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airdvr

The Failure Of This Self-Driving Truck Company Tells You All You Need To Know About Self-Driving Vehicles

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https://jalopnik.com/the-failure-of-this-self-driving-truck-company-tells-yo-1842417033

 

Along the way, he also became a disbeliever, mainly because of the problem with edge cases, or solving for obstacles and other things on the road a self-driving car will encounter that it doesn’t usually do. That could be a deer, for example, or challenging weather conditions, but each case is different, and it turns out that it gets exponentially harder and more expensive for machines to learn them the rarer they get.

Which Seltz-Axmacher ultimately concludes is a big problem for the industry, since to get a machine to be at least as good as a human will take billions and billions of more dollars of investment and likely years of testing. And now that the VC firms are getting wise to this fact, it makes it even less likely that the companies like Starsky will even be given the chance.

I think we might be seeing a huge delay in autonomous vehicle development.

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1 minute ago, wmw999 said:

It's still coming. It was never tomorrow, but it's coming. It's kind of like saying that cars would never replace horses, because horses could go so many more places. 

Wendy P.

Following that idea, maybe autonomous vehicles won't be able to go so many places that my Subaru can go.

The most sophisticated learning machine in the known universe is the human brain, and we don't allow its owner to drive a car on the highway until it has accumulated some 16 - 17 years of experiences, and even then it fucks up a lot.

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12 minutes ago, Phil1111 said:

Its still coming because the cpu, sensors, lidars, etc. Don't smoke pot, talk on cell phones, get hungry, tired, etc.

Automated trucking, a technical milestone that could disrupt hundreds of thousands of jobs, hits the road

One might wonder why so many new warehouse distribution centers are built right off the exits of major highways. Highway travel and 3-4 turns is easy, even for computers.

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(edited)

"Morgan Stanley estimated the savings of automated freight delivery to be a staggering $168 billion per year in saved fuel ($35 billion), reduced labor costs ($70 billion), fewer accidents ($36 billion) and increased productivity and equipment utilization ($27 billion). That’s an enormously high incentive to show drivers to the door – it would actually be enough to pay the drivers their $40,000 a year salary to stay home and still save almost $100 billion per year... Trucks that drive themselves are already rolling out around the world. Self-driving trucks successfully made deliveries in Nevada and Colorado in 2017. Rio Tinto has 73 autonomous mining trucks hauling iron ore 24 hours a day in Australia. Europe saw its first convoys of self-driving trucks cross the continent in 2016. ."

Above story by Andrew Yang, yeah the democrat Yang.

000's of engineers and economics will drive(sorry for that) this industry. Anyone that has watched a self driving agricultural sprayer whip around trees, telephone poles, rock piles at 20mph. All while precisely placing its 90' booms within 2' of the obstruction can see the advantages.

Edited by Phil1111
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23 minutes ago, normiss said:

One might wonder why so many new warehouse distribution centers are built right off the exits of major highways. Highway travel and 3-4 turns is easy, even for computers.

Been like that for years.  I don't think AV was considered.  Perhaps it is now.

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27 minutes ago, normiss said:

One might wonder why so many new warehouse distribution centers are built right off the exits of major highways. Highway travel and 3-4 turns is easy, even for computers.

There has been a shortage of truck drivers for years:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/u-s-truck-driver-shortage-is-on-course-to-double-in-a-decade

Or at least there was; Hard to say at the moment.

I would suggest an intermediate step would be to use the autonomous mode on the major highways, (where it works best).  Then when the truck exits the highway, have it pull over and take on a human driver for the local part of the trip.

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10 minutes ago, Phil1111 said:

 incentive to show drivers to the door – it would actually be enough to pay the drivers their $40,000 a year salary to stay home and still save almost $100 billion per year... Trucks that drive themselves are already rolling out around the world. Self-driving trucks successfully made deliveries in Nevada and Colorado in 2017. Rio Tinto has 73 autonomous mining trucks hauling iron ore 24 hours a day in Australia. Europe saw its first convoys of self-driving trucks cross the continent in 2016. ."

Above story by Andrew Yang, yeah the democrat Yang.

000's of engineers and economics will drive(sorry for that) this industry. Anyone that has watched a self driving agricultural sprayer whip around trees, telephone poles, rock piles at 20mph. All while precisely placing its 90' booms within 2' of the obstruction can see the advantages.

Driving in fields or mines is one thing.  Very little unexpected things happen there.

In February 2018, Starsky Robotics, the San Francisco-based autonomous truck company, completed a 7-mile (11 km) fully driverless trip in Florida without a human in the truck, though one was available to take over by remote control. Starsky Robotics became the first player in the self-driving truck game to drive in fully autonomous mode on a public road without a person in the cab.[16]

In July 2018, Uber announced it was shuttering the truck-focused branch of its autonomous vehicles program as part of a reorganization of its Advanced Technologies Group following the fatal Uber autonomous passenger vehicle crash in Tempe, AZ in March 2018.[17] Shortly after Uber shut down its autonomous truck efforts, two autonomous truck startups, Kodiak Robotics and Ike, were announced featuring alumni from the Uber program.[18][19]

In November 2018, Embark Trucks announced a pilot with national truck fleet Ryder and Frigidaire appliance manufacturer Electrolux to deliver refrigerators via autonomous truck from El Paso, TX to Palm Springs, CA.[20] During the pilot, manually-driven Ryder trucks provided first and last mile delivery while Embark autonomous trucks carried the load as far as 306 miles at a time on I-10.[21]

In May 2019, the company TuSimple announced a contract for a two-week pilot delivering mail for the United States Postal Service. The company planned to run five round trips between Dallas, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona, with two humans on board. The company started in 2015 and already runs daily cargo for customers in Arizona.[22]

As of June 2019, Starsky Robotics demonstrated their continued leadership in the autonomous trucking space by becoming the first company to operate fully unmanned on public highways at 55MPH with nobody in the cab of the truck.[23]

It's happening on a very limited basis.  It has yet to overcome the multitude of lawsuits that will happen when the first truck kills someone.

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1 hour ago, airdvr said:

Been like that for years.  I don't think AV was considered.  Perhaps it is now.

I can tell you that developers are absolutely considering AVs when currently masterplanning towns and communities. I’ve seen several town plans changed in regard to the amount of parking being planned because of the likelihood of AVs, for example.

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2 hours ago, ryoder said:

I would suggest an intermediate step would be to use the autonomous mode on the major highways, (where it works best).  Then when the truck exits the highway, have it pull over and take on a human driver for the local part of the trip.

Hi Robert,

I think it works somewhat like that here in Oregon with regard to triple trailers.  I do see triples out on the Interstate but none ever inside of any city(s).

I think they just find an exit, unhook one of the trailers & go ahead with just the remaining two.

Jerry Baumchen

PS)  Ken Gowlerk:  Your thoughts????????

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7 hours ago, airdvr said:

I think we might be seeing a huge delay in autonomous vehicle development.

Perhaps - but they are largely already here.  Hundreds of thousands of Teslas are driving themselves at Level 2.  The 2020 Audi A8 will be Level 3.  Cadillac is advertising their hands-free driving solution.  Supercruise I think?  (Which I associate with efficient supersonic flight, not autonomous vehicles, but whatever.)

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7 hours ago, kallend said:

The most sophisticated learning machine in the known universe is the human brain, and we don't allow its owner to drive a car on the highway until it has accumulated some 16 - 17 years of experiences, and even then it fucks up a lot.

That's one of the reasons that they will be coming soon.  They don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans to save lives.  (And humans, on average, are less than stellar drivers.)

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4 hours ago, JerryBaumchen said:

PS)  Ken Gowlerk:  Your thoughts????????

I think that the tech industry is full of arrogant engineers who think AI will be able to power autonomous vehicles. Maybe someday, but the level of complexity that will need to be dealt with to cover the unknown unknown situations, coupled with the breakdown rate of electronic components and keeping sensors working properly will cause it to be impractical for large numbers of them to interact with each other safely. Unless the level of traffic changes what would happen is a small number of failures leading to massive gridlock and few but memorable accidents.

Computers can only assist drivers  they can not replace them except possibly on dedicated roads. Which is where the low hanging fruit should be picked first. They have not managed to create AI planes or trains yet. Those are both far simpler problems. The 3 pounds of grey matter in our heads is an imperfect control unit. But far more able than any machine ever built yet.

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10 minutes ago, gowlerk said:

Maybe someday, but the level of complexity that will need to be dealt with to cover the unknown unknown situations, coupled with the breakdown rate of electronic components and keeping sensors working properly will cause it to be impractical for large numbers of them to interact with each other safely.  . . . They have not managed to create AI planes or trains yet.

?? Most commercial aircraft can indeed fly autonomously.  Cat IIIc certified aircraft can fly from takeoff to touchdown on autopilot.  And many of those are entirely fly by wire.  Which is a lot more complex (and the failure modes a lot more dire) than a car.

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8 hours ago, JerryBaumchen said:

Hi Robert,

I think it works somewhat like that here in Oregon with regard to triple trailers.  I do see triples out on the Interstate but none ever inside of any city(s).

I think they just find an exit, unhook one of the trailers & go ahead with just the remaining two.

Jerry Baumchen

PS)  Ken Gowlerk:  Your thoughts????????

Hi Jerry,

 

You are absolutely correct. Triple 'pup' trailers (the short ones) or 'turnpike doubles' (2 long trailers in tandem) are only allowed on certain roads, not even all of the interstates. Eastern half of the US is primarily on the toll roads in IN, OH, PA & NY. Most exits have 'makeup/breakup lots' where, as you suspected, pull off into those lots and break the triples up. 

I'm not Ken, but I drive a big truck for a living.

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12 hours ago, airdvr said:

I think we might be seeing a huge delay in autonomous vehicle development.

What do you mean by huge? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 100 years? Never?

Link below to an interesting article published a few weeks ago by Waymo; they don't seem to be delaying anything. They are slowly but surely moving ahead.  

https://blog.waymo.com/2020/03/introducing-5th-generation-waymo-driver.html

 

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13 hours ago, kallend said:

The most sophisticated learning machine in the known universe is the human brain

MOST sophisticated? Well, yes and no:
Heard of Alpha Zero?
After Deep Mind had created Alpha Go, the first AI that was able to beat a human master in the game of GO (thought to be orders of magnitude more complex than chess), they set out to create a more general AI that would be able to learn any 2-player strategy game. They created Alpha Zero.
Then they had it play chess, and the only thing that they programmed into it, were the rules of chess--no strategy, no openings, NOTHING. Then they allowed it to learn chess by playing games against itself and learning from its mistakes and successes--starting out by playing completely random moves.

The AI took all of 4 hours(!!!--albeit playing on a few super computers in parallel) to teach itself chess on a level where it could beat the previously best chess playing algorythm (stockfish), which itself long had exceeded any human chess master's ability in the game.

The fascinating thing is that AlphaZero is playing in a completely different style than all other chess algorithms. It computes far fewer moves but plays an extremely creative, attacking style of chess that humans are now starting to analyze and that is confusing all other, traditional chess engines.

(they also taught it Go and Japanese Chess, with similar success, but it took a few days before it could beat Alpha Go at the game of Go)

So: 4 hours of learning; from nothing (therefore the name: alpha ZERO) to worlds best chess playing entity...not a bad learning machine in itself. It may be able to learn how to drive.

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On 3/22/2020 at 7:22 AM, airdvr said:

https://jalopnik.com/the-failure-of-this-self-driving-truck-company-tells-yo-1842417033

 

Along the way, he also became a disbeliever, mainly because of the problem with edge cases, or solving for obstacles and other things on the road a self-driving car will encounter that it doesn’t usually do. That could be a deer, for example, or challenging weather conditions, but each case is different, and it turns out that it gets exponentially harder and more expensive for machines to learn them the rarer they get.

Which Seltz-Axmacher ultimately concludes is a big problem for the industry, since to get a machine to be at least as good as a human will take billions and billions of more dollars of investment and likely years of testing. And now that the VC firms are getting wise to this fact, it makes it even less likely that the companies like Starsky will even be given the chance.

I think we might be seeing a huge delay in autonomous vehicle development.

The Wright Company failed too. Guess airplanes weren't viable.

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2 minutes ago, wolfriverjoe said:

Don't forget about Comodore Computers, too.

Had you actually read the article you'd know that it's the venture capitalists who are balking at sinking many more billions into the R & D.  No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

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2 hours ago, wolfriverjoe said:

Don't forget about Comodore Computers, too.

And Tandy Computers.  And Atari.  The computer revolution is a big dud.  No one is going to invest in personal computers after those fiascos.

And don't even get me started on the whole "online" thing.  Remember America Online?  The failure of AOL is all you need to know about any potential "future" for the Internet.

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