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Autonomous Car Progress

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Passenger vehicles Cars and Pickups towing trailers operating at level 4 autonomy. Right now GM claims level 2 hands free driving. They also state supercruise will also work while towing a trailer. So hands free while towing.

Yes, SuperCruise can work while towing a trailer. But SuperCruise is L2 hands-free. SuperCruise can do L2 hands-free while towing. SuperCruise cannot do L4 while towing. Of cours, it is possible to do L4 while towing but that is not what SuperCruise does. SuperCruise is only L2.
 
On Twitter, Mobileye answered my question about what the differences are between Mobileye Chauffeur and Mobileye Drive since they are both L4:


It sounds like Mobileye will take the same autonomous driving software and just tweak the hardware a bit for different applications. So, Mobileye Chauffeur will be L4 for consumer cars. Mobileye Drive will be L4 for driverless delivery and robotaxis. The placement of the sensors may be different since the vehicles will be different. And Mobileye Drive will have some extra hardware to allow teleoperation since there is no driver. Mobileye Chauffeur won't need the hardware for teleoperation since there will be someone sitting in the driver seat.
 
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FSD beta testers ride in a driverless Waymo and are very impressed.

Full ride:

Video is from September 2021. They didn't have FSD Beta at the time, so the verbal comments aren't useful for comparison. They put some general written comments at 11:30 which do reflect their later experience with FSD Beta.

Waymo dialed up the confidence since the JJRicks videos, and probably has gone further since. There's an unprotected left at 3:00 where it looks a tiny bit twitchy while waiting but does not proceed until clear. It starts the turn while the last oncoming vehicle is still in the intersection, more aggressive than I recall. It makes a left in front of an oncoming car at 5:20. It wasn't dangerous, but rattled the couple. I don't remember JJ's cars being nearly that aggressive.
 
Waymo dialed up the confidence since the JJRicks videos, and probably has gone further since. There's an unprotected left at 3:00 where it looks a tiny bit twitchy while waiting but does not proceed until clear. It starts the turn while the last oncoming vehicle is still in the intersection, more aggressive than I recall. It makes a left in front of an oncoming car at 5:20. It wasn't dangerous, but rattled the couple. I don't remember JJ's cars being nearly that aggressive.

Yes, it looks like Waymo has indeed increased the assertiveness. We see similar assertiveness in the videos of the 5th Gen. My guess is the Behavior Prediction has improved where Waymo can be more assertive and still be safe. I think this is a reasonable assumption since we know Waymo has been working a lot on Behavior Prediction. And if the Waymo Driver is more confident in it's predictions of what other vehicles will do, then the car would be able to drive more confidently as well.

Also, @Microterf told me that he recently got a chance to take a ride in Waymo. It had rained so the car had a safety driver (as Waymo does) and he described the car as more cautious and avoiding unprotected left turns. So, I wonder if maybe the Waymo Driver automatically adjusts the assertiveness and driving policy based on conditions. So if the weather is sunny and dry, it dials up the assertiveness and takes unprotected left turns. But if the weather is rainy where the roads might be wet, then the Waymo Driver dials back the assertiveness and avoids more risky maneuvers like unprotected left turns. It would make sense to ajust the driving policy based on conditions that might affect driving. Just a theory.
 
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I like the way Waymo do the left turns across multiple lanes of traffic. They pull all the way straight without left lane (on coming traffic) incursion to pass the horizontal cross traffic lanes first and wait, then turn sharp confidently to destination lanes. (compared to FSD beta always trying to cut corners like its just traveling along a curve) There is no jerking uncertainty of the steeling wheel, Those are the confidence and smoothness that FSD beta need to make users comfortable to use it, I would take a FSD beta with local street driving capability with that kind of smoothness on turns even if it requires manual lane change and defer to users for tricky obstacles.

I think those smooth turns without steering wheel jerking around is a "must" and elementary. I am an old school Control System Engineer and think that Tesla really need to hire a good Control System Expert to handle these underdamp/overdamp system conditions. It's not just software programming and AI.
 
I think those smooth turns without steering wheel jerking around is a "must" and elementary. I am an old school Control System Engineer and think that Tesla really need to hire a good Control System Expert to handle these underdamp/overdamp system conditions. It's not just software programming and AI.
It's possible that adding a level of temporal recursion to the neural networks for vision processing will get rid of some of the jerkiness as well. In a recurrent neural network, each processed video frame won't necessarily result in a new, independent prediction.
 
“Cruise’s driverless cars experienced serious issues Tuesday night with as many as 20 of its vehicles standing motionless for about two hours at the corner of Gough and Fulton streets, according to an eyewitness. The incident was only resolved when the robo-cars were manually moved out of the way by Cruise staff.”

 
Agreed. I think attention monitoring is necessary but not sufficient.

E.g. With the current capability of Tesla FSD it’s absolutely essential you have your hands on the wheel at all times. Sudden steering movements can happen at any time and the delay if you have your hands off the wheel will likely lead to overcorrection or under correction in the event of sudden unexplained steering events (just happened to me this morning, sudden jerk towards adjacent left turn lane with a car in it; immediate disengagement).

I guess we’ll see how it pans out. With the limited domains right now probably SuperCruise is not an issue to be hands off. For UltraCruise not so sure. Depends on capability. If it can give some very short warning (borderline L3 but not L3) it might be perfectly safe.

I assume they have touch sensors if needed.

With the torque-based steering nag, it was very easy to be distracted while using AP. Ever since they enabled the camera monitoring, it has become very difficult to fool the system. But that being said, I’ve noticed, if you stare straight without turning your head significantly, the steering nags will relax down to 1.5-2 minutes gaps.
 
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But that being said, I’ve noticed, if you stare straight without turning your head significantly, the steering nags will relax down to 1.5-2 minutes gaps.
Yes. As I said I have no problem satisfying the nags. However, they are extremely annoying.

I have my hands on the wheel all the time and am nearly always torquing it. Yet I still see the torque warning pop up (to be immediately satisfied since I am actively torquing the wheel). So I do wonder how it works. It seems that it may well be an interval-based system (with some caveats) as you describe, which is silly. Specifically, such a system ignores that you are actively torquing the wheel when it puts up the nag reminder. Why nag if the wheel was torqued for 10 straight seconds 2 seconds ago?

Anyway, it’s not a problem at all to avoid violations; it is just an awful system which is super annoying.

I’d be thrilled to just put both hands on the wheel and never have to worry about it. I’m not sure where else I would put my hands, anyway!

Another problem with the implementation is when the system is uncertain, it will beep at you to take the wheel (the small two red hands warning). It would have much less reason to do this if it always knew when you were holding the wheel. Super annoying.
 
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Informative video of a driverless ride in Cruise. He has some intro comments. I put the chapter start times below. You can jump to "riding the robotaxi" to get to the ride itself.


CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:02 Cruise Overview
03:42 Requesting the vehicle
04:44 Riding the robotaxi!
06:58 Scenario 1
07:50 Initial Thoughts
09:41 Scenario 2
12:00 Arriving
13:02 Closing Thoughts
 
I think those smooth turns without steering wheel jerking around is a "must" and elementary. I am an old school Control System Engineer and think that Tesla really need to hire a good Control System Expert to handle these underdamp/overdamp system conditions. It's not just software programming and AI.

Pretty sure Elon said in an interview recently that driving comfort is currently being deprioritized, and they are focused on zero disengagements in urban areas first. So I don't think the issue is a lack of control system expertise.

At the same time, I don't buy that smoother control can't be improved in parallel with proper decision-making. Which implies that Tesla might be keeping the system jarring to make sure people stay alert while testing.
 
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Here is a reddit post by an anonymous Cruise employee. He is claiming that he warned CPUC that this problem would happen before CPUC issued the permit to charge for driverless rides: The most concerning part is that he claims Cruise is a chaotic environment where the leadership does not want to discuss safety concerns.

FWl_XEjUUAc1-LV


The same issue of multiple Cruise vehicles getting stuck happened before on June 21.


It seems Cruise might have a recurring problem.

Cruise did put out a generic PR statement:

FWmCuApUcAAm87K
 
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Pretty sure Elon said in an interview recently that driving comfort is currently being deprioritized, and they are focused on zero disengagements in urban areas first. So I don't think the issue is a lack of control system expertise.

At the same time, I don't buy that smoother control can't be improved in parallel with proper decision-making. Which implies that Tesla might be keeping the system jarring to make sure people stay alert while testing.
The early L2 systems from major manufacturers were jarring too (ping pong between lanes) and it was suggested it keeps people more alert. But now most systems have been improved to smooth things out, so while there may be some truth to it, I'm not sure it's a major factor. Using cameras to monitor the driver probably is a more reliable way to ensure they are paying attention. Smoothing things out probably is just lower priority at this point.
 
Do these vehicles have remote operators that can prevent this sort thing from happening?
Cruise PR says they used both in the statement linked above. Depending on what the bug was however, it might affect remote retrieval too and make it not possible. The anonymous Cruise employee said the issue was such that it required manual retrieval though. Not enough details to tell either way.