
Meet the Founder Trying to Start the Self-Driving Car Revolution - edward
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201502/john-brandon/the-new-cruise-control-kyle-vogt-cruise-automation.html
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Animats
That "Cruise" company worries me. It may give self-driving cars a bad
reputation.

It seems to be lane-keeping plus radar cruise control, plus hype. All the
major auto manufacturers have lane-keeping and cruise control working, and
some are shipping it. It's good enough to work in most situations on freeways.
Most. The auto manufacturers are reluctant to let customers use it as a full
autopilot. The basic technology doesn't have enough situational awareness.

Here's what Mercedes has right now:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_RFzC_G5BA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_RFzC_G5BA)

(Turn up the video resolution and read the displays. Messages include "lateral
effort from planning too high", "Timeout from ... radar", "Planning timeout
... steer", "Curvature from planning too high".)

Cruise is hyping their system as a full driver-can-do-something-else
autopilot. The major manufacturers, all of whom are painfully familiar with
liability claims, aren't ready to go that far. Their systems have features
which force the human driver to stay reasonably alert. Cruise is app and web
people, not real-time and avionics people. This is worrisome.

In autonomous driving marketing, Volvo is the current leader:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E-tF-6PWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E-tF-6PWU)

~~~
kvogt
Kyle here, Cruise CEO.

It sucks when press (or even our own marketing) give well-meaning people like
you the wrong impression. We need to fix this. The positive impact self-
driving cars will have on society far outweighs any desire we have to be first
to market or turn a quick profit. We haven't launched a product yet, and we
won't until it's safe.

For example, we built a mashup of lane-keeping assist and adaptive cruise
control within the first 3 months of starting the company. It wasn't safe
enough, so we didn't launch it.

We're on roughly our 5th major iteration of the product. It uses maps, but it
also works fine without them. It uses a GPS, but it works fine without it. It
uses lane markers for localization, but it works fine without those too. But
it's still not safe enough, so we haven't launched it yet.

Plenty of tough problems left to solve, but enough upside to justify our
commitment.

~~~
woofyman
Mashup ? That makes me feel so much better.

~~~
rezistik
The part that should make you feel better is where they knew it wasn't safe,
so they didn't release it. Prototyping by mashing things together is how a
significant amount of products get started. Including cars.

~~~
woofyman
According to Wikipedia, a mashup is a term used to describe web development
and combining music. It doesn't denote to me rigorous engineering development.
And no, it doesn't inspire confidence in me that they didn't release a mashup
that was unsafe.

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nl
When can we have an intelligent discussion about what _licenses_ for self
driving cars would look like?

We license drivers now. It seems clear that software should have to pass at
least the same bar.

Unfortunately everytime it is raised it ends up being a discussion on the
effectiveness (or lack thereof) of regulation.

My view is that Google's version of a self driving car may be perfect, but I'm
unconvinced that "vendor modifications" (to steal a term from the Android
world) will always be as well-coded.

What would an appropriate regulation/certification/licensing regime look like?
How are updates handled? Are users allowed to modify the software themselves
(with or without re-certifying?)

~~~
YorkianTones
Even Google's version will have risks and I expect will make mistakes in early
iterations. Having a max speed of 25 MPH and limiting deployment will reduce
some of this risk, but AI is hard and the environment is very open and will
constantly include novel states the agent has to make sense of. Personally I'm
concerned the initial Google design doesn't include a steering wheel for
manual override - seems overconfident to me even for normal scenarios let
alone degenerate ones (weather, internet connectivity, GPS malfunction,
construction, bad maps, road damage, etc.).

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PinguTS
I would vote, that the self-driving car revolution started more than 20 years
back, when Mercedes, Bosch and others already worked on the self-driving cars.
The times when there where no such thing as GPS available to the general
public. All the assistants we have these days in cars like, auto distance
control, drive lane assistant, obstacle detection, stop-and-go assistant and
so on evolved from those prototypes.

At that time a made an internship at the military arm and a fellow had an
internship with the self-driving car.

BTW, the most current Mercedes S-Class can do self-driving for about 80% of
the time. They intentionally disabled it and even put in logic to detect if
the driver is holding the steering wheel or not. If the driver is not holding
it for some time, the assistants are disabled by intention.

Also what I do not understand, why Cruise is attaching everything
mechanically? Any descend car these days with lane keeping assistant/self-
parking assistant has all the parts available. You just have to connect to CAN
and control the whole car. Of course, you have to talk with the OEMs. But that
is how the companies are work, which convert cars for use for people with
disabilities.

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cafebeen
I'm all for self-driving cars, but what I want to hear about is how on earth
they'll overcome things like inclement weather, pedestrians, poorly maintained
roads, and combinations thereof... but maybe that's just because I'm currently
in New England in the winter.

~~~
CamperBob2
Bad weather and unexpected obstacles like pedestrians are actually trivial to
handle. Remember that an autopilot's "visual" perception isn't limited to the
visible-light range like ours is.

Poorly-maintained roads are the problem that would give me nightmares if I
worked on these. Lane markers that might have been perfectly usable when the
database was compiled may be too worn out or obscured by snow, leaves, or who-
knows-what else to be usable later. How can you design a system to fail safely
when every input source is independently fallible? And how can we redesign the
auto insurance industry to make it possible to try?

~~~
eurleif
>Bad weather and unexpected obstacles like pedestrians are actually trivial to
handle.

Google's self-driving cars still have trouble with heavy rain and snow (or at
least they did as of last year).
[http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-
obstacles...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles-
for-googles-self-driving-cars/)

