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Driverless Vehicles

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TUK020
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Driverless Vehicles

#475905

Postby TUK020 » January 25th, 2022, 8:30 am

Thought provoking article in the FT today:
"The true flaw of driverless cars isn’t the tech"
https://www.ft.com/content/189f75e7-da8 ... 3f7f6b1f2a

Gist of the article is that the real advantage of Uber's business model is use of the gig economy means that they don't have to invest a large amount of capital to create adequate capacity to serve demand peaks. Although Robotaxis would avoid the cost of the driver, they would undo the capital light advantage. Says that driverless vehicle technology will lead in places like Deere's tractors in agriculture.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#475958

Postby servodude » January 25th, 2022, 10:53 am

TUK020 wrote:Says that driverless vehicle technology will lead in places like Deere's tractors in agriculture.


The industrial plant stuff has lead this for a while.
Mining was where I first encountered it with which makes sense because there's sensors up the wahzoo all round the place and not many people.
But Ag has also been a sector reliant on GPS positioning for robotic delivery/harvest for a while (and swathes of other good fun tech that I never thought I'd play with in paddocks)

Not sure I'd consider them "driverless vehicles" in the traditional sense though

-sd

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#475960

Postby PeterGray » January 25th, 2022, 11:11 am

Not really a driverless vehicle in the sense normaly used, but this is interesting:
https://www.ducksize.com/weeding-seeding-robot

It plants and weeds. As it does the planting it has a record of exactly where each plant is, and then can go around weeding anything in between, allowing manual labour and herbicide free farming, and improves yields as fewer crop plants get removed by error.

I'm not sure it can yet go round picking off aphids etc, perhaps that's it's next trick.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#475995

Postby Hallucigenia » January 25th, 2022, 12:58 pm

www.smallrobotcompany.com are a British company in this space, they already weed by zapping with electricity and are working on targeting individual slugs with nematode delivery.

TUK020
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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476008

Postby TUK020 » January 25th, 2022, 1:36 pm

servodude wrote:
TUK020 wrote:Says that driverless vehicle technology will lead in places like Deere's tractors in agriculture.


The industrial plant stuff has lead this for a while.
Mining was where I first encountered it with which makes sense because there's sensors up the wahzoo all round the place and not many people.
But Ag has also been a sector reliant on GPS positioning for robotic delivery/harvest for a while (and swathes of other good fun tech that I never thought I'd play with in paddocks)

Not sure I'd consider them "driverless vehicles" in the traditional sense though

-sd

The FT article quoted agriculture, but this is not actually a very good example. The issue is not just positioning/routing that can be done with GPS, but coping with interaction with humans, unpredictable clutter etc. Warehousing, construction materials depot or builders yards would have been a better example.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476231

Postby BobbyD » January 26th, 2022, 8:15 am

TUK020 wrote:Thought provoking article in the FT today:
"The true flaw of driverless cars isn’t the tech"
https://www.ft.com/content/189f75e7-da8 ... 3f7f6b1f2a

Gist of the article is that the real advantage of Uber's business model is use of the gig economy means that they don't have to invest a large amount of capital to create adequate capacity to serve demand peaks. Although Robotaxis would avoid the cost of the driver, they would undo the capital light advantage. Says that driverless vehicle technology will lead in places like Deere's tractors in agriculture.


Unfortunately for UBER The Supreme Court disagrees....

Uber drivers are workers not self-employed, Supreme Court rules


- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56123668

...as does the uK Supreme Court

Uber drivers must be treated as workers rather than self-employed, the UK's Supreme Court has ruled.

The decision could mean thousands of Uber drivers are entitled to minimum wage and holiday pay.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56123668

...and it is a pity. UBER did two things right. It allowed massive flexibility for drivers wanting to turn a buck, and as a counterweight it's demand based pricing bought market efficiency to private vehicle hire. Both of these things have been nixed at every opportunity.

This is some really flawed analysis.

The 'gig economy' was a placeholder for UBER, while they developed their own self driving car - something they walked away from in 2018 after one of their cars killed a woman crossing the road with her bicycle.

The theory was that it was worth posting massive losses running as a 'driven' service so that when driverless tech hit the markets UBER would already be the go to place for TAAS, and everybody would already have their app installed on their phones. And massive losses they have posted. It was basically the opposite of Musk's Tesla Network FSD pitch. Uber wanted to buy the network in preparation for hardware availability, Musk was pitching the hardware as an investment for when the software was viable. Each as ridiculous as the other.

Autonomous drivers scale in a way that human drivers don't. In 1999 Jag bought out the first radar based cruise control. The radar was so expensive it was joked that you got a free £100,000 Jag with every purchase. Now automotive radars are 10 a penny. The first road legal autonomous car will cost billions of pounds. The second will cost hundreds of thousands. With the software written and the computational module and sensor arrays being delivered to car factories in off the shelf kits you'll be down to thousands. Eventually it'll be a mandatory safety feature like Automatic Emergency braking is becoming today, which as it happens tend to utilise one of those £100,000 radars.

You want a viable business model for level 4? Look at Las Vegas or Boston or Tokyo or Singapore or...

You want to get to Level 5, Best place to start is Level 4. Push your geofence out. Join them up. Make adding new areas simpler. Make the requirements to be fenced in lower. This tech is still in utero, the idea that it's potential is limited by the effort it takes to achieve something today is presumptuous to say the least.

...and yes autonomous also has a very rosy future in agriculture.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476268

Postby TUK020 » January 26th, 2022, 10:04 am

BobbyD wrote:
TUK020 wrote:Thought provoking article in the FT today:
"The true flaw of driverless cars isn’t the tech"
https://www.ft.com/content/189f75e7-da8 ... 3f7f6b1f2a

Gist of the article is that the real advantage of Uber's business model is use of the gig economy means that they don't have to invest a large amount of capital to create adequate capacity to serve demand peaks. Although Robotaxis would avoid the cost of the driver, they would undo the capital light advantage. Says that driverless vehicle technology will lead in places like Deere's tractors in agriculture.


Unfortunately for UBER The Supreme Court disagrees....

Uber drivers are workers not self-employed, Supreme Court rules


- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56123668

...as does the uK Supreme Court

Uber drivers must be treated as workers rather than self-employed, the UK's Supreme Court has ruled.

The decision could mean thousands of Uber drivers are entitled to minimum wage and holiday pay.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56123668

...and it is a pity. UBER did two things right. It allowed massive flexibility for drivers wanting to turn a buck, and as a counterweight it's demand based pricing bought market efficiency to private vehicle hire. Both of these things have been nixed at every opportunity.

This is some really flawed analysis.

The 'gig economy' was a placeholder for UBER, while they developed their own self driving car - something they walked away from in 2018 after one of their cars killed a woman crossing the road with her bicycle.

The theory was that it was worth posting massive losses running as a 'driven' service so that when driverless tech hit the markets UBER would already be the go to place for TAAS, and everybody would already have their app installed on their phones. And massive losses they have posted. It was basically the opposite of Musk's Tesla Network FSD pitch. Uber wanted to buy the network in preparation for hardware availability, Musk was pitching the hardware as an investment for when the software was viable. Each as ridiculous as the other.

Autonomous drivers scale in a way that human drivers don't. In 1999 Jag bought out the first radar based cruise control. The radar was so expensive it was joked that you got a free £100,000 Jag with every purchase. Now automotive radars are 10 a penny. The first road legal autonomous car will cost billions of pounds. The second will cost hundreds of thousands. With the software written and the computational module and sensor arrays being delivered to car factories in off the shelf kits you'll be down to thousands. Eventually it'll be a mandatory safety feature like Automatic Emergency braking is becoming today, which as it happens tend to utilise one of those £100,000 radars.

You want a viable business model for level 4? Look at Las Vegas or Boston or Tokyo or Singapore or...

You want to get to Level 5, Best place to start is Level 4. Push your geofence out. Join them up. Make adding new areas simpler. Make the requirements to be fenced in lower. This tech is still in utero, the idea that it's potential is limited by the effort it takes to achieve something today is presumptuous to say the least.

...and yes autonomous also has a very rosy future in agriculture.

I think I disagree over a rather important nuance.
You have cited legal interpretations over the driver's contractual status in response to my description of the gig economy being an important part of the Uber business case. This is not the key point, it is the fact that those drivers bring their own asset to the party, which could be a 10 yr old Toyota Prius - there are plenty of these already in existance whgich can be brought into service with minimal marginal investment.
If every Uber vehicle needs to be a newish car with autonomous capability, this represents a massive capital requirement

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476284

Postby BobbyD » January 26th, 2022, 11:04 am

TUK020 wrote:You have cited legal interpretations over the driver's contractual status in response to my description of the gig economy being an important part of the Uber business case. This is not the key point, it is the fact that those drivers bring their own asset to the party, which could be a 10 yr old Toyota Prius - there are plenty of these already in existance whgich can be brought into service with minimal marginal investment.
If every Uber vehicle needs to be a newish car with autonomous capability, this represents a massive capital requirement


I think where we probably disagree is onhow good an indicator UBER's future is of the future of autonomous driving. I like UBER as a service but I've never thought any of their 'business plans' made much sense.

Business case makes it sound as though uber have actually been making money using that system, and they didn't. Even without the need to lay out capital for vehicles. They lost money, a lot of money. They are increasingly being pulled out of the gig economy in to the vanilla economy where they are liable for minimum wage, paid holiday etc. The cost of human workers is going up. This would make autonomous more competitive, but their problem isn't one of capital outlay it's that since they put their own autonomous development out of its misery the only thing they have to contribute is the UI.

App expertise will be a required component of any L4 network, and it's noticeable for instance that UBER's competitor Lyft have been partnered in to Motional, the collaboration between APTIV who have been running autonomous cars in Vegas for years and Hyundai who build cars. There are three requirements for a level 4 car hire service: autonomous system, car and UI. Getting a properly regulated, road legal L4 car on the road at this point is very hard. Building cars is quite hard. Good App development isn't easy. The tune will be called by the systems developers, the orchestra will be filled out by the car manufacturers, UBER might get a gig or two at second violin.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476301

Postby CliffEdge » January 26th, 2022, 12:40 pm

Other than in limited situations there will never be privately owned driverless cars, sadly.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476324

Postby odysseus2000 » January 26th, 2022, 2:29 pm

CliffEdge wrote:Other than in limited situations there will never be privately owned driverless cars, sadly.


Why?

Regards,

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476346

Postby CliffEdge » January 26th, 2022, 4:33 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:
CliffEdge wrote:Other than in limited situations there will never be privately owned driverless cars, sadly.


Why?

Regards,

Just my opinion based on various articles I've read recently. Disappointing as I was hoping it would come soon but it looks like I'll have to carry on driving till the end.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476384

Postby odysseus2000 » January 26th, 2022, 7:43 pm

CliffEdge wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote:
CliffEdge wrote:Other than in limited situations there will never be privately owned driverless cars, sadly.


Why?

Regards,

Just my opinion based on various articles I've read recently. Disappointing as I was hoping it would come soon but it looks like I'll have to carry on driving till the end.


My experience of articles is that they are sometimes good summaries of what has happened, but mostly they are hopeless as guides to what might come.

Until recently every article and their dog was 100% certain that BEV & Tesla in particular were gimmicks & could never compete with combustion.

The arguments made were many & often very detailed & universally rubbish. Anyone with any science & historical knowledge could easily point out multitudes of flaws which I often did here to universal ridicule & before that on the Fool, but hardly anyone believed me.

I am now reasonably convinced that most cars will be robotic self driving machines & that human driving will be as extensive as are horse drawn transport now and that the price of cars will fall. The only thing that might stop this is some discovery that humans are able to do things that computers can not. Before alpha-go became the world champion GO player these kind of aguments were hard to refute, but that single event demonstrated that synthetic neural nets can out perform highly trained human brains.

From that observation it is very difficult to argue that neural nets will not drive better than humans & as the nets are mostly made from very abundant elements there is no obvious limit to how low a cost they can be made for.

Regards,

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476399

Postby ReformedCharacter » January 26th, 2022, 9:39 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:I am now reasonably convinced that most cars will be robotic self driving machines & that human driving will be as extensive as are horse drawn transport now and that the price of cars will fall. The only thing that might stop this is some discovery that humans are able to do things that computers can not. Before alpha-go became the world champion GO player these kind of aguments were hard to refute, but that single event demonstrated that synthetic neural nets can out perform highly trained human brains.

From that observation it is very difficult to argue that neural nets will not drive better than humans & as the nets are mostly made from very abundant elements there is no obvious limit to how low a cost they can be made for.

Regards,

Interesting article in the DT:

The result is that forecasts have got more pessimistic. Chris Urmson, former head of Google’s AV team, thinks they will only be phased in over the next 50 years. On inspection, there is good reason for that long wait. For it is beginning to dawn that fully autonomous vehicles will never be able to manage on our messy streets. “The story we are told about self-driving cars is that the technology will be able to adapt to the world and that the world needs to do nothing,” says Stilgoe. “I think we know that’s a lie. The world always adapts to meet the technology.”

In other words, AVs will never drive in the current environment. Rather, we will change our environment to enable AVs to drive. To the human eye, a traffic light, even with the sun behind it, is a straightforward signal. To a computer, judging its shade and illumination in such circumstances can be extremely hard. Far easier would be to have a “smart traffic light” that communicates stop and go signals digitally and wirelessly to the car’s computer. Piece by piece, over the next decades, we will “upgrade” and adapt our world in this way to suit AI. “The world has been designed to be human-readable,” says Stilgoe. “AI needs the world to be AI-readable.”

That could well involve other changes, aimed at simplifying our complex roads for AI’s benefit. Reserved lanes for AVs, perhaps; more strict enforcement of speed limits; greater surveillance, where ubiquitous cameras ping real-time data back and forth. “These are relay consequential discussions we need to have,” says Stilgoe. “It’s not just about plucking out the human driver and switching in a computer and nothing else changes.”


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/features/can-driverless-cars-ever-truly-make-human-choices/
may be paywalled

I wish I could be more optimistic about the time frame as it looks as I'm much too old :)

RC

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476407

Postby odysseus2000 » January 26th, 2022, 10:01 pm

The Telegraph article is rubbish.

Musk on the last Friedman podcast described how much better the camera system they now have is better than a human eye.

Regards,

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476409

Postby CliffEdge » January 26th, 2022, 10:05 pm

Apparently bicycles will take precedence over cars unless they are eventually banned.

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476415

Postby servodude » January 26th, 2022, 10:21 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:The Telegraph article is rubbish.

Musk on the last Friedman podcast described how much better the camera system they now have is better than a human eye.

Regards,


you do much stereo image processing?
it's not about the quality of the camera
- it's about knowing from everything else at the junction that the bulb is shot in the red light in front of you

that's worked around in automonous mines by really restricting the edge conditions things have to cope with; using laser guidance, LIDAR, radar, GNSS, big flashing stobes and indemnity (so that anyone on site who goes anywhere near anything does so at their own risk. There are sites where even as the designer of the telemetry I'm not allowed to be on site at install)

Some of those machines are tech wonders (and not just in their control systems - their scale is quite amazing)
and their use is branching out in to different domains as it matures and the need for off vechicle guards diminishes being replaced with on vehicle equivalents

The difference is that the risk profile of a AHS going rogue in the Pilbarra is a damn site lower than if it wanders off a new spur on the M1

- sd

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476431

Postby Howard » January 27th, 2022, 12:04 am

odysseus2000 wrote:The Telegraph article is rubbish.

Musk on the last Friedman podcast described how much better the camera system they now have is better than a human eye.

Regards,


Have you driven a Tesla? If you have, you'll understand its limitations.

I have driven a new Tesla and its cameras couldn't see a broken down car on the motorway partially blocking the slow lane approximately a mile ahead. When it got much closer it did see the obstacle but much later than me and, if the motorway had been crowded, it would have caused a problem taking avoiding action.

A friend with a Tesla has observed similar issues.

regards

Howard

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476434

Postby odysseus2000 » January 27th, 2022, 12:20 am

Howard wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote:The Telegraph article is rubbish.

Musk on the last Friedman podcast described how much better the camera system they now have is better than a human eye.

Regards,


Have you driven a Tesla? If you have, you'll understand its limitations.

I have driven a new Tesla and its cameras couldn't see a broken down car on the motorway partially blocking the slow lane approximately a mile ahead. When it got much closer it did see the obstacle but much later than me and, if the motorway had been crowded, it would have caused a problem taking avoiding action.

A friend with a Tesla has observed similar issues.

regards

Howard


Unless you are in the US with the latest Fsd, one can't appreciate how much the tech has improved in the last 6 months.

The Telegraph article was about traffic lights. Sure this is a non trivial problem but comparing a public road Tesla to a mining truck makes no allowance for the quality of the Tesla AI neural net training. I have not seen any traffic light mistakes in the US.

Fsd is a rapidly expanding field, changing by the week & getting better in leaps & bounds.

Regards,

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476444

Postby BobbyD » January 27th, 2022, 7:19 am

servodude wrote:you do much stereo image processing?
it's not about the quality of the camera


That's lucky because Tesla are using lower res cameras than the phone I was using 16 years ago!

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Re: Driverless Vehicles

#476472

Postby CliffEdge » January 27th, 2022, 9:54 am

My idea of a driverless car is,

I get in, tell it where to go, anywhere in the UK, sit back and relax, read a book, listen to music, enjoy the views, have a nap, it wakes me up when I get there.

I don't need a licence, or even to be able to see.

Ain't gonna happen sadly. Anything else is driver assistance, not knocking it. Useful to have, but I'll still need a licence, be competent to drive, eyesight etc.

Not self driving private cars except in very restricted situations like the motorway where they might do most of the driving but you certainly won't be allowed to fall asleep! Never gonna happen in the next twenty years.


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