They would do better to look at the few serious autopilot crashes Tesla has had. They tend to involve the car driving straight into a large stationary object, in situations where a much cheaper car with a basic automatic emergency braking system (AEB) would refuse to collide and would just stop.
It looks like Tesla’s over-sophisticated system which builds a live 3d map of the whole environment, too heavily filters out large non-moving objects, believing them to be things like overhead bridges which it can pass under.
It needs a supplemental and independent AEB system based purely on highly directional forward facing sensors which can confirm that the path ahead is clear. This is so cheap that it is becoming common on mainstream cars like Hondas and Toyotas. The current model S probably already has the sensor hardware onboard to enable this extra redundant safety system in software and save lives.
> They tend to involve the car driving straight into a large stationary object, in situations where a much cheaper car with a basic automatic emergency braking system (AEB) would refuse to collide and would just stop
> Volvo's semi-autonomous system, Pilot Assist, has the same shortcoming. Say the car in front of the Volvo changes lanes or turns off the road, leaving nothing between the Volvo and a stopped car. "Pilot Assist will ignore the stationary vehicle and instead accelerate to the stored speed," Volvo's manual reads, meaning the cruise speed the driver punched in. "The driver must then intervene and apply the brakes.” In other words, your Volvo won't brake to avoid hitting a stopped car that suddenly appears up ahead. It might even accelerate towards it.
> The same is true for any car currently equipped with adaptive cruise control, or automated emergency braking. It sounds like a glaring flaw, the kind of horrible mistake engineers race to eliminate. Nope. These systems are designed to ignore static obstacles because otherwise, they couldn't work at all.
> “You always have to make a balance between braking when it’s not really needed, and not braking when it is needed,” says Erik Coelingh, head of new technologies at Zenuity, a partnership between Volvo and Autoliv formed to develop driver assistance technologies and self-driving cars. He's talking about false positives. On the highway, slamming the brakes for no reason can be as dangerous as not stopping when you need to.
I don't work on these radar systems, but have played a lot with ultrasound for robotics. It seems possible these radar systems give almost continuous false positives. You could get a pretty strong return from potholes, slightly sunken drain covers, etc. Using doppler to reject any return that matches the car's own road speed just leaves the returns from moving vehicles. You can then track speed vs distance to sanitize that data. It becomes a tractable problem then to detect that the car in front is slowing quicker than you are. But telling the difference between a stationary car and a slightly misaligned bridge expansion joint is probably not trivial.
The Tesla has multiple different sensors, including ultrasound, radar, and cameras. Fusing information from the different sensors should help correct for such errors.
> These systems are designed to ignore static obstacles because otherwise, they couldn't work at all.
Just to be clear, it does not automatically follow that therefore it is acceptable for them to be on the road like this. That argument must be based on efficacy, not feasibility.
My understanding is that statistics show that these emergency braking systems do, on balance, reduce the severity and frequency of collisions. Perhaps that is because drivers of these vehicles are not being given the opportunity to stop paying attention to the road, but once that option is offered, the minimum acceptable performance for obstacle detection goes up. It's no use arguing that the drivers of level-three cars are supposed to be paying attention at all times, because people are human, and don't do passive attention well - acceptability criteria must be based on what actually happens, not what is supposed to happen.
My wife's reasonably cheap Subaru has both adaptive cruise control and AEB. It does not have the Volvo bug. The AEB and active cruise are separate systems and the AEB has priority.
Is there any public data on how many false-positive obstacles these systems detect and then ignore? Or are vendors too ashamed to admit they have any false positives?
It looks like Tesla’s over-sophisticated system which builds a live 3d map of the whole environment, too heavily filters out large non-moving objects, believing them to be things like overhead bridges which it can pass under.
It needs a supplemental and independent AEB system based purely on highly directional forward facing sensors which can confirm that the path ahead is clear. This is so cheap that it is becoming common on mainstream cars like Hondas and Toyotas. The current model S probably already has the sensor hardware onboard to enable this extra redundant safety system in software and save lives.