
Aurora is finally ready to show the world what it’s been up to - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21080298/aurora-self-driving-car-announcement-2020-plan-waymo-ford-general-motors
======
pwinnski
> Back in 2015, Urmson said that his goal for autonomous vehicles was that
> things would progress so rapidly that his 11-year old son would not need to
> get a driver’s license. Now, he has a more measured prediction: over the
> next five years, we’ll start to see commercial fleets of autonomous vehicles
> piloting people and goods. After that, we could start to see broad adoption.

So five years ago, he was sure we were five years away. Now he's sure we are
five years away. How is this a "more measured prediction?" Because instead of
completely generalized self-driving used by everyone, he's predicting...
completely generalized self-driving used only by companies?

I predict that five years from now, Umson will have a more measured prediction
that is still somehow five years away.

~~~
redwood
5 vs 10

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dmix
> Whether they are public transit agencies or the Ubers and Lyfts of the world
> or logistics companies like Amazon or FedEx or UPS. We think about building
> a driver that can support all of those opportunities.

Why not just focus on one of these? Or even just highway driving kits first
for long hauls and commuters?

This seems to be the approach geohot is trying to take with his company.
Narrowing the scope down to the simple stuff and working it into serious
commercial operations, then scaling it up to harder stuff.

The main thing is scope creep with the different demands of the different
drivers.

But who knows maybe they have a different internal plan for initial roll out.
Or a more generic use case is indeed the best approach...

~~~
modo_mario
On the other hand...the road is the road. It's not like the logistics
companies are trying to automate train traffic, public transit is all about
them boats and others are into the road business. They're all on the road and
the main thing that might differ is the behaviour of their transport to a
certain extent (eg trucks vs cars)

You could focus on highways only for logistics transport but even then you
might need to be able to react to a sudden pedestrian...even if it's just to
make truckers lives a bit easier because you can always rely on human error.

~~~
sytelus
B2B logisitcs have fixed routes so one can simplify a lot of things. For
example, you can map out all traffic lights, stop signs, turns, lanes
precisely and without ambiguity. This can reduce reliance on stochastic
predictions by an order of magnitude. Also, fixed routes mean continuous
recurring paid high value business.

~~~
ng7j5d9
Not really though, right? I theoretically have the same commute every day, but
there have been times when a moving truck has been stopped in my lane, or the
period when a road was down to one lane as it was repaved, and then re-opened
with a new traffic circle, etc. You can't train your truck how to complete a
route today and then assume it'll be able to successfully complete that route
everyday as detours, new traffic patterns, accidents, etc, happen.

~~~
cheriot
Interstates are more consistent than local roads. I'm surprised long haul
trucking isn't the first target for these companies. Driving 20 hours straight
and pulling up next to a local driver for the last mile would be faster (human
drivers are required to sleep) and save a bunch of money.

~~~
modo_mario
Consistency is key in automation. Other than the cost of automation itself
consider the big big costs when those irregularities do exist, the big cost of
the systems made to account for and handle those potential failures and the
fact that as almost always there's more of those failure points than you
expect.

------
Animats
It's Urmson, who likes conservative, safe designs. They may be the winner in
the end.

The competition in self-driving is thinning. Uber gave up. Volvo gave up.
Apple gave up. Tesla is stuck at the driver-assistance level. Cruise is having
problems, but they do have lots of test vehicles on the road. Waymo is
soldiering on, but their plug might be pulled. Google/Alphabet are cutting
back on "moonshots", not having had much success with any of them. (See list
from 2016. Any successes?)[1]

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/20-moonshot-projects-by-
goog...](https://www.businessinsider.com/20-moonshot-projects-by-google-
turned-alphabet-2016-2)

~~~
vardump
Are you sure Apple actually gave up yet? I thought they still have related
activity following their recent acquisition of Drive.ai.

If anyone, it could well be Apple that can catch up with Tesla's self-driving
capabilities.

When it comes to Tesla, they might be sitting on better technology than it
might seem at first glance.

Although I'm not sure they'll manage in Europe, pedestrians and cyclists are
more common and have better rights. Does Tesla get enough non-visual
wavelength information from front sides, to avoid pedestrians and wild
animals? Tesla's self-driving story could be cut short in Europe the first
time the car kills a cyclist crossing the road in low visibility conditions,
like during heavy snowfall.

Can Tesla manage in low angle sunshine and snow or dirt on the cameras? Humans
can shift their viewpoint, but cameras can't. This could be particularly
difficult in North Europe.

Some Asian markets like India and Vietnam could be difficult for them because
of chaotic traffic systems.

Addendum: If played "right", self-driving can be $100B+ business. I'd expect
true poker hands to be only shown once time is right and legislation allows
it.

~~~
twic
Who's working on self-driving cars in Europe then? I only know about a couple
of groups of Cambridge nerds:

[https://five.ai/faq](https://five.ai/faq)

[https://wayve.ai/](https://wayve.ai/)

~~~
jpm_sd
[https://www.oxbotica.com/](https://www.oxbotica.com/)

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DoctorOetker
this is a really poor title:

I can not guess from the name "Aurora" what this is about,

and certainly not from the cryptic: "... is finally ready to show the world
what it’s been up to"

~~~
olalonde
Yeah, I thought this would be about Amazon Aurora.

~~~
levosmetalo
And this makes title more informative? I mean, why should we have to know what
is the Amazon Aurora?

~~~
pas
Replace Amazon with AWS, and it helps at least to categorize AWS Aurora as
some kind of IT SaaS. That Aurora is a DB-as-a-Service thing. They offer MySQL
and PostgreSQL.

------
darepublic
How about instead of using lidar, we use a camera on a swivel that can check
mirrors and look out onto the road with basically the same visual sight as a
human. Then for test data we just have our drivers wear some kind of camera
glasses to capture what they are looking at and have them drive around, create
labelled data in terms of what they see and how they respond in terms of input
to the car. Then we can train a system that just kind of drives like humans
do, with the same flaws, but hopefully with the same strengths as well.

~~~
freehunter
Because people aren't going to trust self-driving cars unless they're
_drastically_ better than humans are. Being as good as a human will always
lead to an inevitable crash where the human will say " _I_ could have avoided
that" and now the whole system crumbles.

Human pedestrians get hit and killed by human-driven vehicles every day.
Uber's self driving vehicle did it once, in a situation that was also missed
by the human supervisor, and it was national news for weeks.

~~~
cr0sh
> Because people aren't going to trust self-driving cars unless they're
> drastically better than humans are.

I believe that people aren't ever going to trust self-driving cars, unless
they are "perfect". Even ten 9s of reliability (no driving errors or
accidents) would probably be too imperfect for people to accept (and I don't
believe humans have ever made anything that close to perfection).

I believe the reason this is probably so has to do with assignment of blame
and guilt. Something easily done with human drivers, less so (or maybe
impossible) for self-driving vehicles.

~~~
freehunter
Eventually I think they will, as the generations who drove their own car age
out and new generations who grew up reliant on self-driving technology comes
of age.

You see it with automatic transmissions, some people don't trust the computer
to shift gears for them because they think they can do it better. As time went
on and automatic gearboxes became more reliable and more popular, those
complaints slowed down. (speaking from an American standpoint here)

You see it with anti-lock brakes (ABS). My grandparents still don't trust ABS
even with studies showing ABS stops quicker than humans pumping the brakes,
because it takes a level of control away from them. But that's not a common
complaint these days.

You see it with electric cars, where any fire make national news but no one
seems to care about the thousands of ICE cars that burn to the ground every
year.

You even see it with seatbelts, people who claim it's safer to be thrown from
the car in an accident.

But eventually those complaints lose their novelty and people just accept it
as normal.

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RickJWagner
Those blue things on top look a bit too much like the old police-car lights, I
think.

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smoyer
I am disappointed that this article isn't about black,floating,triangular
aircraft with bead-on-a-wire exhaust.

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hartator
> It doesn’t trot out its vehicles just to prove they exist or take
> journalists for test drives to demonstrate that the technology actually
> works.

Well they just did that, didn’t they?

~~~
chrisseaton
The article knows this - it says

> that finally appears to be changing

