

Latest prototype self-driving vehicles cruising around Mountain View - msoad
https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/3NuRpigxp4e

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nlh
Was discussing self-driving cars with a few colleagues on a drive the other
day, and a question came up:

Does anyone have a sense how the cars handle situations where traffic is being
directed by a human, with hand signals, etc? I.e. a cop standing in the middle
of the road, waving through cars through an intersection where there's been an
accident, etc.?

We pondered a few scenarios -- are they reading the hand signals? Are they
judging other cars' movement? What if it's not a cop but a crazy random person
who jumps into traffic and decides to play cop? We humans are remarkably good
at determining "soft" things like "that guy looks crazy - let's get out of
here" vs "that's a cop, I better pay attention", etc. The rabbit hole gets
quite deep here...

~~~
rabbidruster
I actually ran into a simple example of a challenge like this. The power went
out in mountain view a few weeks ago and a bunch of stop lights stopped
working. I pulled up behind the self driving car which had stopped at the
disabled light. Instead of treating the light like a stop sign, the car
remained stop. After 5 or so seconds stopped at the light (there were no other
cars at the intersection), I honked at them. I assume someone took manual
control because it started to move right after.

While this situation could probably be addressed, it is a great examples of
challenges these cars may come across.

~~~
bsder
> Instead of treating the light like a stop sign, the car remained stop. After
> 5 or so seconds stopped at the light (there were no other cars at the
> intersection), I honked at them.

There are many normal _humans_ who don't know what to do when the traffic
lights are in a non-normal situation

The difference is that once a self-driving car is programmed for what to do,
it won't get it wrong again.

Self-driving cars will get continually better and will eventually surpass
human drivers simply because human drivers will never improve.

~~~
alextgordon
It handled it completely correctly. Lights being out is an exceptional
situation where the usual rules of the road are suspended.

 _Sometimes_ it means "treat it as a stop sign", but _other_ times it means
"turn the car around because ignoring the lights on this particular road would
be positively suicidal". e.g. a level crossing.

Computers have no conception of danger, and so they don't get to decide what's
dangerous and what's not.

~~~
bsder
Actually, in California, that isn't true. An intersection controlled by a
traffic light converts to a 4-way stop when the traffic light is out.

However, even for your example of a level crossing, humans fail regularly.
People regularly run into trains in Texas at a level crossing because the
train has a long stretch of flatbed cars that someone missed at dusk or at
night.

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atallcostsky
It looks like Google will be posting monthly reports of their self-driving
cars from now on. Looks very interesting. See:
[http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/](http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/)

~~~
refurb
Is it just me, or does this incident seems like it was made worse by the
autonomous mode?

 _​A Google Lexus model AV was traveling northbound on El Camino Real in
autonomous mode when another vehicle traveling westbound on View Street failed
to come to a stop at the stop sign at the intersection of El Camino and View
Street. The other vehicle rolled through the stop sign and struck the right
rear quarter panel and right rear wheel of the Google AV. Prior to the
collision, the Google AV’s autonomous technology began applying the brakes in
response to its detection of the other vehicle’s speed and trajectory. Just
before the collision, the driver of the Google AV disengaged autonomous mode
and took manual control of the vehicle in response to the application of the
brakes by the Google AV’s autonomous technology._

It looks like the Google Vehicle (GV) was traveling on El Camino (I'm assuming
it had no stop sign), the computer saw the vehicle approaching (what should
have been a stop) and hit the brakes. The driver took over (right before the
collision) to stop the brakes from being applied and the car hit the _rear_ of
the GV. With out the computer controlling the speed, I wonder if the GV would
have cleared the intersection already?

Then again, depending when each event happened, maybe if the driver didn't
take over, the GV wouldn't have been hit? Hard to tell.

~~~
btian
How about everything would have been all right if the other vehicle stopped at
the stop sign?

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bkjelden
One thing I've noticed seeing the Lexus cars drive around Mountain View is
that they're incredibly cautious.

I wonder what will happen once they become more commonplace, and human drivers
realize they can be incredibly aggressive around the self-driving cars - cut
them off, etc - and the self driving cars will happily accommodate the human
driver, except with better reaction time and precision than a human driver
could ever have.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Probably the cars will hit them. If you look at the disclosed accidents list
that seems to be not entirely uncommon (even if it isn't the robot car's
"fault")

That said, an algorithm that learns how to prevent people from cutting it off
would be interesting indeed.

~~~
CyberDildonics
Which cars will hit which other cars? If a driverless car can avoid an
accident, especially by stopping, it will.

~~~
seanp2k2
Ahh, the halting problem :)

I think it will be a long while before we have fully autonomous cars which
drive better than humans even in the edge cases.

~~~
CyberDildonics
It depends on what you mean by better. Dealing with an unpowered stoplight by
stopping is one thing, actually colliding into something else is different. It
is already becoming common for new cars to have features which keep collisions
from happening.

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protomyth
"The prototypes’ speed is capped at a neighborhood-friendly 25mph"

What are the speed limits of the roads the car will be driving on?

~~~
jacobolus
I really wish all cars would drive 25 mph on residential streets. The big
limiter on car travel time is timing of traffic signals and overall road
capacity, not top speed.

It’s very common around me for cars to be driving on semi-arterial residential
streets (with official speed limit 25) at 55+ mph at 2 AM, which is both noisy
and potentially unsafe: there’s low visibility at night and at that speed it
would be hard to maneuver out of the way if there was something moved into the
road.

If we had smaller cheaper lighter-weight cars which maxed at 25 mph on
residential streets, plus maybe some of those 15–20 mph electric bikes which
are everywhere in China, plus fast, frequent, and reliable mass transit,
there’d be little negative impact on routine chores and commuting, but huge
improvements in pedestrian and cyclist safety.

~~~
jacobolus
Right now our infrastructure and zoning in the US is all optimized for upper-
middle-class 25–60 year-old able-bodied adults, and really sucks for children,
the elderly, sick or disabled people, the mentally ill, the poor, foreign
tourists, etc.

Even among healthy young professionals, we optimize for everyone having a long
commute, living spread apart, strictly separating shops from housing, etc.,
such that basic living pretty much requires hours of driving time every day.
In better designed cities which are a bit more compact and have arranged the
most common destinations more centrally, car trips are less necessary, on
average are shorter, and smaller slower cars would be more practical.

I’d love it if I could drive around town in a electric golf cart type vehicle
that only cost a few thousand dollars new and topped at 15 mph (perhaps
slightly larger and safer than a golf cart, but that general idea), without
getting honked at and run over by angry dudes in SUVs. That would be better
than a bike for carrying my groceries or driving a few miles in the rain, but
much cheaper and more convenient for most purposes than a full-sized car.

~~~
djrogers
>I’d love it if I could drive around town in a electric golf cart type vehicle
that only cost a few thousand dollars new and topped at 15 mph (perhaps
slightly larger and safer than a golf cart, but that general idea),

They're called NEVs, and you can pick them up for a few thousand bucks.
Electric, 25mph, cheap to insure, and fun.

~~~
jacobolus
The key part here is “without getting honked at and run over by angry dudes in
SUVs”.

~~~
nmrm2
Just get one and use it and don't let the arrogant bastards get to you.

After a couple of near-fatal bicycle accidents with asshole cars, I got a
front and rear camera for my bicycle and always take up the entire lane I'm
entitled to. I'll pull off to the parking lane and let people pass when
there's space and the guy behind me is being civil. But I just completely
ignore the assholes who honk and yell, even if there's ample space in the
parking lane.

And I buy myself a beer for every honk or yell I get, so I can stay pretty zen
knowing I'm going to have a good Friday night, instead of getting angry at SUV
dude. And, you'd be surprised how rarely I get drunk -- most people are pretty
decent :-)

(for context -- I ride on 25mph streets and my cruising speed on my normal
routes is 20-25 mph, and my max speed is typically around 27. I accelerate
pretty aggresively for a cyclist, and only moderately slower than I think is
safe for a car on these roads, which have lots of houses and pedestrian
traffic. The last guy who passed me immediately slammed his brakes when he
realized I was already ~10 over and he was now doing 35 in a 15mph school
zone... idiot.)

------
msoad
One way that Google can launch its driverless Uber is by using remote drivers
that can take over once the program can't decide what to do...

~~~
eru
It depends on the legal framework.

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shpx
I don't mean to troll, but I really hope that that is not the final look of
the car. Looks like one of those toy red and yellow cars [0]. Such an amazing
engineering achievement deserves a more serious, futuristic look.

[0] [https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2c/7b/4b/2c7b4b50b...](https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2c/7b/4b/2c7b4b50b3e4cc44b0b4a7f341b419c6.jpg)

~~~
lotu
This was something that Elon Musk really got right with Tesla, he made it a
point for his cars to have sex appeal. His model names are even S3X.

On the other hand I think this little car is probably going to be geared to
the elderly or the disabled who would not be able to drive a regular car, so
in that case sex appeal might not matter that much.

~~~
a_c_s
I think "cute and harmless" is actually the right approach for these cars, at
least while they are in development. It is harder to project fears of unsafe,
dangerous, menacing AI on something that looks likes a kid's toy.

Once autonomous cars are for sale and established in the market then I totally
agree with you.

~~~
gammarator
Reminds me of this: New Yorkers will help a cute but hapless robot get where
it's trying to go: [http://www.tweenbots.com/](http://www.tweenbots.com/)

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jliptzin
Looks like the Howard.

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dzhiurgis
> the same fleet that has self-driven over 1 million miles since we started
> the project

Of which only a fraction was in self driving mode.

They spent 1 million miles learning the model.

~~~
EmployedRussian
You are mistaken: "We’ve self-driven over 1 million miles"
[http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/where/](http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/where/)

(The total miles driven in both manual and self-driving mode is closer to 2
million miles I believe.)

~~~
dzhiurgis
Ok, there was an article previously that I've misinterpreted. From their
monthly report:

> Autonomous mode: 1,011,338 miles

> Manual mode: 796,250 miles

~~~
toomuchtodo
I asked why they don't include the miles their algorithms have trained on
using simulated driving, and one of their safety drivers emailed me back and
said they'd consider it.

