Robot cars make for annoying drivers.
Relative to human motorists, the driverless vehicles now undergoing testing on public roads are overly cautious, maddeningly slow and prone to abrupt halts or bizarre paralysis caused by bikers, joggers, crosswalks or anything else that doesn’t fit within the neat confines of binary robot brains. Self-driving companies are well aware of the problem, but there’s not much they can do at this point. Tweaking the algorithms to produce a smoother ride would compromise safety, undercutting one of the most-often heralded justifications for the technology.
It was just this kind of tuning to minimize excessive braking that led to a fatal crash involving an Uber Technologies autonomous vehicle in March, according to federal investigators. The company has yet to resume public testing of self-driving cars since shutting down operations in Arizona following the crash.
Photo: Reuters
If driverless cars can’t be safely programmed to mimic risk-taking human drivers, perhaps they can be taught to better understand the way humans act. That’s the goal of Perceptive Automata, a Boston-based startup applying research techniques from neuroscience and psychology to give automated vehicles more human-like intuition on the road: Can software be taught to anticipate human behavior?
“We think about what that other person is doing or has the intent to do,” said Ann Cheng, a senior investment manager at Hyundai Cradle, the South Korean automaker’s venture arm and one of the investors that just helped Perceptive Automata raise US$16 million. Toyota Motor Corp. is also backing the two-year-old startup founded by researchers and professors at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We see a lot of AI companies working on more classical problems, like object detection [or] object classification,” Cheng said. “Perceptive is trying to go one layer deeper — what we do intuitively already.”
This predictive aspect of self-driving tech “was either misunderstood or completely underestimated” in the early stages of autonomous development, said Jim Adler, the managing director of Toyota AI Ventures.
With Alphabet’s Waymo planning to roll out an autonomous taxi service to paying customers in the Phoenix area later this year, and General Motor’s driverless unit racing to deploy a ride-hailing business next year, the shortcomings of robot cars interacting with humans are coming under increased scrutiny. Some experts have advocated for education campaigns to train pedestrians to be more mindful of autonomous vehicles. Startups and global automakers are busy testing external display screens to telegraph the intent of a robotic car to bystanders.
But no one believes that will be enough to make autonomous cars move seamlessly among human drivers. For that, the car needs to be able to decipher intent by reading body language and understanding social norms. Perceptive Automata is trying to teach machines to predict human behavior by modeling how humans do it.
Sam Anthony, chief technology officer at Perceptive and a former hacker with a PhD in cognition and brain behavior from Harvard, developed a way to take image recognition tests used in psychology and use them to train so-called neural networks, a kind of machine learning based loosely on how the human brain works. His startup has drafted hundreds of people across diverse age ranges, driving experiences and locales to look at thousands of clips or images from street life — pedestrians chatting on a corner, a cyclist looking at his phone — and decide what they’re doing, or about to do. All those responses then get fed into the neural network, or computer brain, until it has a reference library it can call on to recognize what’s happening in real life situations.
Perceptive has found it’s?important to incorporate regional differences, since jaywalking is commonplace in New York City and virtually non-existent elsewhere.
“No one jaywalks in Tokyo, I’ve never seen it,” says Adler of Toyota. “These social mores and norms of how our culture will evolve and how different cultures will evolve with this tech is incredibly fascinating and also incredibly complex.”
Perceptive is working with startups, suppliers and automakers in the US, Europe, and Asia, although it won’t specify which. The company is hoping to have its technology integrated into mass production cars with self-driving features as soon as 2021. Even at the level of partial autonomy, with features such as lane-keeping and hands-off highway driving, deciphering human intent is relevant.
Autonomous vehicles “are going to be slow and clunky and miserable unless they can understand how to deal with humans in a complex environment,” said Mike Ramsey, an analyst at Gartner. Still, he cautioned that Perceptive’s undertaking “is exceptionally difficult.”
Even if Perceptive proves capable of doing what it claims, Ramsey said, it may also surface fresh ethical questions about outsourcing life or death decisions to machines. Because the startup is going beyond object identification to mimicking human intuition, it could be liable for programming the wrong decision if an error occurs.
It’s also not the only company working on this problem.
It’s reasonable to assume that major players like Waymo, GM’s Cruise LLC and Zoox are trying to solve it internally, said Sasha Ostojic, former head of engineering at Cruise who is now a venture investor at Playground Global in Silicon Valley.
Until anyone makes major headway, however, be prepared to curb your road rage while stuck behind a robot car that drives like a grandma.
“The more responsible people in the AV industry optimize for safety rather than comfort,” Ostojic said.
Jason Han says that the e-arrival card spat between South Korea and Taiwan shows that Seoul is signaling adherence to its “one-China” policy, while Taiwan’s response reflects a reciprocal approach. “Attempts to alter the diplomatic status quo often lead to tit-for-tat responses,” the analyst on international affairs tells the Taipei Times, adding that Taiwan may become more cautious in its dealings with South Korea going forward. Taipei has called on Seoul to correct its electronic entry system, which currently lists Taiwan as “China (Taiwan),” warning that reciprocal measures may follow if the wording is not changed before March 31. As of yesterday,
The Portuguese never established a presence on Taiwan, but they must have traded with the indigenous people because later traders reported that the locals referred to parts of deer using Portuguese words. What goods might the Portuguese have offered their indigenous trade partners? Among them must have been slaves, for the Portuguese dealt slaves across Asia. Though we often speak of “Portuguese” ships, imagining them as picturesque vessels manned by pointy-bearded Iberians, in Asia Portuguese shipping between local destinations was crewed by Asian seamen, with a handful of white or Eurasian officers. “Even the great carracks of 1,000-2,000 tons which plied
It’s only half the size of its more famous counterpart in Taipei, but the Botanical Garden of the National Museum of Nature Science (NMNS, 國立自然科學博物館植物園) is surely one of urban Taiwan’s most inviting green spaces. Covering 4.5 hectares immediately northeast of the government-run museum in Taichung’s North District (北區), the garden features more than 700 plant species, many of which are labeled in Chinese but not in English. Since its establishment in 1999, the site’s managers have done their best to replicate a number of native ecosystems, dividing the site into eight areas. The name of the Coral Atoll Zone might
Nuclear power is getting a second look in Southeast Asia as countries prepare to meet surging energy demand as they vie for artificial intelligence-focused data centers. Several Southeast Asian nations are reviving mothballed nuclear plans and setting ambitious targets and nearly half of the region could, if they pursue those goals, have nuclear energy in the 2030s. Even countries without current plans have signaled their interest. Southeast Asia has never produced a single watt of nuclear energy, despite long-held atomic ambitions. But that may soon change as pressure mounts to reduce emissions that contribute to climate change, while meeting growing power needs. The
RSS