
Google Self-Driving Car Project - cjdulberger
http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/
======
danso
From the FAQ:

 _Will Google’s self-driving cars get into accidents? Have they gotten into
accidents before?_

> _Safety is our top priority. In the 6 years of our project, we’ve been
> involved in a small number of accidents in more than 1.8 million miles of
> autonomous and manual driving combined. Our vehicles have not caused any
> accidents while in self-driving mode. For more information, view our monthly
> reports._

So no accidents in self-driving mode; a "small number" during "manual
driving"...and credit to Google, even though there is only one monthly report,
it contains a listing of past accidents:

[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-0515.pdf)

I skimmed over the dozen listed incidents. Several of them were during
"autonomous" mode but are incidents in which another car is described as
hitting the vehicle. Arguably, none of the "manual" mode accidents were
egregiously the fault of Google.

However, I think the definition of "caused" will be debate here and for years
to come. In one Feb. 2015 incident, the autonomous Google car is struck in the
side rear by a car that rolled through a crossbound stop sign. The Google car
is described as "Applying the brakes in response to its detection of the other
vehicle's speed and trajectory"...since the collision ended up happening
anyway, and it hit the _rear_ of the Google car...doesn't that imply that if
the Google car _hadn 't_ cautiously applied the brakes while going through the
intersection, it would have cleared the intersection without getting hit? Also
worth noting: the Google human driver tried to take control during the
autobrake sequence...so it's possible that his/her reaction and manual braking
was what led to the rear collision.

~~~
VikingCoder
If it's debatable what a _human_ should have done in a given situation, you
can't really expect a computer to perform _better._

That said, when they sell one of these things to a person, how the heck are
they going to handle the insurance?

~~~
enneff
Insurance companies will love insuring these cars because they will be
involved in far fewer accidents, and will have a complete log of exactly what
happened so it will be easy to assign blame.

~~~
teraflop
Not just that, but human drivers have a lot of "hidden variables" affecting
their accident risk -- level of experience, state of mind, aggressiveness,
familiarity with local roads, and so on. Insurance companies have to try to
account for all of that when calculating premiums, based on a limited number
of data points.

With autonomous vehicles, two cars of the same model running the same software
should be more or less interchangeable. So even leaving aside the _number_ of
accidents that occur, the level of _uncertainty_ should be a lot lower.

------
dylanjermiah
FAQ:
[http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/faq/#q1](http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/faq/#q1)

------
nogridbag
> Aging or visually impaired loved ones wouldn't have to give up their
> independence.

I know this is simply phase one, but I'm hoping google puts some emphasis on
individuals in wheelchairs in future prototypes because this technology can be
life changing for some with extremely limited mobility - my mother being one
of them. Independence is key here and the the majority of us can't conceive
what it's like to to be dependent on others for everything. A user with a
wheelchair or power chair needs to able to get in and out of the self driving
car with zero assistance.

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peter303
I am curious why google dabbles in all these strange projects removed from
their core business, which seems to be organizing the worlds information and
making some money off that. are these merely hobbies of eccentric, rich
founders?

On the other hand I am glad somebody is pouring money into fundamental
research. The government has limited funds. Many big companies that formally
had big R&D cutback during downsizings.

~~~
Hortinstein
Google is a machine learning company. Knowing about how people use their phone
(Android), Computer (ChromeOS), etc a self driving car gives them more and
more data to refine and expand their algorithms.

At the same token it is because they have these vast troves of data and some
of the best machine learning scientists in the word, they are suited to do
this type of research.

Another thing to think about is that if we are not distracted by the commute
we will spend more time using Google services.

~~~
bane
(note: this is supposed to be pseudo-tongue-in-cheek-back-of-the-envelope
math)

Let's say they invest...I dunno $300m in developing this technology
(completely made-up number)

\- The average commute time in the U.S. is ~30 minutes...or 1 hour per day. I
don't know what it is globally, but for fun we'll assume it's the same for
everybody on the planet.

\- Google made $66billion in 2014 (or about $9.43 per person on the planet,
assuming 7billion people)

\- Assume most people are awake 16 hours during a day.

\- However, if people are stuck driving for 1 hour out of those 16, that's
only 15 hours they can build revenue for google.

\- This means google is generating about $.63 per available waking hour per
person.

\- 1 more available hour is $.63*7billion = a possible "new" market of
$4.4billion/year assuming every person

This would pay back the R&D costs handsomely + tons of profit in the first
year if google can get everybody to switch all at once.

Even if it takes a decade or two to switch humanity to self-driving cars, it
would still pay for itself quickly.

------
nathanskidmore
Don't miss the reports section:
[http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/](http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/)
which links to a May 2015 report that gives info about accidents and computer
vision

~~~
ufmace
Was just going to post that myself. I think this is the first time they've
published a report of all of the accidents their vehicles have been in.

------
Animats
Google doesn't give out much info about how their system works. It seems to be
very much like the technology from the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Most of
the improvements since seem to relate to predicting the movements of other
street users. That's not surprising, considering Google's focus on "big data".

Sensor technology hasn't improved much. It's still mostly cameras, Velodyne
rotating LIDAR units and off the shelf centimeter Doppler RADAR units. Flash
LIDAR and millimeter RADAR aren't volume products yet. They will be once auto
companies get serious about this.

The DARPA Humanoid Challenge is live today. Watch:
[http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/](http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/)

------
gumby
I can't wait until I don't have to drive, but it's hard to see how much of a
difference google is making. We're in downtown MV and these cars are
continuously driving around, and one is parked every night a couple of houses
down from my girlfriend's house.

The problem is, they drive the same routes over and over. I always see them in
the same places, and nowhere else. They have hyper-mapped a small number of
routes (mm resolution). And all that highway driving: MV to SF and back on
280, over and over and over again.

I am sure they are making progress, but how much?

------
TheGRS
Little surprised to see no comments on the car's aesthetic design. My first
thought was "ew". At least with Tesla they tried to go with a design that was
very appealing to the eye. This car looks like an ugly, mass-produced POC. My
better senses tell me it is a prototype unit that was built for function over
form. Just saying, if you want to get the public behind your idea, better put
together something that is a little more sexy.

Then again, Smart Cars are equally ugly and they have gained some huge
traction, at least with car2go, so what do I know.

~~~
teraflop
I'm willing to bet the aesthetic design is a very deliberate choice. Google
knows that there's a lot of skepticism toward the idea of autonomous cars,
largely based on their unfamiliarity. By limiting the initial version to 25mph
and making it shaped like a Cozy Coupe, they're making it seem as non-
threatening as they possibly can.

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michaelmcmillan
This is really impressive. However, has any one else thought about the ethical
dilemmas these algorithms will have to decide upon?

Say for instance that two pedestrians, a young child and an old person,
suddenly find themselves in front of a self-driving car. There is not time for
the car to brake in time so the algorithm has to make a choice: Which
pedestrian gets hit?

I think we'll see more questions like these in the coming years as AI
progresses and we become more dependent on it.

~~~
ufmace
I think the real answer to this sort of question is: Who cares?

There are tens of thousands of people dying every year in very real car
crashes, plus probably an order of magnitude more suffering life-changing
injuries, and self-driving cars have a huge potential to cut way down on that.
Meanwhile, situations like that virtually never happen - maybe like once a
year in the entire US. If they can eliminate even 10% of the actual accidents,
then they could run down both pedestrians in that imaginary scenario, and
still be way ahead.

It may be fun to think about ethical dilemmas like that, but they are
fantastically rare compared to the huge numbers of perfectly ordinary crashes
that happen every day. Let's fix those, and worry about the rare one-offs
after we've reduced the accident rate by 95%.

~~~
michaelmcmillan
Yes, I agree with you. These edge cases will probably never actually happen.
But again, this is only hypothetical. Are there lines of code that actually
define the behaviour of the car in these cases? I think it's an interesting
question (-:

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dbecker
I'm trying to figure out if I can keep my current car until autonomous
vehicles become broadly available. Anyone here have an informed opinion on
when that will happen?

~~~
greedo
Unless you live in an area with perfect weather, don't expect autonomous
vehicles very soon. They have difficulty in heavy rain, snow, and ice.

~~~
TwiztidK
Absolutely. If you've ever driven though heavy snow, you know that you can
barely see any of the road (no white or yellow lines) and lights are the only
part of other cars that you can see. Signs and other traffic signals get
completely covered with snow. People can barely drive in those conditions, I
highly doubt that a self driving car could with current technology. Although I
have high hopes for the future.

~~~
alooPotato
Why would machines be worse than humans in bad weather if they are better than
humans in good weather? Its not like our eyes are better than the machines
cameras.

If its because human drivers can better "build a mental model" of whats
happening with limited visibility/data - that seems like the same problem that
autonomous cars are designed to solve.

Whats stopping autonomous cars from making progress in the bad weather arena?
Is it just we haven't done enough miles in that weather and we need to train
the ML some more?

~~~
teraflop
You're putting a lot of faith in the ability to solve a very difficult
problem. Computer vision has made huge strides in recent years, but it's still
far behind the capabilities of the human visual cortex. It's not just a matter
of building a simple model and training it until it achieves arbitrarily high
accuracy. ML encompasses a powerful set of tools, but it's not a magic black
box that eats data and spits out AI.

We don't yet know how the human brain processes images at a detailed level,
and it's too complex of a system to optimize by brute-force. The best ML image
processing systems still rely on a lot of pre-encoded assumptions, _and_
require huge amounts of training data/computational resources, _and_ don't
perform as well as humans even on simple tasks.

For now, autonomous vehicles "cheat" a lot by using sensor technologies like
lidar and radar -- techniques that produce spatial data that can be
interpreted more easily than raw imagery. That adds a lot to the hardware
costs, but it's currently the only way we can make them perform acceptably
well in real-world scenarios. And conditions that interfere with those
technologies more severely, like fog or snow, are still crippling.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Actually there's no reason to suppose that computer vision hasn't already
exceeded the human capacity. After all, it has lidar and radar. Cheating or
not, it has a very good result.

~~~
teraflop
Agreed -- don't knock it if it works! However, those kinds of sensors don't
really fall into what's normally considered "computer vision".

Mind you, I'm extremely optimistic about the potential successes of autonomous
cars in the near- to mid-future (the next 5 to 25 years, say). But I don't
want people to get the wrong impression about where the state of the art is
_today_. And in particular, I want to push back against the idea that machine
learning is a solved problem, and that autonomous cars can teach themselves to
drive as well as a human if we only give them enough miles of practice.

------
return0
is this a product, a prototype or are people going to sign up to start driving
them? (and how?)

