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Google's Driverless Cars Run Into Problem: Cars With Drivers



 
 
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Old September 2nd 15, 06:32 AM posted to austin.general, rec.autos.driving, sac.politics,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.google-sucks
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Default Google's Driverless Cars Run Into Problem: Cars With Drivers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google, a leader in efforts to create
driverless cars, has run into an odd safety conundrum: humans.

Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a
crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to
allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to
apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much
Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.

Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow
the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you
are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009,
couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept
waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it
go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the
advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.

It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling
field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest
challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world
in which humans don’t behave by the book. “The real problem is
that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the
Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who
studies autonomous vehicles.

“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and
the right amount depends on the culture.”

Traffic wrecks and deaths could well plummet in a world without
any drivers, as some researchers predict. But wide use of self-
driving cars is still many years away, and testers are still
sorting out hypothetical risks — like hackers — and real world
challenges, like what happens when an autonomous car breaks down
on the highway.

For now, there is the nearer-term problem of blending robots and
humans. Already, cars from several automakers have technology
that can warn or even take over for a driver, whether through
advanced cruise control or brakes that apply themselves. Uber is
working on the self-driving car technology, and Google expanded
its tests in July to Austin, Tex.

Google cars regularly take quick, evasive maneuvers or exercise
caution in ways that are at once the most cautious approach, but
also out of step with the other vehicles on the road.

“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a
point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why
is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver
during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon
Valley headquarters.

Since 2009, Google cars have been in 16 crashes, mostly fender-
benders, and in every single case, the company says, a human was
at fault. This includes the rear-ender crash on Aug. 20, and
reported Tuesday by Google. The Google car slowed for a
pedestrian, then the Google employee manually applied the
brakes. The car was hit from behind, sending the employee to the
emergency room for mild whiplash.

Google’s report on the incident adds another twist: While the
safety driver did the right thing by applying the brakes, if the
autonomous car had been left alone, it might have braked less
hard and traveled closer to the crosswalk, giving the car behind
a little more room to stop. Would that have prevented the
collision? Google says it’s impossible to say.

There was a single case in which Google says the company was
responsible for a crash. It happened in August 2011, when one of
its Google cars collided with another moving vehicle. But,
remarkably, the Google car was being piloted at the time by an
employee. Another human at fault.

Humans and machines, it seems, are an imperfect mix. Take lane
departure technology, which uses a beep or steering-wheel
vibration to warn a driver if the car drifts into another lane.
A 2012 insurance industry study that surprised researchers found
that cars with these systems experienced a slightly higher crash
rate than cars without them.

Bill Windsor, a safety expert with Nationwide Insurance, said
that drivers who grew irritated by the beep might turn the
system off. That highlights a clash between the way humans
actually behave and how the cars wrongly interpret that
behavior; the car beeps when a driver moves into another lane
but, in reality, the human driver is intending to change lanes
without having signaled so the driver, irked by the beep, turns
the technology off.

Mr. Windsor recently experienced firsthand one of the challenges
as sophisticated car technology clashes with actual human
behavior. He was on a road trip in his new Volvo, which comes
equipped with “adaptive cruise control.” The technology causes
the car to automatically adapt its speeds when traffic
conditions warrant.

But the technology, like Google’s car, drives by the book. It
leaves what is considered the safe distance between itself and
the car ahead. This also happens to be enough space for a car in
an adjoining lane to squeeze into, and, Mr. Windsor said, they
often tried.

Dmitri Dolgov, head of software for Google’s Self-Driving Car
Project, said that one thing he had learned from the project was
that human drivers needed to be “less idiotic.”

On a recent outing with New York Times journalists, the Google
driverless car took two evasive maneuvers that simultaneously
displayed how the car errs on the cautious side, but also how
jarring that experience can be. In one maneuver, it swerved
sharply in a residential neighborhood to avoid a car that was
poorly parked, so much so that the Google sensors couldn’t tell
if it might pull into traffic.

More jarring for human passengers was a maneuver that the Google
car took as it approached a red light in moderate traffic. The
laser system mounted on top of the driverless car sensed that a
vehicle coming the other direction was approaching the red light
at higher-than-safe speeds. The Google car immediately jerked to
the right in case it had to avoid a collision. In the end, the
oncoming car was just doing what human drivers so often do: not
approach a red light cautiously enough, though the driver did
stop well in time.

Courtney Hohne, a spokeswoman for the Google project, said
current testing was devoted to “smoothing out” the relationship
between the car’s software and humans. For instance, at four-way
stops, the program lets the car inch forward, as the rest of us
might, asserting its turn while looking for signs that it is
being allowed to go.

The way humans often deal with these situations is that “they
make eye contact. On the fly, they make agreements about who has
the right of way,” said John Lee, a professor of industrial and
systems engineering and expert in driver safety and automation
at the University of Wisconsin.

“Where are the eyes in an autonomous vehicle?” he added.

But Mr. Norman, from the design center in San Diego, after years
of urging caution on driverless cars, now welcomes quick
adoption because he says other motorists are increasingly
distracted by cellphones and other in-car technology.

Witness the experience of Sena Zorlu, a co-founder of a
Sunnyvale, Calif., analytics company, who recently saw one of
Google’s self-driving cars at a red light in Mountain View. She
could not resist the temptation to grab her phone and take a
picture.

“I don’t usually play with my phone while I’m driving. But it
was right next to me so I had to seize that opportunity,” said
Ms. Zorlu, who posted the picture to her Instagram feed.

Comments:

frederik c. lausten verona nj 7 minutes ago
Can a car get drunk, high on drugs, senile, vision impaired, or
take itself for a joy ride. When you think of all the things
humans do when behind the wheel driverless cars don't seem like
a bad idea.

Reply Recommend

Michael Wara Stanford Law School 7 minutes ago
I'm all for driverless cars - but I want beautiful things in my
life as much or more. And that egg/golf cart contraption just
isn't.

Who designs the hardware at Google? Are they kidding? Is that
their idea of creating brand?

It will be a shame if an excellent product craters because of
poor packaging. Can they just buy Tesla already? Or steal some
more hardware people (and their managers) from Apple?

Seriously.

Reply Recommend
James Hartford 9 minutes ago
Safety is only valuable if it improves the human condition.
Safety that makes your life more meaningless, more boring, more
stupefying, more insipid, slower, more isolating, and more
mindless is not really safety. It's death.

This is a fleet of fancy hearses for the living dead.

Reply Recommend
Sergio New York,NY 9 minutes ago
You just wait for those driving robots to start reasoning. It is
not going to be pretty for humans.

Reply Recommend
StevenA59 SF, CA 9 minutes ago
Yes, they're too safe. That's the problem. (Rolls eyes.)

Reply Recommend
Peter Evans USA 9 minutes ago
The very last car I would get into is one whose decision-making
has been created by engineers. Car paralyzed by drivers inching
forward? How was that not taken into account before it hit the
streets? Scary. What other clearly obvious things did they not
take into account? The main danger with autonomous cars...the
common dim-witted engineers lack of decision-making common sense.

Reply Recommend
James New York 9 minutes ago
There's one thing that I really don't get about this driverless
car nonsense: if you don't want to drive yourself why don't you
just take the bus, or, if this country would already invest in a
public transport system like, let's say Germany, you could even
take the train and get somewhere way faster than by car or
actually even by plane (if you count all in). How great would
that be! I personally like to drive by myself IF I decide to
take the car instead of the subway, the bus, the train and yes
instead of walking. So if I use a car it would never occur to me
to let a computer take over, sit back and relax. Again if I want
that then I take public transport - and because public transport
in the US is very flawed that's where all the money and research
should go to, and not into driverless cars.

Reply Recommend

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/te...altech/google-
says-its-not-the-driverless-cars-fault-its-other-
drivers.html?_r=0

--
Do no evil.

Well, now that we have lots of money and can pay lawyers - ****
that.

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