[HN Gopher] Watch Zoox's autonomous car drive around San Francis...
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Watch Zoox's autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour
Author : pcshah1996
Score : 60 points
Date : 2020-04-17 22:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (venturebeat.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (venturebeat.com)
| vardump wrote:
| Yawn. Good lane markings, no rain/snow or other bad weather,
| perfect road surfaces.
|
| Just like all other self-driving demos. I'd like to see a demo
| like this on snow covered roads, with no lane markings visible. I
| think that would tell a lot more about the system's ability to
| deal with an imperfect world.
| spacehome wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I can't meet that standard.
| vardump wrote:
| Actually I'm sure you'd do just fine. Humans can just pretty
| effortlessly deduce required information out of numerous
| clues.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I'd like to see a demo like this on snow covered roads, with
| no lane markings visible.
|
| But humans can't drive well in those situations either. Why are
| you asking for something better than humans can do?
| vardump wrote:
| Humans can and regularly do so pretty safely.
|
| Ask Canadians, Swedes or any other people living in a
| location with long winters.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was
| at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It
| didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of
| the bus in front of me. As a human, I knew I could drive
| safely where the bus had been driving seconds ago. A self-
| driving car would have... tell me.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Are you sure those two red lights can see and know where
| they are going?
| rossjudson wrote:
| Pulled over, like you should have done.
|
| I've been exactly where you were, driving the Coq highway
| in British Columbia at night in a blizzard, following two
| red dots in front of me. I had (mandatory) snow tires on a
| rear wheel drive BMW. I also had my family in the car.
|
| It was probably the single stupidest thing I've ever done
| driving a car.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It
| was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to
| Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red
| lights of the bus in front of me.
|
| Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe
| that's what an autonomous car would do.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| I lived in Boston for 10 years. People drive on snow-covered
| roads just fine.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| People in San Francisco struggle to drive in the _rain_ let
| alone the snow.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole
| selling point of self-driving cars.
|
| And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in
| snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else
| driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north
| of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice
| with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year.
| It's not unreasonable to hold self-driving cars to the same
| standard.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Because "something better than humans can do" is the
| whole selling point of self-driving cars.
|
| I don't think so. 'As good as humans can do' would be
| useful.
| candu wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in
| autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D,
| time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the
| public transit and/or active mobility solutions of the
| near-future.
| chx wrote:
| As far as I know "navigating a busy parking lot while raining"
| is a problem the autonomous car industry does not even have an
| idea how to solve.
| BubRoss wrote:
| In a parking lot the car would be starting from a position it
| can stay in, so requiring a person to intervene is one
| option. Also busy parking lots frequently don't stay busy
| forever and heavy rain doesn't last forever either.
|
| A look at the local weather could see where a storm is and
| give an estimate of when it will be able to automate leaving
| and require a person otherwise. I think there are pragmatic
| answers to extreme situations.
| m0zg wrote:
| Such videos don't get published just because. They're either
| looking for more funding or for an acquisition. Which is it?
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| What is the general view on Zoox's progress relative to other
| non-waymo playes. Such as Argo, Aurora and Cruise. There is the
| widely reported disengagement per mile, but most robotics people
| know it is just smoke and mirrors meant to make the regulators go
| away (disclosure, studied/researched robotics in grad school).
| IntenseChaos wrote:
| The general consensus among my AV friends (who work at a bunch
| of different companies) is that their AV driving stack is
| really good, but obviously not perfect.
|
| I have no idea about their business model and how COVID affects
| that, though.
| Fricken wrote:
| Relative to competitors Zoox's automous OS is doing quite
| well and doesn't get enough respect. Relative to the
| objective everybody is fucked.
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| Could you provide more context on the first part.
| Fricken wrote:
| They've been keeping abreast.
|
| The co-founder, Tim Kentley Klay was somehow able to get
| Jesse Levinson on board, and Jesse Levinson had no
| problem getting infinite street cred on board. So they
| were able to attract a lot of key, original robotics
| talent before the hype got out of control.
|
| For a long time though, they were low on funds, so they
| did lots of closed course testing, and it wasn't until
| they closed a large funding round that Zoox began on
| public roads, and they performed quite well right out of
| the starting gate.
|
| Now Zoox and it's competitors are lost in an endless
| wasteland of testing, development, and validation. It's
| futile to attempt to do a comprehensive analysis between
| the different players, they all have their quirks, but
| Zoox has built all the critical infrastructure needed to
| do full scale testing, and they're eyeballs deep in it
| like everyone else.
|
| However, Zoox has stormy waters ahead financially. They
| need another $2 billion to stay abreast in this never
| ending race. It's getting harder to visualize scenarios
| where that happens.
|
| What nobody can do well enough to build a competitive and
| scalable robotaxi service is prediction in multi-agent
| scenarios. The AI for that just doesn't exist.
| ahnick wrote:
| What are some of examples of multi-agent scenarios they
| struggle with? Do you think there are paths to autonomous
| driving where we add infrastructure or laws to reduce the
| universe of these scenarios that would have to be dealt
| with? For example, adding dedicated autonomous driving
| lanes or reducing the amount of intersections between
| pedestrian walkways and roadways?
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| Hm yeah sounds like what I have been hearing too. But the
| line engineer inside at Waymo are very optimistic at how
| close we are, maybe it's just the sentiment of the
| moment.
|
| So in the scenario where predicting pedestrian/cyclist
| behavior holds up progress for a few more years. And
| given how the market has turned in SV and beyond, what's
| your read on how the space will play out? For example,
| car companies can't keep funding Aurora/Cruise/Argo
| because they will be facing very tough consumer climate,
| so the fight for funding internally will be even fiercer.
| Softbank funds Nuro and its portfolio of companies
| (WeWork and others) have been duds.
|
| Google is expecting a bad 2020 ad revenue wise, unclear
| what will happen in 2021. The founders stepped out last
| year and the narrative has been that Google is less
| focused on "moonshots" and more on core ad business.
|
| Is there any other deep pocketed investors that will
| finance development of AVs for another 5 years? Who will
| acquire the ones that are independent? IPO doesn't seem
| likely for any of them correct?
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| Multi-agent refers to behavior of pedestrians/cyclists,
| and other cars on the road. This is especially tough in
| "ambigous" junctions such as roundabouts, and unprotected
| left turns. There the strategy to negotiate the junctor
| is highly context dependent, and the information needed
| to find a strategy is not in the current scene. Drivers
| in these moments draw on "cultural awareness" of what
| "should" be done. Observing a history of what people do
| in these situations may not be sufficient because of the
| long tail of unique events, or at least unique in terms
| of how the computer will represent the scene. For
| example, if the scene is represented by the set of
| trajectories (or really waympoints), then the set of
| possibiilties is infinite. All of this assume the car
| "knows" it's entering and exiting a predefined scenario
| such as roundabout, real life driving is not so discrete.
|
| On top of this, there's a liability and ethics issue. We
| accept teenagers for getting drunk and killing people,
| but we cannot accept an autonomous car that cannot
| navigate a roundabout which would otherwise be easy for a
| person, sober or otherwise.
| Fricken wrote:
| I have faith in robotaxis abilities to handle safety
| critical things. The lizard brain stuff is under control.
| They are still just too stupid to navigate complex
| traffic efficiently, without regularly hesitating and
| getting tripped up.
|
| Robotaxis are Rube Goldberg machines, there are so many
| moving parts. The running joke at Waymo for a while was
| "How many engineers does it take to operate a self
| driving car?"
|
| Everybody was convinced deep learning would give us all
| the magically brilliant AI we needed to make this work.
| With perception and classification problems the robotics
| industry was able to go from "impossibru" to "holy shit
| it works" over the space of a couple years, it was really
| exciting. In hindsight it's easy to see that the exciting
| and game changing breakthroughs were in fact a long time
| coming, and that the real rate of progress in open world
| robotics is in fact excrutiatingly slow and bespoke.
| Nobody has an ace up their sleeve.
| matdehaast wrote:
| Thanks for the info. Can you clarify what predictions in
| multi agent scenarios are?
| ragebol wrote:
| I think was is meant is: in case you have a few people
| and AVs in an interaction, predict who's going to do what
| in order to best anticipate the overall outcome. Not sure
| humans can do that outside of conversation and norms and
| rules.
| Fricken wrote:
| Imagine an uncontrolled intersection. The Robotaxi is
| approaching from one direction. In the opposite direction
| is a cyclist who intends to turn left across the
| Robotaxi. There is also a pedestrian that may or may not
| cross the street, and another vehicle about to cross in
| front of the Robotaxi from the other direction. There are
| a huge number of ways this scenario can play out, and any
| decision made by one agent can affect the behaviors of
| all the others, compounding it's complexity. Humans can
| game out these situations intuitively, but current AI
| cannot read deep enough into the matrix to deal with
| these situations quickly and reliably.
| BubRoss wrote:
| There are rules to that situation. You can start there,
| let other cars go ahead of you if they break the rules,
| go slow and not hit anything. It isn't as if self driving
| cars can't look to the side or stop if something changes.
| Beyond that Jim Keller would say that not getting hit by
| something else is a matter of ballistics.
| TheSmiddy wrote:
| In Australia there are no uncontrolled intersections
| (that I am aware of). Every single junction clearly marks
| who must give way and we don't have any 4-way stops,
| instead using roundabouts in these situations.
|
| It's possible that for self driving to work road systems
| will have to be more formalised to remove the ambiguous
| situations you've described. I can't imagine it working
| well in China or Indonesia where traffic flows much more
| like water in a stream and lanes are merely just
| suggestions.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Watching this, it's so frustrating that we're 95-99% there on
| autonomous driving.
| vladislav wrote:
| more like 0.1% there in terms of the work required to launch
| Fezzik wrote:
| Possibly for driving in cities and highways on clear days, but
| we are nowhere close to having autonomous vehicles even match
| human drivers in 100% of possible/likely driving circumstances
| and road/weather conditions. That last few percent is the
| highest hurdle.
| candu wrote:
| That's the good old Pareto principle for you: the last few
| percent are going to take a _lot_ more effort than the first
| 95%.
|
| More to the point, this falls into the category of safety-
| critical systems, with the added wrinkle of potentially being
| used daily by millions of people. Unlike many domains where
| software is applied, 80% of the way there doesn't cut it, nor
| does 95% or 99% or even 99.9%.
|
| (Leaving aside the fact that, for all of us not actively
| engaged in autonomous vehicle R&D, we likely have absolutely no
| idea how close we are to success here, or even what all the
| relevant goalposts would be.)
| phkahler wrote:
| Remember that we've been at that level with voice recognition
| since the end of the last millennium.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Casually starting the turn and not yielding to pedestrians at
| 10:21.
|
| Companies actually put this kind of footage up without ever
| reviewing it?
| chrischen wrote:
| I mean it's not 100% of the way there. Plus human drivers do
| that all the time and MUCH worse things. I'm talking from the
| point of view as a frequent Uber/Lyft passenger.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Casually starting a turn and correctly identifying that the
| person on the right slowed down, stopped and turned to face the
| other crosswalk.
|
| You can see it on the top right camera.
| stefan_ wrote:
| I take it the ped at 12:22 also "turned"?
| hrishid wrote:
| Are you referring to the pedestrian who's almost crossed the
| crosswalk on the left side of the screen? This is still a
| proper yield as far as I can see. The car just enters the
| intersection before that person has finished crossing.
| stefan_ wrote:
| That's already the problem. Don't enter the intersection if
| you can not speedily finish your turn. There is also already
| another ped on collision course the moment they start moving
| forward.
| dllu wrote:
| While technically right, you'll never be able to get
| anywhere in a big city if you drive like that.
| vladislav wrote:
| This demo is not informative as to the readiness for scalable L4
| deployment, for which it would be necessary to focus on the
| breadth/accuracy of perception features under the hood of intent
| prediction and what happens at the tail end with arbitrary
| situations that occur in urban driving environments.
| anonymous_car wrote:
| This demo is not informative as to the readiness for scalable
| L4 deployment
|
| does anyone make that claim?
| vladislav wrote:
| Presenting a subset of the information to let the uninformed
| jump to favorable conclusions for the presenter is not a new
| marketing strategy. If there's no indication about the true
| level of progress, what is the purpose of the demo?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > to let the uninformed
|
| The uniformed don't know what 'scalable L4 deployment' is,
| so they can't jump to that conclusion.
| yellowapple wrote:
| No, but they're familiar with the definition (start-to-
| finish entirely autonomous trip under somewhat-controlled
| driving conditions) even if they don't necessarily know
| the lingo to describe it. Being able to get from point A
| to point B without human intervention is what people
| expect when they hear "self-driving car", and the video
| does little (if anything) to temper that expectation
| (perhaps because it truly is ready for L4 deployment, or
| perhaps because it's all smoke and mirrors).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > under somewhat-controlled driving conditions
|
| I don't even know what this means, so I doubt the
| uninformed know the definition.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Meaning one can see the road, chiefly.
| [deleted]
| yellowapple wrote:
| The two turns (one left and one right-on-red) leading up to
| getting to Market Street in the latter half of the video struck
| me as odd; the left turn looked like a bit of a lane sweep, and
| the right-on-red looked dubious (is it legal to turn right on red
| if you're not in the far-right lane?).
|
| SF intersections are hard, though, and the computer seemed to
| handle them about as well as I would've.
| databus wrote:
| Is there a way to know that this isn't done with remote control,
| other than the company says so?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If you think people are just going to simply lie to you then
| how do you ever get anything out of reading things on the
| internet?
| yellowapple wrote:
| By getting multiple opinions, like what the GP is presumably
| doing by asking such a question on a forum like Hacker News.
| [deleted]
| anonymous_car wrote:
| Argument from ignorance also known as appeal to ignorance, is a
| fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition
| is true because it has not yet been proven false or a
| proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
| dmitriid wrote:
| Besides the sheer complexity of situations described in this
| video, I wonder how these vehicles will deal with differences in
| traffic rules in different countries (when even road signs can be
| different).
| yellowapple wrote:
| It sounds like it currently "cheats" a bit by already having
| driving rules, maps (including signs), etc. baked in; it'd be
| akin to a human driver memorizing the California Vehicle Code
| and a map of San Francisco word-for-word and lane-for-lane.
|
| Presumably Zoox deployments in other cities would work
| similarly, "cheating" by baking in local driving rules and road
| maps. A consumer-owned self-driving car would likely be able to
| do something similar by downloading the local ruleset and maps
| on the fly, assuming one exists.
| netsharc wrote:
| Cheap criticism: the video starts with (I paraphrase) "This is 1
| hour of driving", the last thing I expected after the fade-out/in
| was to see a man with a weird shirt... and then I notice the
| video is about 27 minutes long.
|
| Edit to add: After that I started watching it, it's actually a
| video of an impressive AI.
| ygra wrote:
| It's played back at twice the speed. Apparent from pedestrians
| waking twice as fast, and if course, the 2x speed indicator in
| the upper left.
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