San Francisco fog defeats pack of Waymo robo-taxis A mayhem of self-driving Waymo cars succumbed to San Francisco fog on Tuesday morning and came to a halt, briefly tying up traffic in the city's Balboa Terrace neighborhood. Five Waymo robo taxis were baffled by Karl – the name by which the American city's frequent fog is known – and pulled over on San Aleso Avenue, according …
From what I remember from sailing , radar only detects massive metal things , actually guess they dont have to be metal, but they need to be sizeable and not shaped like a stealth bomber.
What I'm saying is I wouldnt feel safe crossing the road near a Johhny Cab - "cos radar"
Unless "Radar" is now a catch all metaphore for every kind of obstacle detection / mapping technique available. including the white stick .
Shorter wavelength (mm wave and beyond) radars are more than capable of detecting humans without their needing to be carrying a big plate of steel or a retroreflector device, so no, it's not necessarily just a case of using "radar" as a catch-all term.
Isn't the shorter wavelength the stuff that's used in meteorology to detect rain clouds and stuff? So it it detected the water in humans? Would that be affected by dense fog?
It's all well outside my area of knowledge, so, you know, just asking for some help here :-)
I'd also assume LIDAR doesn't work too well in dense fog either.
Come back in the summer and you'll discover that Karl the Fog is also known as our natural air conditioning. There is a reason that a local saying is "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" (unknown author, but often falsely attributed to Mark Twain).
The Fog in The City isn't apocryphal, it's very real ... and the idiots programming these cars should be aware of it. One wonders what other safety issues they don't know about (or are simply ignoring because "nobody will ever do that!). Garbage in, garbage out.
The chances of me trusting self-driving cars in my lifetime approach zero.
And then we moved to Melbourne, Victoria - and now we laugh about such comments.
I've spoken to Russians and Canadians who have never felt so cold as in one of our 4-seasons-in-a-day summer days - never mind winter.
The difference, of course, is largely that houses here would be condemned in most civilised countries as little more than refrigerator cartons with a home theatre system.
For typically over half the year, I can (and have) snow-ski at sunrise in the Sierra (20F/-7C), waterski at lunchtime in The Delta (88F/31C), surf at Davenport Landing for sunset(60F/15C), and then drive home over a very foggy and cold (45F/7C) Golden Gate Bridge. There are reasons people flock to California, and none of them are politics.
Interesting how far from extreme all the places being name-checked here really are.
One El Niño summer in Melbourne and you'll never call it cold again.
I live in Santa Barbara and marine fog and marine overcast is a pretty constant thing here, too. During the summer how warm any given day will get depends almost entirely on where you are relative to marine layer and how stable it is. Often it sticks around until about noon and then burns off, which is pretty ideal because you still get some sun but the high temperature gets held down.
It's not unusual for it to be 20F hotter ten miles inland than it is at the shore.
On my last full day in California I rushed back down the coast get some pictures of the Golden Gate at sunset, and just as it should have come into view the densest fog I've ever experienced came out of nowhere. You couldn't see the bridge from the top of the viewpoint, hell, you couldn't even see the bridge when driving over the bridge. Of course it was a beautiful clear sunset the next day while on the plane taxiing out of SF.
But still, no excuse for a self driving vehicle.
Should have taken the Larkspur Ferry to SF and back instead of driving. Chances are it would have been clear on the water, and you'd have managed pictures of the Bridge disappearing into the marine layer. Us locals can predict the weather by how much of which parts of the Bridge are visible from a distance.
Karl's a right capricious bugger. Have a beer.
No, it's quite a bit more advanced than that.
Has to do with high and low pressure changing the depth of the marine layer, and the fact that the Golden Gate itself (the gap being bridged) is the only real opening in the Coastal mountain chain for many miles north and south. The size and shape of the bridge itself act as a scale against which it's fairly easy to read subtle differences in air pressure and the speed/direction of the wind, as well as the depth/thickness of the marine layer, and how high it is off the water. That's the gist of it, but there are other factors that help in the prediction (water temperature at the off-shore buoys being a big one). I can go out about three days with good accuracy, I know some old folks who can get five days out with pretty good precision.
San Francisco Fog has it's own entry in the Wiki near you.
I suspect that Waymo is taking it carefully... as much as the cars can see each other, driving on blithely at speed because they can 'see' through the fog doesn't seem to gel well with... well... meatbags who might act irrationally during foggy conditions.
This is why *everyone* should slow down during extreme weather conditions, even if their cars are equipped with the fastest braking system on the planet with the best ABS, slip control and the like... You don't know what others who don't have cars with the superb handling characteristics that yours does, do, or how their cars suddenly might lose grip and start doing silly things.
So if a self-driving car decides to pull over as a precaution, I'd say that shows that Waymo at least thought this through and learned from the likes of a) Tesla (white semi crossing road and Tesla plowing into it), and b) Uber's self-driving unit fiasco in Phoenix (was it Phoenix where a self-driving Uber car thing ran over the cyclist?).
Confusion about intent, particularly when driving at speed, could easily cascade into collisions or other problems on the road (such as holding up traffic)."
That happens frequently with just meatbags behind the wheel, not leaving enough space in front and failure to anticipate resulting in that concertina effect of breaking, coming to a stop and taking off again. There is probably a proper term for it and many papers written on the subject.
four spinning LiDAR sensors, six radar sensors, fourteen cameras, and eight ultrasonic sensors, and assorted telemetry sensors monitoring the wheels, steering, brakes, and so on.
And yet the fleshy meatbags manage with just two (sometimes fewer!) eyes and the seat of their pants... sounds like these robot thingies have some way to go.
" sounds like these robot thingies have some way to go"
Well, lets count the amount of car collisions caused by humans and compare it to the amount caused by robot drivers.
and remember:
A politician uses statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination
You won't be allowed to buy one. You'll hire one like a taxi or, at best, lease one.
I see Ford have now been allowed to sell their "partial self-driving" cars in the UK now (geo-fenced to certain motorway routes) and while you buy the car, the level 2 hands-free driving is only "free" for a short while and then becomes a subscription only service.
"censors"
And there'll be no swearing, "making out" with your "friend" or watching smutty videos on your phone while in one due to all those censors :-)
"and then becomes a subscription only service."
At which point I (or more likely a high-profile lawfirm) file a class-action lawsuit against Ford to return the money for all the suddenly broken-by-design hardware that they sold me (and tens of thousands of others ... thus the class action). Followed immediately by another class action to remove all the components used by said system, so as to not unnecessarily weigh the car down and waste fuel/'leccy ... WILL NOBODY THINK ABOUT THE CHILDRENVIRONMENT????
Swearing will take care of itself, no government anywhere can stop it, no matter how hard the fuckers try.
You shouldn't be watching pR0n your phone, or making out, when behind the wheel .... When you are driving, DRIVE. It's kind of important.
there are very long-standing conventions, expectations, and human interactions
This is an excellent insight. A lot of driving in cities is built on these sorts of conventions and expectations. Experienced city drivers know that bus drivers will start to move shortly after their last passenger steps on, taxis will jump into a tiny space in front or beside but most other drivers will be more open to taking turns, some cars will take a "no right turn" that is clearly only there to improve traffic flow, cyclists will pull in front of you as they cross the traffic lights before they are green, etc. This isn't about what is legal, but how real road users behave on city streets - which is very different from how they behave on suburban roads or highways.
There is no replacement for the experience from driving down Shaftesbury Avenue at 7PM, Marylebone Road at 8AM or tiny streets in the City at 3PM. Autonomous cars should be much better than us because they can (instantly) share the experience their whole fleet has acquired over their whole history. However, it doesn't look like these makers are concentrating on learning from experience like humans do.
"However, it doesn't look like these makers are concentrating on learning from experience like humans do."
That seems to be the case with pretty much all so-called AI that has been foisted on us. Even ChatGPT and equivalents comes in "versions" as they train new ones. With the chat ones, it's been made abundantly clear that they can't tell right from wrong and can easily be "trained" by users to become highly offensive, so now they don't do that. In the case of "AI" controlling cars on the road, there's a chance one car will "learn" some bad behaviour and pass it on the rest of the fleet thereby leading to the enormous likelihood of autonomous cars causing accidents, injuries or death where the operating company has no idea why or how it happened. An insurance nightmare. Passing on information about roadworks and traffic jams is one thing, but passing on behavioural reaction type learning in a live environment is something that they simply can't do. It needs to be in a consistent and known state.
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