AutoPilot and Animals

[johnmodely]

So picking up my Model Y this Thursday in the northeast, and deer and large animals are a huge issue here. Ive hit deer twice, and just ran over a massive raccoon a few months ago that took out my front fender.

Im hoping autopilot can see animals darting across the road and do evasive action before I see it and have time to react. I saw a thread about this in 2016, but where are we at in 2020?

I would expect AP with HW3 to be able to recognize animals and avoid them if its safe to do so, hope thats the case at this point.

 

[Tam]

...I would expect AP with HW3 to be able to recognize animals and avoid them if its safe to do so, hope thats the case at this point.

Soon! And that "soon" means I would not give a year number

 

[diplomat33]

So picking up my Model Y this Thursday in the northeast, and deer and large animals are a huge issue here. Ive hit deer twice, and just ran over a massive raccoon a few months ago that took out my front fender.

Im hoping autopilot can see animals darting across the road and do evasive action before I see it and have time to react. I saw a thread about this in 2016, but where are we at in 2020?

I would expect AP with HW3 to be able to recognize animals and avoid them if its safe to do so, hope thats the case at this point.

I would not count on it. AP is a driver assist which means you must always be alert and in control. Assume that AP won't stop for an animal.

 

[Tam]

...

Too brutal for me to watch. I don't know how I am going to be able to sleep after watching it!

 

[Daniel in SD]

Too brutal for me to watch. I don't know how I am going to be able to sleep after watching it!

Sorry. I've deleted it.
If people want to see cars using Autopilot hitting deers they can do a google search.

 

[K2500Z71]

Given that people have a tough time avoiding deer, I wouldn’t expect AP in its current state to be able to either.

Realistically, we won’t have true FSD until it’s able to detect and respond to road hazards like animals, debris and potholes just like a human would. If not, I suspect that mobile service will be overwhelmed responding to flat tire calls. I have to override NOA quite frequently on expressways here in the northeast to avoid potholes that would surely bend a rim or result in a flat.

 

[malcolm]

Tesla Autopilot safety feature helps save cop running a red light - Electrek

Would side-pointing radar help? Similar problem to another driver running a light. Except on either side. And sudden braking could cause problems for following vehicles.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Tesla Autopilot safety feature helps save cop running a red light - Electrek

Would side-pointing radar help? Similar problem to another driver running a light. Except on either side. And sudden braking could cause problems for following vehicles.

A human with situational awareness and peripheral vision could have done an even better job! haha.
AEB is good because clearly not everyone has those things all the time.
I bet computer vision is good enough to be better than a human at detecting red light runners.

 

[Quamera]

So it sounds like Autopilot isn't quite up to evading suicidal wildlife yet, is FSD any better. In Australia kangaroos often feed along the less major roads around dawn and dusk when it is almost impossible to see them because of the light conditions and the fact that they are a similar colour to the dead grass beside the road. If some of the forward facing cameras had infrared capabilities they would be able to detect animals (and people) better than our eyes especially in low light conditions.

 

[Tam]

...is FSD any better...

I think both Autopilot and FSD are at the same level regarding detecting a stationary object or an animal.

That's because both are still heavily relying on the radar and the issue of stationary objects is still unresolved for the past century.

With the first death in Autopilot in 2016, Tesla said it would improve the radar to address the problem

Elon Musk
@elonmusk

Working on using existing Tesla radar by itself (decoupled from camera) w temporal smoothing to create a coarse point cloud, like lidar
7:59 PM · Jul 14, 2016
2.2K
Retweets and comments

and still, there were another 2 fatal autopilot deaths in 2018 and 2019.

Tesla Vision and Neuro Network are promised to be the solution.

It has been drastically improved in the past 6 years since AP1 but still, we are nowhere near solving the Kangaroo problem.

In theory, it's an exponential improvement so we should not have to wait for another 6 years but that's what I am afraid of a much longer wait because the reality is quite different from theory.

However, while waiting for perfections, there are still many other features to be introduced as a consolation prize.

 

[Uncle Paul]

Vehicles hit wild animals all the time, because they are unpredictible. They can come out of dense cover and spring onto the roadway in an instant.

Both human and automated drivers can take evasive actions, but there is no assurance that it will avoid the contact.

I used to do ultra high speed open road driving events (Silver State Challenge) and the advics was not to attempt to swerve to avoid hitting the animal. Swerving at high speeds can easily put you into a ditch, plus you want to give the animal the chance to change their pathway to avoid your vehicle.

 

[agtdDelirium]

A simple infrared camera and a heads-up display would be such a simple addition to vehicles. I have never understood why this type of technology has not been adopted. Maybe because most auto manufactures are based in large urban environments, and they lack the understanding of the immense risk this represents for those of us who live far from the beaten track.

In the past year, I have hit one deer and narrowly avoided 2-3 more. There are certain times of the year where I live in Colorado that the daily morning commute sees 2-3 carcasses over a 15 mile stretch of highway, the previous night's slaughter.

And no, the Model S does not avoid deer in autopilot.

 

[HenryFarkas]

So picking up my Model Y this Thursday in the northeast, and deer and large animals are a huge issue here. Ive hit deer twice, and just ran over a massive raccoon a few months ago that took out my front fender.

Im hoping autopilot can see animals darting across the road and do evasive action before I see it and have time to react. I saw a thread about this in 2016, but where are we at in 2020?

I would expect AP with HW3 to be able to recognize animals and avoid them if its safe to do so, hope thats the case at this point.

I saw a deer next to the road yesterday. My M3 didn't see it.

 

[Quamera]

I am still of the opinion that a computer should be able to predict the most likely path of an animal and organise the safest and least damaging evasive action far more quickly than a human. We see animals as being unpredictable because they seem to suddenly emerge from the roadside and dash across it but really they are just trying to cross the road as quickly as they can usually after being startled by the noise and/or lights of the car and will be traveling in a straight line at a fairly constant speed.

Sometimes the best solution is not to brake because even though the animal will cross the path of the vehicle it is not moving fast enough to intercept and passes safely behind. Unfortunately the usual human reaction is to immediately hit the brakes when the animal is sighted and then the vehicle slows down just enough for the animal to be hit front on and cause carnage to all involved.

Some of Teslas current cameras would need IR capabilities for early animal detection in low light conditions which would help for cyclists and pedestrians as well. Rules would also have to be created to allow the vehicle to cross onto the wrong side of the road when there was no oncoming traffic and even off the road if it was safe to do so bearing in mind the reduced car control as soon as any wheel leaves the bitumen.

 

[Pomato]

It's not just animals. Self-driving cars need to be programmed to try to understand pedestrian and animal logic or lack of logic, or at least be programmed to slow down a lot to wait for possible scenarios.

Just to give an example, recently a kid was skateboarding in my neighborhood street. I slowed down as soon as I noticed he wasn't looking at my car. Then his skateboard went towards me and he himself in the opposite direction, and naturally I start bringing my car to a stop, while he being an illogical creature thinks about saving his skateboard by running towards it and the lane my car was driving on.

If a self-driving car didn't predict that kid would make a sudden dash towards a small inanimate rolling object, I think there's a good chance the kid would be hit.

 

[HenryFarkas]

Vehicles hit wild animals all the time, because they are unpredictible. They can come out of dense cover and spring onto the roadway in an instant.

Both human and automated drivers can take evasive actions, but there is no assurance that it will avoid the contact.

I used to do ultra high speed open road driving events (Silver State Challenge) and the advics was not to attempt to swerve to avoid hitting the animal. Swerving at high speeds can easily put you into a ditch, plus you want to give the animal the chance to change their pathway to avoid your vehicle.

During my career as an emergency physician, I had the opportunity to meet lots of drivers who swerved to avoid a deer and hit a tree instead.

 

[superdry]

I very narrowly missed hitting a cow with my Model X with AutoPilot engaged. It was dark and the cow was black, so it wasn't visible very far in advance. The car was driving the speed limit (35 mph in this case) and there were no other cars around. The cow was slowly crossing the road from left to right. The cow just appeared in the field of vision illuminated by the headlight, and the driver swerved to the left and slammed on the brakes. I was in the passenger seat and thought for sure we were going to at least clip the cow. Considering what a deer can do to a car, this cow could have easily totaled the car and perhaps killed both occupants.

It all happened so fast. I don't recall any alerts from the car that there was an object ahead. I wonder why at least the forward radar didn't see the cow, even if it was at the last minute and too late to avoid a collision. Perhaps the issue of a cow, unlike a car, having most of its body at least a couple of feet off the ground could be an issue: radar mounted in the front bumper at, say, 12" off the ground, and looking only forward and level, may see only the legs and think they're small enough to not be a danger. Who knows.

 

[LowlyOilBurner]

My last two Volvo’s had “large animal detention w/emergency braking”. It didn’t work for deer, I always had to stab the brakes. Maybe the deer weren’t big enough, maybe it needed to be a moose or elk for it to actually work.

I did have my Y pick up a deer on the UI as a human, for like a split second. I was going super slow around a turn, the deer was on the straight away after the curve. The deer had crossed the road before I or the car would have stopped.