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Volvo's Driverless Cars 'Confused' by Kangaroos (bbc.com) 160

An anonymous reader shares a report: Volvo's self-driving technology is struggling to identify kangaroos in the road. The Swedish car-maker's 2017 S90 and XC90 models use its Large Animal Detection system to monitor the road for deer, elk and caribou. But the way kangaroos move confuses it. "We've noticed with the kangaroo being in mid-flight when it's in the air, it actually looks like it's further away, then it lands and it looks closer," its Australia technical manager said. But the problem would not delay the rollout of driverless cars in the country, David Pickett added.
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Volvo's Driverless Cars 'Confused' by Kangaroos

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  • The White-Tailed Deer (and likely other related species - I'm only personally familiar with this one) moves in a bounding manner, often with all four legs off the ground. What makes it that much different from the kangaroo in the eyes of the driverless car? Is it at in the height difference in terms of on the ground versus not on the ground?
    • The difference is the lack of training data. Volvo didn't try hard enough to get this right.

      • The difference is the lack of training data. Volvo didn't try hard enough to get this right.

        I'm guessing that the system assumes that any object in it's path is on the ground. Anything in the air would appear to be further away as the ground would only rise up to meet it in the distance. Basically, they didn't throw bouncy balls at the car to see what would happen....

        PS: One of the US ads for car safety includes signs indicating that bouncing balls have kids following them.

        • I'm guessing that the system assumes that any object in it's path is on the ground.

          That's not how these systems work. It's a combination of image processing, Computer Vision and neutral networks. Most of the good ones will stop if a soccer ball bounces through the street too. And if you dig into how the system categorizes pedestrians you'll find that you can trick a poorly trained one if a person doesn't form a neat triangle. Like if they are in a wheelchair or have their leg up in a cast and using crutches. (or a child on a pogo stick)

          The human brain organizes these things differently th

          • I'm guessing that the system assumes that any object in it's path is on the ground.

            That's not how these systems work.

            I think you'll find it is. They're not using stereoscopic camera systems so they can't directly measure the distance of an object in view.

            In steroscopic systems a Difference Map allows you to estimate the distance by, in conjunction with the optic parameters, measuring the number of pixels offset between the left and right image any given object is.

            In monoscopic camera systems, such as what Volvo's using, regardless of Neural Network magic, you can only estimate an object's distance by its vertical position

        • And what happens if it sees a bike rider ahead of it but fails to see the wheels?

      • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:30PM (#54699855)

        Volvo isn't in the habit of testing their cars upside-down.

      • by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:41PM (#54699941)

        I know it's passé to read TFA, but:

        Volvo's safety engineers began filming kangaroos' roadside behaviour in a nationally recognised hotspot for collisions in 2015.

        There's a picture of a Volvo vehicle with "Kangaroo detection data collection vehicle" printed on its side.

        So... they're working on it, with good training data.

        • Didn't you know? If driverless cars can't work 100% perfectly now, how will they ever do so in the future?

          I mean, that is proper actual logic, that.

          • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @04:58PM (#54700775) Homepage Journal

            Didn't you know? If driverless cars can't work 100% perfectly now, how will they ever do so in the future?

            I mean, that is proper actual logic, that.

            It's the same people that demand zero insect parts in their wheat and corn. It's just not going to happen. We can keep the amount of crushed up insects you accidentally ingest very low, but it's unreasonable to expect it to be zero. The amount of dead mice (by mass) ground up with your flour is even lower than the insect parts.

            PS - The amount of urine in a public swimming pool is much higher than it is reasonable, and everyone has a right to complain about that and demand that it be lower.

          • Didn't you know? If driverless cars can't work 100% perfectly now, how will they ever do so in the future?

            I mean, that is proper actual logic, that.

            No. The "proper actual logic" (which, in a fit of irony, you appear to miss) is that it's premature to crow about the future existence of SDCs when computational power running SDCs was increased a thousandfold over two decades for a measly 1% increase in performance.

            The only people who believe that SDCs are right around the corner are those who are not aware of all the SDC successes of the 90s. The current state of SDCs have them possessing less obstacle avoidance abilities than a cockroach.

            For five years

            • My current non-self-driving car has better obstacle avoidance abilities than a cockroach. Of course, having an allegedly intelligent driver adds additional safety features.

        • Volvo's safety engineers began filming kangaroos' roadside behaviour in a nationally recognised hotspot for collisions in 2015.

          No, it's not good training data.

        • There's a picture of a Volvo vehicle with "Kangaroo detection data collection vehicle" printed on its side.

          So... they're working on it, with good training data.

          Maybe they've been using Apple iKangaroos but they're just holding them wrong?

      • The difference is the lack of training data. Volvo didn't try hard enough to get this right.

        Maybe they should just train the damn kangaroos to stay the heck out of the way.

        • (Sorry to any vegetarians)

          Much better to market the vehicles as hunting machines.

          With climate change, it'd fix the environment in switching to gamey roo meat rather than continue to destroy the landscape with cattle farming. Cows belch emissions and require land clearing for pasture.

    • I expect that Volvo did most of the training with animals they find on the road in Sweden. The White Tailed Deer lives in North America.

      • by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @03:02PM (#54700095) Homepage

        I expect that Volvo did most of the training with animals they find on the road in Sweden. The White Tailed Deer lives in North America.

        But Moose live in Sweden. Moose are much larger than deer, but share the same basic body type (large body on relatively long and thin legs). Special caution needs to be taken with moose, since their eyes don't glow in the dark, and they have tendencies to bite. In fact, a moose once bit my sister.

        • by nnet ( 20306 )
          newfoundland speedbump...
        • I don't think you need to worry too much about a moose biting your car when you're hurtling towards it at speed.

        • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @05:29PM (#54701027) Journal

          a moose once bit my sister.

          Realli?

        • I expect that Volvo did most of the training with animals they find on the road in Sweden. The White Tailed Deer lives in North America.

          But Moose live in Sweden. Moose are much larger than deer, but share the same basic body type (large body on relatively long and thin legs). Special caution needs to be taken with moose, since their eyes don't glow in the dark, and they have tendencies to bite. In fact, a moose once bit my sister.

          You see, moose or deer are not analagous to Kangaroos. Kangaroos are as fast as deer, as heavy as moose, as tall as a basketballer and not fucking afraid. Also they jump. Because they have a high centre of gravity, if you hit them they go over the bonnet, through the windscreen and into the occupants in quite a way that a deer or moose does not.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        Swedish deer:
        http://www.jaktjournalen.se/wp... [jaktjournalen.se]
        And reindeer:
        http://jaktmarkerna.se/wp-cont... [jaktmarkerna.se]

        Can't be very different?

    • A lot of the answer is in the vertical movement and the erratic movement. It's not just the legs leaving the ground, a kangaroo when it jumps ... jumps. When sprinting (away from cars especially) they will easily cover their own height in each leap and cover a lot of horizontal ground in the process. When contacting the ground it can change direction suddenly. It's an incredible problem for computer vision to analyse.

  • These are the types of things that just make all of the hype totally obviously completely garbage. No animal on the planet would run into a kangaroo. Perhaps the entire concept of the sensor is just way off.

    I have memories of the way machine guns evolved. From large gatling systems to the smallest of springs. These cars are still at the large gatling systems.

    • by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:13PM (#54699743)

      No animal on the planet would run into a kangaroo.

      Except for humans. According to TFA there are 16,000 kangaroo strikes per year.

      • No animal on the planet would run into a kangaroo. Perhaps the entire concept of the sensor is just way off.

        Except for humans. According to TFA there are 16,000 kangaroo strikes per year.

        Seems like you're both right (although you're much more right.) Humans' sensors aren't great for depth perception at night, which is when most animal strikes occur — and according to WP, most roos are nocturnal. If the excuse is that the roo "looks" like it's closer or further away depending on whether it's in the air, then I suspect the flaw is inadequate depth sensing. The car should be dramatically better at this than a human before it's allowed to run around at speeds over a walking pace.

        • by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:43PM (#54699951)

          The good thing is that the car's sensors and algorithms can be fixed. It sounds like it's mostly a case of Volvo overlooking the effect of jumping animals. According to the Volvo information about their autonomous cars, they have camera, radar, laser, and ultrasonic sensors. With the right algorithms, the car should be much better than a human at detecting animals at night, and respond much quicker too.

          The car should be dramatically better at this than a human

          Better than a human is good enough for now.

          • by Wycliffe ( 116160 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @03:06PM (#54700127) Homepage

            The good thing is that the car's sensors and algorithms can be fixed. It sounds like it's mostly a case of Volvo overlooking the effect of jumping animals. According to the Volvo information about their autonomous cars, they have camera, radar, laser, and ultrasonic sensors. With the right algorithms, the car should be much better than a human at detecting animals at night, and respond much quicker too.

            There will always be unknown objects at or near ground level. With camera, radar, laser, and ultrasonic sensors, how did they screw up the depth perception that badly? Will it be able to detect a small child? What about a medium size child? What about a box? What about a bumper that fell of a car? What about a flock of birds? What about a chair,cage of turkeys,sofa,trashcan,bale of hay, etc.. that fell off a truck. If you're designing it for known obstacles, you're likely doing it wrong. Every human driver out there is able to detect something that isn't suppose to be there and take corrective actions even if they don't know what the unknown object is.

            • Every human driver out there is able to detect something that isn't suppose to be there and take corrective actions even if they don't know what the unknown object is.

              Yeah, this. If I don't know what a thing is, I still hit the brakes, because I don't know what its density is and that might be important. If it turns out to be a plastic bag or something, well, that's OK so long as the person behind me wasn't following too close. And since I have a nice safe car with lots of crumple zones, frankly I don't really give a shit if someone drives up my ass as long as I don't go off the road, and they have enough insurance to replace my nice safe car.

            • Unlike the summary suggests, the Volvo is not a driverless car. It's a car with a Driver Assist function, with a special module to warn for large animals. The first step is to signal the driver, and provide information on the type of object. The driver can then decide what to do. Only if the driver doesn't react on time, the system takes over and brakes. It's still a fairly simple system.

              Keep in mind that large wild animals are also potentially dangerous if they are not in the middle of the road, but stand

              • by tsqr ( 808554 )

                Unlike the summary suggests, the Volvo is not a driverless car.

                It's not just the summary. The TFA is entitled, "Volvo's driverless cars 'confused' by kangaroos", and contains such suggestive phrases as, "Volvo's self-driving technology is struggling to identify kangaroos in the road" and "the problem would not delay the rollout of driverless cars in the country".

              • Unlike many Slashdotter's suggest, there is no self driving. Only cars following rules that are too rigid for real world use.
            • Volvo is reporting that they have "trouble" to judge the distance.
              They did not say they won't stop or have problems to detect the Kangaroo at all.
              So your questions about kids etc. are rather absurd.

              chair,cage of turkeys,sofa,trashcan,bale of hay, etc
              Most of them don't fly ... so you have no problem to judge the distance.
              Or is it easy for you you to judge how high a bird is flying which species (aka size) you don't know?

              With camera, radar, laser, and ultrasonic sensors
              Radar does not pick up Kangaroos. (The

            • I would not want my self-driving car to take corrective action if it were about to hit a flock of birds. That would more likely than not cause an accident. Birds have flown across the road at low levels in front of my car all the time, and I have never slowed down or swerved, and I have never hit one.
              • I would not want my self-driving car to take corrective action if it were about to hit a flock of birds. That would more likely than not cause an accident. Birds have flown across the road at low levels in front of my car all the time, and I have never slowed down or swerved, and I have never hit one.

                Well, birds do the same thing with me, and I have hit them on occasion. And I have had to brake to avoid hitting them. And I have been able to do that fast enough to make a difference sometimes, and not other times.

                Your lack of experience does not constitute proof of a negative. Thanks for playing, though.

          • by tsqr ( 808554 )

            The good thing is that the car's sensors and algorithms can be fixed. It sounds like it's mostly a case of Volvo overlooking the effect of jumping animals. According to the Volvo information about their autonomous cars, they have camera, radar, laser, and ultrasonic sensors. With the right algorithms, the car should be much better than a human at detecting animals at night, and respond much quicker too.

            According to TFA, Volvo has been working on this problem for two years. I'm guessing the "right algorithms" have been right around the corner for some time now.

            • I'm guessing the "right algorithms" have been right around the corner for some time now.
              It is most likely not an algorithm problem but a sensor problem. Or kets say a combination. How to interpret the sensor data in a meaningful way.

          • Better than a human is good enough for now

            For the research phase, sure. But not for actual deployment.

          • by mjwx ( 966435 )

            With the right algorithms, the car should be much better than a human at detecting animals at night, and respond much quicker too.

            Also much better at false positives as we're finding out. Many of these vehicles are unnecessarily slamming on the brakes over nothing. Not only is this dangerous, it's also expensive with increased congestion (and bad for the environment).

            The car should be dramatically better at this than a human

            Better than a human is good enough for now.

            But they aren't. Computers are reactive, humans are predictive. A good driver avoids dangers before they happen. The only reason Google's autonomous car has been successful is because the human driver is predicting issues. Left to it's own devices it drove right in front

        • by Anonymous Coward

          and according to WP, most roos are nocturnal.

          No, roos are not nocturnal. I live in the bush and have a friend that rehabilitates rescued Joeys (baby roos) and you don't drive certain roads at dawn or dusk as the roos are on the move seeking water. That's when most of the strikes happen.

        • by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @06:39PM (#54701473) Journal

          It's not about depth perception.

          Roos are erratic creatures and can move very quickly. So one will be grazing 20 metres off the side of the road, become spooked by your headlights, bound onto the road in two or three hops, and hit your car.

          It's about a second per hop for roos, so this takes place very quickly, well inside the illuminated area that your headlights project. Often they will appear from the vegetation on the side of the road and then be on the road in one hop, only 10 or so metres in front of you. It's why most cars in rural Australia are festooned with LED light bars and spotlights because the further and - most importantly - the wider you can see at night, the better.

          Here are a few typical roo strikes to give you some idea of the problem -

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] - This one in particular.

          • It's not about depth perception.

            Well, no. And also no. TFA explicitly says that the problem is not that the car doesn't have time to react, but that the car is having trouble identifying the roo as not being a bird, and thus is making incorrect assumptions about how it will move.

            It's about a second per hop for roos, so this takes place very quickly, well inside the illuminated area that your headlights project.

            So what you're saying is that it's well within sensor range? And so they have absolutely no excuse for not detecting it? Right-o!

            • by ColaMan ( 37550 )

              Sensor range isn't headlight range.

              Time to identify an object emerging from the undergrowth 20 metres away with a varying trajectory is minimal at 100km/hr. It's less than a second. Coupled with kangaroos typical behaviours - like running parallel to the road for a bit as you approach before jumping across in front of you - well, it's going to be tough to do with software.

              Roo running alongside the road which is an immediate threat? Or person on a bike, which will maintain speed and position as you pass? Har

              • Sensor range isn't headlight range.

                What? Of course it is, at least, some of the sensors can clearly see at least as far as the headlights, not least because they are using a camera in the visible spectrum. Talk sense.

                Time to identify an object emerging from the undergrowth 20 metres away with a varying trajectory is minimal at 100km/hr. It's less than a second.

                No, I don't give half a squashed shit what it is. If it is looking like it's about to get in front of the car, stop. It doesn't matter if it's a plastic bag that might clog my air intakes, or a roo that might destroy the front of my vehicle, I want to avoid hitting it either way.

                Roo running alongside the road which is an immediate threat? Or person on a bike, which will maintain speed and position as you pass?

                No, bullshit. A person on a bike doesn't emerge fr

      • My brother was working on the road trains in the outbacks (he had just immigrated) and the first kangaroo he saw the truck ran over it.
        Didn't even stop, the trucks have these huge bull bars on them, they are designed to hit kangaroo's and keep going.
        If you don't know what a road train is (I didn't) Road Trains [wikipedia.org]
    • Not very many 1200 kg animals roll along the ground at 120 km/h. Newton's first law of motion combined with the square-cube law makes this a non-trivial problem. I think the key to self-driving cars is for them to not kill any more people than human driven cars already do, luckily for self-driving cars we human drivers established a fairly easy baseline to pass.

      With your analogy, we didn't simply give up, we still used machine guns even if they were not perfected.

      • ...and just look at how many people were killed by bad machine guns. The car needs to be way better than a human before it's kills are acceptable. I can accept another human making a mistake that I would make. I don't accept a machine making a mistake that I would make. I already find it tough enough to accept a human making a mistake that I wouldn't make.

        In any event, how's this for an algorithm: look forward. if you see the you expect to see (a road) keep driving. If you see fur, instead of a road,

        • Doesn't matter if it's in the air, or on the ground.
          Of course it matters. Without any "cross reference point" you can not judge how far something is away if it is in the air and the background behind it is only sky.

          look forward. if you see the you expect to see (a road) keep driving. If you see fur, instead of a road, slow down.
          That is what the car is doing. Volvo only stated that there are troubles to get the distance accurate.

        • ...and just look at how many people were killed by bad machine guns. The car needs to be way better than a human before it's kills are acceptable. I can accept another human making a mistake that I would make. I don't accept a machine making a mistake that I would make. I already find it tough enough to accept a human making a mistake that I wouldn't make.

          I don't agree with your position, and I doubt the legislature of your country will agree with you either. You're certainly free to have your opinions, and refuse to use self-driving vehicles. But I the rest of your community are not likely to put a halt on this because of the concerns you raise, because I believe they are very much a minority concern that doesn't carry much weight philosophically with most people.

    • by xevioso ( 598654 )

      But these are all software problems, and we humans have gotten pretty good at that. It's an interesting case here because it's an unusual animal that travels in a way most other animals don't, but there's nothing here that can't be fixed by adding in some code.

      What's more interesting to me is that Volvo is trying to test it's cars in Australia, where there's long stretches of unpaved roads and all sorts of weird things that cross the road. Does the car stop when it sees a snake in the road crossing? How

      • "How does it determine if it's a snake or a cable or rope?"

        Or a cop's spike strip...

      • But these are all software problems, and we humans have gotten pretty good at that.

        That hasn't been my observation of human's track record with creating software at all. Humans are great at hardware problems, but to this day humans are manifestly terrible at creating software.

  • under the EULA we are not at fault just be lucky that it was not kid / baby as under the EULA we do not need to do any think to help you in court or wave the NDA so we can give out log's / source code / etc to your legal team.

  • Avoid Volvo driverless cars in Australia, around zoos with bad security.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      You do know they have kangaroos in the wild in Australia, don't you? They aren't just in zoos.

  • I'm confused by kangaroos too.
  • by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:33PM (#54699881)

    to kill all kangaroos.

    (If I were Bender Bending RodrÃguez, the obvious solution would be to kill all humans, but since I'm not Bender Bending RodrÃguez, that's not the solution.)

  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:40PM (#54699933) Homepage

    What's with the boxing? Who the hell taught them to fight like men? WHY?

    And marsupials are just flip-floppers. Birth but still inside the mother's pouch? Come on out already. Are they going for a second birthday?

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )

      Marsupials Millenials. Whats it with Mxxxilas never wanting to leave the mother's basement/pouch

  • by Anonymous Coward
    The real problem is the 'so-called' 'AI' is not a real 'AI' (and I and many others wish they'd stop referring to it as such). It only half-assed recognizes things based on what it's 'trained' to recognize. A human being, seeing some animal they've never seen before in their life but that is crossing the road, is going to swerve or stop anyway because the human brain is actually intelligent. These 'deep learning algorithms' are not even as smart as a dog brain. I think the entire approach is doomed; it shows
  • Wait, so everything Down Under is out to kill you, and now they've developed stealth technology?! We're doomed!

  • I'm confused as well.

    Personally I can't do such leaps with an empty purse.

  • Close up wallaby, or distant kangaroo?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    You'll be driving on a highway at night, a roo will all of a sudden land in the middle of the road and if they dont stop to look at your headlights they'll be gone in one jump. If you happen to hit that roo, imagine hitting a tree at highway speeds, thats the kind of damage you can expect. The best course of action is to stear around behind the roo or stop if either of those is at all possible without killing yourself, and thats how roos are deadly.

  • If they can't detect kangaroo, how the heck do they detect rabbits and birds or anything smaller? Or do animals lives only count when they might damage the precious humans?
  • Stop riding pogo stick to work.

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