_

Interesting that this is done so much in a scenario-by-scenario way. I would
have thought something like this would be covered by a general rule, such as
"choose an unobstructed path if one exists, otherwise stop".

I suppose such general rules can conflict sometimes, and that's why you need
the database of scenarios; but still, this case surprises me, since there was
no reason the car couldn't simply change lanes.

And I would think you would need the general rules because there will always
be scenarios you couldn't have anticipated. Maybe the answer is that as long
as you have the alert test driver, it's better for the car not to try to apply
general rules; but once the car is truly autonomous with no driver, it
shouldn't be quite so conservative, particularly in a situation like this
where a danger-free solution existed.

~~~
jonknee
It sounds like they're just adding unit test cases--the new scenario is the
test and what actually changes is separate (be it a new algorithm, a special
case, changes to existing algorithms, etc).

~~~
Qworg
This is exactly how it works - testing reveals corner cases and you address
them.

------
donpdonp
The video of the LIDAR data and the software's interpretation of the
environment is fantastic. The "augmented reality" of the long barrier in front
of potential collisions, and the green/red road-ahead indicator makes it easy
to see what the software is seeing and thinking.

------
rdl
I can't imagine not wanting to work on this. It must be really complicated at
Google -- I'd take a 50-75% pay cut to work on this project at Google, rather
than ads optimization. It must be an interesting organizational challenge
figuring out how people get assigned to it; sort of like PARC vs. optimizing
photocopier software at Xerox back in the day, except back then they kept PARC
pretty much secret from engineering (from what I've read).

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ableal
_" It's those little tweaks that bridge the gap between a jerky robotic ride
and an amazingly smooth one."_

Properly taught robots know about jerk, snap, crackle and pop (the third,
fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of the position vector with respect to
time,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jounce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jounce)
). "Amazingly smooth" is probably the minimum jerk trajectory.

------
Holbein
From the article: "The first rule of riding in Google's self-driving car, says
Dmitri Dolgov, is not to compliment Google's self-driving car. (...) I have
just announced that so far the trip has been "amazingly smooth." "The car
knows," says Dolgov."

I'd say considering remarkably complex work, compliments are absolutely
justified. Why shouldn't we compliment a creator of a for a job well done
anymore? What's wrong with these people?

~~~
epi8
It's just a superstition. I give demos all the time, and I hate it when I do a
test run and people tell me how awesome it's working. Tell me afterwards,
you'll jinx it if you tell me before. It doesn't actually work that way, but
hot damn it feels like it does.

And the demos I give don't put anyone's lives at risk!

------
ableal
It's pretty clear that autonomous vehicles are going to be standard, sooner or
later. The technology will be mandatory for any new vehicle allowed on public
roads.

I'm just curious what's Google plan for it. Are they solving the problems,
getting patents and licensing to car manufacturers? Selling devices, with data
collection built-in? Something else?

~~~
eurleif
Regardless of Google's plans for the cars themselves, if people are freed from
having to watch the road, they will probably use most of their newfound free
time to stare at a screen. That benefits Google.

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azth
Do the radar systems on these vehicles have any effects on health?

~~~
ramchip
[http://www.google.com.tr/patents/US5821897](http://www.google.com.tr/patents/US5821897)

> The 76-77 GHz range is assigned by the Federal Communications Commission
> (FCC) for collision avoidance radar systems.

Some info on what that means:
[http://www.rfcom.ca/faq/answers.shtml](http://www.rfcom.ca/faq/answers.shtml)

------
chrismealy
I want to know how it handles rain.

~~~
r0fl
I think a self driving car will do a much better job operating in the rain
than a human being. Rain makes it difficult to see and wipers are sometimes
worn out and make visibility even worse.

Slick driving conditions are also dangerous for human drivers but these days
there are electronic stability systems in place to make it less dangerous to
drive in the rain. If you have a car that can turn all traction controls off
you can easily see the difference of assisted and non assisted driving in the
rain.

I think the bigger problem will be heavy snow. What happens when you park your
car at the mall and come back to find the sensors covered in 4 inches of snow?
Very curious to see how they deal with that issue.

~~~
chrismealy
Not yet. That's why Google's been testing in Nevada.

~~~
SatoshiPacioli
Wait, did you actually want to know how it handles rain, or were you asking a
rhetorical question implying that it can not handle rain? If the latter, it
would've been friendlier to say "it doesn't handle rain well, here's why:
[...]"

~~~
ryanmcbride
I think he probably started searching for answers after he posed his original
question, and found some. Not that he was asking a question he knew the answer
to.

------
inthewoods
Maybe it's just me, but the idea that Google is testing these cars on regular
street is pretty amazing. What happens if someone dies while they're running
their tests? I'm not trying to troll, but it seems to me that the liability
concerns here would be huge.

~~~
jabelk
I believe the tests are closely supervised, with a fully attentive person
sitting in the front seat ready to take over. If anyone died or there was some
accident, that person would be liable. (Although the public outcry/fear
mongering over a death in that situation would likely be a huge setback. I'm
sure they're being extraordinarily careful.)

------
elwell
> The Google car can now recognize temporary stop signs, making it less
> reliant on pre-programmed maps

1\. Obtain handheld stop sign

2\. Troll self-driving cars

My point is, a human would know when a kid is just messing with you by holding
up a stop sign; a self-driving car would slam its brakes?

~~~
altcognito
Picture taken of offender. Authorities called, charges filed; Impeding
traffic.

------
jtchang
The technology inside the self driving car is amazing. It almost makes me
think that we will have AI at the same time we will have a self driving car.

------
driverdan
Interesting article. Anyone catch this?

> Larry Burns ... says taxi-like fleets of shared autonomous vehicles can
> become viable business models if they can capture just 10 percent of all
> city trips.

"Just" 10%? Sounds like typical startup BS numbers.

------
Aloisius
The defensive style driving of the Google car won't work in San Francisco
where you literally have to break the law in order to turn left (by stopping
in the intersection and often finishing the turn on a red).

~~~
ScottBurson
That's actually legal. Provided you entered the intersection legally, you have
the right-of-way over cross traffic (but not over oncoming traffic, obviously)
to exit it.

I don't have the California Vehicle Code in front of me, but I'm pretty sure
about this because the situation arose during my road test to get my first
license (yes, I still remember this, even though it was almost 40 years ago!).
I had entered the intersection to turn left, and when the light turned yellow,
the tester lady said "clear the intersection" or words to that effect. (I
passed.)

Anyway it has to be that way -- you can't have cars stuck in the middle of the
intersection while cross traffic tries to go around them!

~~~
Aloisius
I have actually gotten a ticket for this near Mendocino. From the DMV
handbook:

 _> If you are turning left, make the turn only if you have enough space to
complete the turn before creating a hazard for any oncoming vehicle,
bicyclist, or pedestrian. Do not enter the intersection if you cannot get
completely across before the light turns red. If you block the intersection,
you can be cited._

~~~
ScottBurson
What happened, exactly? I'm guessing you entered the intersection when the
lane you wanted to turn into was backed up, so you would not have been able to
clear the intersection even in the absence of oncoming traffic. Is that right?

~~~
Aloisius
Actually it was non-stop oncoming traffic. The last person entered the
intersection on a deep yellow. By the time they cleared my car, I was in a red
in the middle of the intersection (as were they, but I got the ticket).

~~~
ScottBurson
Assuming you were the lead car in the left-turn lane, I think the officer
erred in citing you. The law can't require you to predict when other people
are going to act illegally so you can plan accordingly.

It also doesn't make sense that not even one car per cycle is allowed to turn
left across such a traffic flow. You could have sat there for hours following
that advice.

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vaadu
How is this a realistic future with an ambulance chaser around every corner?
What company is going to insure the vehicle owner? It's gotten so bad that the
the killers are suing the victims.
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/26/newser-...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/26/newser-
driver-sues-boy-she-hit/8201609/)

