[SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???

Fri Aug 5 22:50:43 CEST 2016

On Wednesday, I was passed by a Tesla on the 101 going to SFO from NASA Ames at about 4pm (rush hour).  The person behind the wheel (I couldn't call him the driver) had a stack of papers in both hands and was reading them.  He went by me too fast (40mph?, I was doing about 25) to see how often he looked up; I saw one head bob.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-
> bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Mike Ellims
> Sent: Friday, July 22, 2016 06:54
> To: 'Les Chambers'; 'Peter Bernard Ladkin';
> systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
> Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???
> 
> Morning Les,
> 
> These are all on the surface reasonable ideas, however as Mencken said;
> "for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple,
> and wrong"
> (sorry - couldn't help myself ;-).
> 
> 1. The solutions suggested are applicable only to vehicles; what about
> pedestrians, cyclists, horses, live stock, wild animals (deer or moose)
> or any of the hundreds of objects that can be found on roads e.g.
> roadwork's, fallen trees. To go beyond where Mercedes, BMW and Tesla
> are now requires everything be detected.
> 
> 2. They don't scale, or at least don't scale fast enough.
> First, to be truly useful all vehicles would need to be equipped.
> Currently there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the worlds roads and
> approximately 85 million new vehicles being added each year. Note this
> doesn't include road going equipment such mobile plant or tractors.
> 
> Second the average life of a vehicle is somewhere between 10 and 20
> years so even if we started mandating one of these solutions now it
> would be 2026 or so before approximately half of the world vehicles
> were equipped and 2040 before 100% (simple model assuming 3% of all
> vehicles are removed each year).
> 
> Even if it was a simple retrofit like putting bumper stickers on the
> front sides and rear of every vehicle it still need to be designed and
> rolled out.
> If it has to be done by a mechanic paid for by the manufactures it's
> going to have a minimum cost of $50 US per vehicle... so we're talking
> a minimum of $50 billion... And if it's bumper sticks they had better
> be an exact match to the paint on my car!
> 
> But that would be unlikely to happen as,
> 
> 3. The solution would have to be legally mandated. This might be
> possible Europe but in the US you would have to provide an economic
> case that showed that the avoided cost in lives saved would exceed the
> cost of adding the equipment to all vehicles. Three simple examples, in
> Europe side impact bars on trucks, ABS and indicators a different
> colour to brake lights are all required, in the US none of these are as
> the economic case isn't clear enough for to allow the rule making
> process to move forward.
> 
> For the Tesla that implies you need agreement between the EU,
> USA/Canada, China and Australia (based on locations of the supercharger
> networks).
> Goodness know how long getting agreement would take but possibly
> somewhere between 4 and 10 years?
> 
> I know this is a bit like pissing on the parade but the huge numbers,
> time scales and politics involved make the problem approximate
> intractable fairly well, which is why manufactures are following an
> approach based on what they control.
> 
> It may be worthwhile to note that the vast majority of cars on the road
> today don't need radar reflectors as they are radar reflectors, under
> all that plastic they are steel (or aluminium in the case of Tesla). It
> gets interesting with carbon fibre cars such as the BMW i3 but I assume
> they have radar reflective material added to the mix as radar and
> adaptive cruise control is so common today (you would hope that would
> come out of the hazard analysis wouldn't you).
> 
> Remember in the Tesla crash the car's radar "saw" the truck (but only
> the truck bed) but apparently misclassified what it was seeing... at
> this juncture it appears to be a requirements or analysis problem not a
> senor detection problem.
> 
> I suspect that fully autonomous cars are probably some way off, Google
> is now saying 5 to 10 years, Musk says two but what he probably means
> is 4 to 10.
> 
> Fully autonomous vehicles can probably be classed as a "wicked"
> problem, in that the problem itself isn't well defined. Tesla and other
> manufactures have been able to provide a partial solution for highly
> constrained conditions, i.e. motorways and highways where the
> complexity of the situation is relatively  "low". Noisy urban areas (as
> an example) is a whole different problem. For example do we have to
> detect people and classify them as people or is it enough to classify
> them as things either moving or not moving; or perhaps as thing on
> road, things moving towards road or things not on road? At this point
> in time it may not be possible to answer that question.
> 
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: systemsafety
> [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf
> Of Les Chambers
> Sent: 22 July 2016 00:14
> To: 'Peter Bernard Ladkin'; systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
> Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???
> 
> Peter
> The concept of workshopping something is that you rollout ideas, people
> critique them and in the process maybe you spark some creativity, new
> ideas that is. These days our lives are absolutely ruled by the people
> with ideas.
> Elon Musk is a classic example (I'm in awe of that guy despite the fact
> I disagree with some of the things he does). Ideas are the last
> frontier, they are the final currency, they will never be automated.
> In 24 hours My Tesla Motor Club post attracted 930 views and 22
> replies. It looks like this is a very active forum biased more towards
> solutions than the it'll-never-work-narrative - I find this refreshing.
> The following three I found particularly informative:
> ----response one ------------------
> Good reference: Wireless Vehicular Networks for Car Collision Avoidance
> http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781441995629
> ----- response two -------------------
> I'd favour a "radar reflector" of some sort - something that makes a
> "vehicle" more "visible" to the sensors. Hopefully dirt-cheap, and thus
> could be mandated for installation at the vehicle's next roadworth-test
> (over here that is an annual test once a car reaches 3 year's old).
> ------ response three ------------------ "high-quality GPS SPS
> receivers provide better than 3.5 meter horizontal accuracy."
> So i think accuracy is not good enough.
> If there is a car on the side of the road, your GPS receivers are
> closer each other than 3.5 m and collision warning would give false
> alert.
> ------------------------
> 
> Have you got any ideas Peter?
> 
> Les
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: systemsafety
> [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf
> Of Peter Bernard Ladkin
> Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2016 3:51 PM
> To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
> Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] a public beta phase ???
> 
> Les,
> 
> On 2016-07-21 01:44 , Les Chambers wrote:
> > Ok, so I've posted my brilliant idea (below) on a Tesla Forum for the
> > Model S. .... It got 4 views in the first 10 seconds after posting.
> > Let's see how much interest it generates.
> 
> When I read your post I thought you were being facetious. But on the
> odd chance you were being serious, a couple of comments.
> 
> First, fail-stop is a fairly well-understood mechanism, of limited use.
> It is going to be of particularly limited use in road traffic, not only
> because of its functional limitations but also because of the latency.
> People's reaction time is between 1 and 2 seconds (this has been fairly
> well measured with pilots). This is quite long enough to get you into
> an irrecoverable situation in road traffic.
> 
> Second, the Tesla S is equipped with such a device. It's called
> "steering wheel and brake activation" and it didn't save Mr. Brown.
> 
> Third, designing reliable GPS locator mechanisms, even for steadily-
> moving objects, is tricky. For example,
> http://www.icao.int/APAC/Meetings/2015%20ADSBSITF14/IP04_AUS%20AI.4%20-
> %20Bo
> eing%20787%20ADS-B%20deficiency.pdf
> For general comments about the suitability of GPS-based devices for
> high-resolution terrestrial use, see
> http://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/reports/global-navigation-space-
> systems
> , the report of a Working Group chaired by Martyn. There is quite a bit
> about trustworthiness and lack of it.
> 
> Fourth, car manufacturers have been working on such "sense and avoid"
> mechanisms quite intensely for well over a decade. I recall a talk at
> SAFECOMP 2004 in Potsdam from Daimler R&D guru Ralf Herrtwich on the
> trustworthiness of automotive telematics. He was talking about car-to-
> car stuff. It was mostly radar/lidar/sonar based, for what I take to be
> obvious reasons, namely that you don't have to worry in quite the same
> way about the trustworthiness of your sensorics as you do about the
> trustworthiness of third-party information such as GPS positioning of
> others. I doubt if that has changed at all.
> 
> I asked him about what they were doing about vulnerable road users and
> didn't get the impression that they were doing much at all at that
> point.
> 
> PBL
> 
> Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany MoreInCommon Je suis
> Charlie
> Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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