Given that these vehicles will shift the risk model from driver to manufacturer, and subsequently programmed to obey the laws (which include right of way), we might actually see pedestrians and cyclists using their right of way instead of being bullied away from it.
The idea that cars can communicate with each other so they could drive closer together and faster is complete bullshit...Sure, it's possible, but what profit-driven company would ever take that risk knowing the real-world reliability of wireless communication?
The idea that they won't drive around looking for parking? Welcome to your traffic jam of the future: https://twitter.com/yann_rouen/status/807781862022246401
Pretty much all the evidence points to very slow traffic in the future of self driving cars. As someone who mostly walks everywhere, I'm pretty excited.
It may not make the traffic in downtown SF faster, but it sure will make the traffic on the 101 from SF to San Jose faster. And good luck walking that.
Second, and more importantly, when you have only autonomous vehicles on the road, you can make assumptions that all drivers are perfectly rational, and then your safety margins can be smaller, allowing closer travel at higher speeds.
I suspect in the future, much like how when we transitioned from horse drawn carriage to motor vehicle, at first they will share roads, but then there will be autonomous only roads where the speeds will be higher.
Because there's a huge difference between individual agents trying to maximize their own benefit to the detriment of everyone else (while also operating based on limited, local sensor data, and with limited processing power and slow reaction times), and a fully integrated traffic flow where fast, powerful agents communicate with each other, share sensor data and telemetry, and are able to make global optimizations.
Scenario #1 often produces pathologic outcomes that are way below global optimum. Scenario #2 can optimize traffic to the extent that human drivers would be unable to keep up with it (think rush hour traffic moving at legal speed limit nearly bumper to bumper with no accidents).
If the kids being dropped off at that school started using self-driving Uber Pools, then that video would be better described as "Welcome to your traffic jam of the past."
I think it can be done; the following car may have to brake hard if communication is lost with the leading car.
Let z1 be the safe following distance behind a non-smart car, and z2 be the safe following distance behind a smart car. z2 < z1.
Follower approaches leader and settles at z1. Follower attempts to contact leader. If contact is successfull, follower measures link quality and computes z3=f(z1, z2, quality). If link quality is perfect, z3 can be z1 - in which case the slightest link disturbance causes hard braking.
If link quality is 50%, z3 might be avg(z1, z2), and the follower has more time budget to avoid braking during tiny dropouts.
because that's not the most efficient way to move traffic. Yes, a road at it's limit is going to be worse off. Perfect merging and other better habits will help in a lot of places. Just think of all the times you see some idiot merge in at 50 way before the end of the lane.
Their PR department are, as can be expected, top notch though. I especially like how they put a populist spin on their announcements, like the beer delivery (yay, beer!) and now picking up passengers with their proof-of-concept vehicles, to make it look like self-driving cars are already part of their business.
Too many tech companies (and esp. robotics ones) do their development and testing under limited conditions, and then they're blindsided by real-world realities.
Getting contact with customers early is key. It's like the old military adage: No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. In this case, the "enemy" is the real world.
Kudos to Uber for getting out there and working with customers -- it's much better than Google's autonomous cars, which have driven millions of miles and never had a single paying passenger!
Feeling peckish? Ignore it. It's just the McDonald's corporation trying to raise the value of it's stock.
And (as with the "smart home" advocates), they forget that, outside of the tech crowd - not everyone likes interacting with (and hence, being dependent on) computers for every conceivable need in their life, 24x7.
The ownerless model might work for some people -- but not too many, I suspect.
I have a friend working for a major supplier in self-driving vehicle sensor tech who went to Pittsburg to learn from Uber. I imagine they at least did their homework before flying him out there.
(1) Joke's on you. We already know better.
A few years time to market. Damn. We may get accurate sickness data worldwide before we get driving cars.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2009/10/what_price_v...
"I'm a vomit-bucket-half-full sort of guy. I don't think these cabbies are trying to charge you for puking, I think they are offering you the premium service of vomiting in their taxi."
"America was built on the idea of premium services. This is how the wealthy are able to have so much more fun than everyone else. They can behave however they want as long as they have the money to cover the premiums! The $70 currently in my wallet entitles me to a good three blocks on Michigan Avenue and a nice half-digested deep dish pizza projectile vomited all over the headrest."
http://uberpeople.net/threads/throw-up.630/
"Yep Uber is pretty good here in Sydney as well. I had the outside of my car given the Jackson Pollock chunky rainbow look by a passenger. His friends thought it was a real laugh and afterwards I found they had also taken my giveaway chocolates as well. Sent the report in with photos and $95 receipt for the cleanup, and got $250 credited to my account the very next payment.
I have to say, in all my years of driving public vehicles Uber (with its hold on the rider's credit card detail) , have the best and quickest method to compensate drivers for these horrible incidents when they occur."
They can certainly have a video/image feed of the inside, to remote check if it is messy once the ride is over(can be automated to a good extent with image recognition), and retire it from service until its cleaned up.
you could have before and after photos taken for each trip.
We are a long way from where I would be willing to trust my life to self-driving cars - as a passenger, as another driver on the streets, as a cyclist, or as a pedestrian. Much farther away than these companies press releases make it seem.
Here's why. These driving algorithms are successful in large part because of data. They train their systems, such as visual recognition (what are the objects in the world around me), on millions of miles of visual data collected on the roads, most of it in California in the sunny daytime.
This means they are very likely to perform well in the average case when everything goes according to plan. And if deployed there they might live up to the hype and save thousands of lives compared to human drivers.
But now say you're in a major city in the midwest or northeast, for instance. It may be night time. It might be raining. There might be two feet of snow on the ground, narrow lanes, road signs covered up and unreadable. There may be a pedestrian crossing in dark colors. The street lines may be faded or nonexistent. There may be a street that is marked one way on the GPS map but is currently detoured the opposite direction due to construction.
There may be a policeman directing traffic. The police might pull the car over and direct it to a parking lot. There might be a fire truck or ambulance coming at an unusual time.
A computerized system trained on data can only perform well in situations very similar to its training set. But its vision will have a hard time recognizing objects it hasn't seen before. Its language processing will not understand unusual or novel road signs. Even if it recognizes the objects around it correclty, it lacks the "true" intelligence to deal with unforeseen situations falling significantly outside its training set.
I believe that cars are quite likely to run into novel situations they haven't experienced before, and I don't trust their reactions or decisionmaking in these scenarios. So I think what we have are self-driving cars that perform very well in the common, easy case, as we have already seen in numerous press releases, but are in my opinion very unpredictable in the long, fat tail of situations.
Police and emergency services will just coordinate with the "ATC" to pre-script routes differently depending on the situation.
In complex situations, flashing lights and honks are not enough, you need to verbally communicate with other drivers.
I would eat my hat if an AI could handle these kinds of situations.
So in short, I'll believe the hype when I see a video of a full auto drive through London at rush hour.
The Otto deal was set around incentives, it's not actually a flat 600 million dollar deal. If Levandowsky can deliver a Robotaxi OS that carries Uber to greatness, his networth could be astronomical. He's probably the top candidate in the world right now to lead an autonomous driving project to commercialization. He's got a vicious Randian streak and he's been at the bleeding edge of driverless vehicles since the Darpa days.
I am confused do they require a permit or is uber changing the claim/capabilities of the car to evade getting a permit?
"The company doesn’t require a permit from the California DMV to operate in the state, it says, because the cars don’t qualify as fully autonomous as defined by state law because of the always present onboard safety operator."
Uber could claim they need to record passengers in order to spot damage or dirtying of the cab. (Otherwise passengers could blame any damage on the previous occupant.)
This raises a good point i never thought about. If in some day all of our cars have self driving or self aware features, then that means nearly all locations in the city are within reach of cameras and possibly microphones. I'm not "a paranoid" about privacy stuff, but that is quite impressive nonetheless.
The future is going to be quite interesting. I always thought we'd end up with cameras on every street corner monitoring everything. I never thought our own cars could become every present monitoring devices.
You might find this article interesting: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/one-nation-under-cctv
> I heard there is a camera in the car. That’s correct. To learn more about how we can improve the self-driving experience for our riders, your trip may be recorded.
When picking up a ride they notify it's a self-driving Uber and let you cancel for free.
Even in highway driving you can lose traction in an instant if you hit a patch of black ice. Autonomous vehicles will need to be able to recover from a complete loss of traction safely. This isn't trivial - in fact it's probably the most complicated bit of driving I tend to do. Once you are sliding and your steering wheel becomes more of a suggestion than a command, the entire act of driving becomes a process of trying to coax the car off the road using a combination of steering, brakes, and even occasionally gas. I think it's possible for a computer to do this - but you can't avoid all slides just by driving slowly.
Then there's the plethora of other winter fun you run into with a vehicle: getting stuck (happens all the time on city streets) and all the techniques to get unstuck, going too slow and losing your momentum (and thus traction), having every indication you have traction and then discovering you actually don't (it's very easy to be driving at a "safe" speed and still slide through an intersection), white out conditions where you are guessing where the lane is... etc...
To be clear, I believe most of these conditions could eventually be handled by computers. I also believe a lot of people drive too fast in/on snow. However, winter driving is in no way simple. It's a problem domain unto itself, and one I've seen relatively little work being done on.
This may seem like a straw-man argument, I don't intend it to be. I think self-driving cars will be on the whole better drivers, but these are also situations that I see as being extremely difficult for a computer to identify to the level a human driver is capable of.
Google/Waymo and its successors are using pre-mapped courses with many heuristics and edge case tweaks. Routes are generated from existing resources (Google Maps, etc). Much effort is devoted to avoiding other vehicles and pedestrians. Much of the rules are based off of U.S. traffic rules, such as speed limits, stop signs, traffic signals, and lane markings.
They both share technology (computer vision, momentum/traction control), but I conjecture the bulk of the work for commercial autonomous driving was not related to the DARPA challenge and wasn't paid by its grants.
Interesting. The US Military did spawn the self-driving Car Revolution with their DARPA Challange.
http://www.livescience.com/44272-darpa-self-driving-car-revo...
Does anyone have more info or speculation on the tech stack sitting in the trunk?
