kevinchen (u/kevinchen)

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

eru · 2 years ago

Satellite internet is fast becoming good enough and cheap enough.

As an additional safeguard, you can make your trucks go into 'safety' mode when connection becomes spotty or when too many operators become too busy with other trucks.

'Safety mode' could mean slowing down the trucks or even stopping some of them. And in general, letting the autonomous systems err on the side of caution more often.

kevinchen · 2 years ago

I believe the MTBF argument still applies to Starlink.

Regarding the minimal risk condition / fallback behavior, a central point of the article was that slowing or stopping are almost always unacceptable on freeways because of the speeds involved

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

pinkmuffinere · 2 years ago

Ya, I wonder the same thing. In an extreme case it seems like you could build dedicated repeaters/cell phone towers/something along specific stretches of highway, and then start testing along just that stretch with remote operators on call. I suspect remote operators are cheaper than devoted drivers, potentially making a profit from that transition alone, and also collect training data to develop full autonomy.

kevinchen · 2 years ago

Cell networks are even longer lead time and more capital intensive than autonomous driving ;) even if we only consider the fcc + local permitting time, it already makes this option difficult.

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

karaterobot · 2 years ago

> No guarantee of a timely response from remote operators or backend services.

> Therefore, all safety-critical decisions must be made by the onboard computer alone.

Why is the requirement that all safety-critical decisions must be made on board, versus the seemingly-simplifying assumption that only some or most decisions would have to be made on board, because a remote operator or backend service could be available a lot of the time? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have a single operator remotely monitoring multiple vehicles that are autonomous under ideal conditions (driving along a straight road in good weather) and then taking over when necessary. Let's say you would only use such a system for major routes with solid satellite visibility, not last-mile routes hauling heavy equipment on a dirt road in the boonies, or something like that. Maybe this wouldn't work, but it's not obviously ridiculous to me, so I wonder why he just starts out saying the truck most be fully autonomous with no human ever in the loop.

kevinchen · 2 years ago

Author here. At the mean time between failures needed to exceed human performance, the uptime of the network connection quickly becomes a limiting factor. It’s possible to pick only routes that have great cell coverage but this limits commercial viability.

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

zbrozek · 2 years ago

Sensors and their ranges aren't the right thing to point to. Off-the-shelf options are typically geared towards the ranges useful for passenger vehicles because that's where the volume is, but with money and time one can design something different. It's possible to achieve a sensible link budget for lidar or radar at much-longer ranges. The sensors will be bigger, they'll consume more power, and they'll cost more. But it's totally achievable.

There are a lot of differences between passenger vehicles and trucks. The physical dynamics of articulated vehicles, the mission profile, and social dynamics come to mind. How does a robotruck place cones or flares while it awaits rescue?

Personally, I expect autonomous trucking to be a force-multiplier for humans who were formerly drivers. Such trucks will have sleeper cabs and the human will be there to maintain the vehicle and handle the long tail of tasks (filling tires, cleaning, refueling, repairs, rigging, whatever). You'll get 24-hour operation out of a single human employee because they'll be able to sleep and do other things most of the time. Maybe they'll work a second job as a remote call-center operator.

kevinchen · 2 years ago

Most high end sensors, especially lidars, are targeted at L4 applications. Otherwise the price cannot be justified. It’s a safe bet that sensor makers are including AV developers in their market research.

For lidar, the range is also limited by power limits + physics, which cannot be overcome by increasing money/power/device size. Some dependencies on semiconductor manufacturing tech or better signal processing might be possible to solve with more money.

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

aga98mtl · 2 years ago

The issue with braking distance and jackknifing could be resolved with smaller trucks. The 18 wheeler we know is optimal because it maximize the cubic volume driven by one person. If you don't need the human driver, two smaller trucks might be better than one.

kevinchen · 2 years ago

The cab, sensors, and compute are also expensive, not to mention other variable costs like staff for remote assistance, maintenance, and first/last mile

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

Edman274 · 2 years ago

I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is higher than "safer than human drivers" -- like, we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist".

Also, I feel like there's a lot of talking past one another in these conversations because one person will say "Let's see an autonomous truck shipping hazmat to Pittsburgh in February with freeway lanes shut down" and another person might say "that's a rare instance" but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions, with greater safety than the safest human driver. We tolerate human failures but to use them as the benchmark for autonomous systems would be perceived as unethical, because autonomous systems are deliberately designed and any failures by them would be seen as an intentional oversights and errors, and no one at Waymo or Tesla or where ever is ever going to be charged with vehicular manslaughter for an autonomous vehicle error. We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. My observations are only moderately related but I'm anticipating the same well-trod talking points coming up and want to address them.

kevinchen · 2 years ago

I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable.

That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...

(Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study. Just want to point out it’s not the argument being presented.)

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

silvestrov · 2 years ago

If he thinks driving cars in cities is the easiest problem, he does not have experience driving a car in a European city with lots of cyclists and pedestrians.

Driving a car in inner Copenhagen is a stressful situation due to the insane number of cyclist you have to watch out for, see https://youtu.be/FaySp9i2zMA?t=113

kevinchen · 2 years ago

Thst video looks fairly sparse and well structured by SF standards? eg interactions starting at 9:00 https://youtu.be/TOV0ndPr0Dk

Many examples of high pedestrian density in https://youtu.be/P6sw4EKegp4

kevinchen commented on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare kevinchen.co/blog/autonom... · Posted by u/kevinchen

mxwsn · 2 years ago

Whoa hold on, table 1 of stopping distances is calculated for 2.5 second reaction time which is 10x longer than conventional human reaction time. Then the stopping distances are compared to radar/lidar/camera to argue that AVs can struggle to stop within detection range. It's possible a computer might need 2.5s to make a decision to stop. But the current analysis isn't based on that.

This analysis seems really suspect to me. Any clarification would be appreciated.

kevinchen · 2 years ago

Author here. the shorter reaction times you mentioned are collected under ideal conditions, like the person knows they are being tested and only needs to push a button or whatever. In driving, the reaction time is end to end, including perception, decision-making, and actuation (moving your foot, pressing pedal all the way, shifting, etc.)

Also recommend checking out the citation. It is an accepted value used in American highway design.