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posted by janrinok on Sunday August 09 2015, @06:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-remember-your-stopping-distances? dept.

Einstein once said, "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

So 5-8 seconds seems like a (relatively) short amount of time. But, is it enough to safely take back control of a self-driving car and negotiate a road hazard? And if the driver is given less time, is it better or worse? Researchers at Stanford attempted to find out:

In this study, we observed how participants (N=27) in a driving simulator performed after they were subjected to an emergency loss of automation. We tested three transition time conditions, with an unstructured transition of vehicle control occurring 2 seconds, 5 seconds, or 8 seconds before the participants encountered a road hazard that required the drivers' intervention.

Few drivers in the 2 second condition were able to safely negotiate the road hazard situation, while the majority of drivers in 5 or 8 second conditions were able to navigate the hazard safely.

Although the participants in the current study were not performing secondary tasks while the car was driving, the 2 second condition appeared to be insufficient. The participants did not perform well and liked the car less. Additionally, participants' comfort in the car was also lower in the 2 second condition. Hence, it is recommended to give warnings or relinquish control more than 2 seconds in advance. While not necessarily the minimum required time, 5 second condition from a critical event appeared to be sufficient for drivers to perform the take over successfully and negotiate the problem. While the results of this study indicated that there was a minimum amount of time needed for transition of control, this was true when the drivers only monitored the car's activity and did not perform secondary tasks. It is possible that these results can change if the drivers are occupied with other activities.

Full research paper available here.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 09 2015, @07:25PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 09 2015, @07:25PM (#220357)

    I wonder what fraction of the general population can handle an emergency in only 2 seconds. I've observed some pretty poor driving.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @07:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @07:34PM (#220359)

    I'm pleased our overlords provide us the chance to kill ourselves so that the insurance won't pay out in our favor.

    Does the car relinquish control back to us when there are red and blue lights flashing behind us? How many seconds does that take?

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday August 09 2015, @07:35PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday August 09 2015, @07:35PM (#220360)

    I would think even two seconds to take over is way too long. I've avoided accidents where the only thing that saved me was video game reflexes; things like people puling out from a left turn lane into a through-lane, backing out at speed from between pocked cars blocking vision, etc. It's even worse when I'm on a motorcycle as sudden twitchy responses are almost as dangerous as the thing you're trying to avoid. Make no mistake, when many cars are autonomous there will still be accidents and almost all of them will be caused by human drivers.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:01PM

      by frojack (1554) on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:01PM (#220368) Journal

      You misunderstand the point of the study.

      In your cited examples you were driving. So right off the mark you can toss every one of your examples out the window. They are non-germane to the topic at hand. You were driving and were ready to handle emergencies, yet you still failed to anticipate possible bad actions on the part of other drivers. You therefore got yourself into a twitch situation, which defensive driving training would have kept you out of.

      The thing is, a driverless car should not get two seconds to impact, and then hand over control.
      You could make the case that it shouldn't allow the situation to get two seconds to impact AT ALL.
      But if they do, they should handle the emergency, rather than handing it off to a human.

      If the human wasn't driving, and the car was, just getting the human brain into driving mode will take more than two seconds. That is what this study shows.

      if automated cars only manage to hand you an emergency situation two seconds away they will be FAR more dangerous than the vast majority human drivers, (most of which manage to drive years on end without an accident). It takes humans a while to switch chains of thought. This study suggests that 5 seconds is a minimum
      necessary for a human to take over.

      If the autonomous driving mode reaches an emergency state where impact is two seconds away, a controlled crash avoidance and shutdown routine should take over. You can't hand a human a two seconds to impact scenario, unless they were attentively monitoring the vehicles progress.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:17PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:17PM (#220373)

        You mean a routine to minimize injury when the crash does happen. Perhaps the routine should warn passengers of the imminent danger so they could brace for impact.

        Terminator scenario, the cars start acting to protect themselves even against their programming.

        • (Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Monday August 10 2015, @04:32AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2015, @04:32AM (#220548) Journal
          I suppose it's long enough to give religion a try. There's not much in the way of bracing for impact that you can do, aside perhaps from pulling your arms in towards your body. I have discovered those things snap easy in an accident.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @04:34PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @04:34PM (#220745)

            Perhaps studies can be done to determine the most favorable position to be in.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:52PM

        by sjames (2882) on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:52PM (#220483) Journal

        More to the point, even when the 'drivers' were doing nothing but watch the car drive, 2 seconds wasn't enough. Five seconds was just enough when the 'driver' was watching the car drive attentively but 8 was better.

        But that's not the real world at all. In the real world, the driver will be on the phone, reading a book, trancing out to music, or asleep. The reality is that the autonomous system MUST be designed to handle the situation no matter what, there is no help to be had from a human. If, for some reason, the automation isn't going to be able to manage, it must be prepared to pull over and come to a complete safe stop before a human can be counted on to (eventually) take over.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Monday August 10 2015, @09:30AM

          by Nuke (3162) on Monday August 10 2015, @09:30AM (#220602)

          In the real world, the driver will be on the phone, reading a book, trancing out to music, or asleep.Indeed.

          Indeed. Personally, I would probably not be, but plenty of drivers will. Anyway, the idea of a driver (or operator of any machinery) having to watch an automated process and constantly make judgements, as opposed to fully controlling it, ready to intervene with a degree of readiness measured in seconds - as a matter of life or death - is absolutely crazy. It must also be a recipe for reducing people to nervous wrecks, if, if, they do it diligently. Like "Shall I intervene? Shan't I intervene? Shall I intervene? Shan't I intervene? ......."

          It is possible that these results can change if the drivers are occupied with other activities.

          I submit that for the "Understatement of the Year" award.

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 10 2015, @11:31AM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2015, @11:31AM (#220630)

            Anyway, the idea of a driver (or operator of any machinery) having to watch an automated process and constantly make judgements, as opposed to fully controlling it, ready to intervene with a degree of readiness measured in seconds - as a matter of life or death - is absolutely crazy.

            Well, that's an industrial factory line machine operator position. As fewer people are involved in manufacturing and the illegals take over, its no surprise that kind of work is missed from consciousness. Observationally people either freak out and burn out in a week or they get used to the idea of not giving much of a F and last until the next accident, at which time they get fired for not giving a F and get another minimum wage machine operator job at a competitor. Essentially they're being paid minimum wage to be scapegoats for software failures. I suppose there are white collar jobs like that too.

            Anyway the point is that people taking over after a machine fails doesn't really work all that often. There is an interesting related strategy for self driving cars. So last night I drove home, ate dinner, and then I played minecraft for a bit and then go to bed. So rather than driving home at 80 MPH for 20 miles why not drive home at 25 MPH on side streets etc and stay off the dangerous interstate and let the chips fall where they may as I play minecraft and maybe eat a packed dinner in my car, maybe take a nap? Its hard to kill the passengers in a car in a collision "well under 25 MPH" I suppose the most likely cause of death would be the automated car driving off bridges or maybe drunks in hand driven cars running red lights at 100 MPH. Lets say my car (not I) hit a parked car at 25 MPH which would pretty well total both cars but is unlikely to kill or even injure anyone. I can go all machine operator "who cares" and let the black box and insurance company fight Toyota's software engineers all they want, I just don't need to care. The ideal self driving commuter car would probably look a lot more like an enclosed golf cart on a side street than a giant (empty) SUV on the interstate.

            Going further, imagine the roads filled with bumper cars. Sure it takes "awhile" to get there, but people already brag about how long they sit in rush hour traffic jams, so never getting over 5 mph is not a real issue. Being bumper cars with half horsepower motors, they'll get pretty decent mileage, and if they hit another bumper car, well, no harm no foul, they are bumper cars after all. Something like bumper car RVs would be a sight to see...

          • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:57AM

            by sjames (2882) on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:57AM (#222124) Journal

            Even if they do care, they will inevitably fail eventually. Even when the human is actually driving the car, highway hypnosis is a thing. It can only get worse when the 'driver' doesn't even have to hold the steering wheel.

      • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 10 2015, @02:07PM

        by Nerdfest (80) on Monday August 10 2015, @02:07PM (#220682)

        Defensive driving only goes so far. Someone randomly pulling out of a turn lane 5 feet in front of you when they shouldn't is only really avoidable by reducing your speed where it would cause serious traffic problems every time you encounter another vehicle. It can solve most situations but not all.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:26PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:26PM (#220377)

      video game reflexes

      You and I have video game reflexes, its the other 90% of the population I'm worried about. And multiply that by the fraction of the cars on the road having drivers who are high, drunk, or sleepy. Well, my car will drive me home, nobody will be able to tell if I have that extra beer, I can yell at the kids in the back seat for 30 seconds after all the car is driving not me...

      there will still be accidents and almost all of them will be caused by human drivers

      I think you misspelled software bugs. Also getting powned by viruses and miscreants and governments. Its interesting to think about swarm issues, yes genetically identical instinctual swarms usually don't collide very often, but multiple cars of various levels of dirt on cameras and completely different implementations of algos not to mention strange latency and jitter in response rates, combined with unpredictable "butterfly wing flapping" chaos road conditions (so a bird in the road in California leads domino like to a car in Florida slipping off the road in to the ocean the next day because of an unknown oil slick along the lines of the butterfly analogy in weather forecasting)

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday August 10 2015, @04:16AM

        by Reziac (2489) on Monday August 10 2015, @04:16AM (#220544) Homepage

        "completely different implementations of algos" -- Windows Common Files in action!

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:36PM (#220381)

      This would be a serious problem. When I was learning how to drive almost 20 years ago the school taught defensive driving because 2 seconds really isn't enough time. When driving you need to be watching out for dangerous situations and avoiding as much of it as possible.

      I'm guessing that rather than switching to manual controls, in most cases just pressing a button to tell the car to stop would be the appropriate course of action. The car behind you ought to automatically come to a stop as well. Now, if more than one car is malfunctioning, I'm not sure that taking the controls yourself several minutes later is going to help.

  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday August 10 2015, @07:38AM

    by davester666 (155) on Monday August 10 2015, @07:38AM (#220575)

    And, of course, it is entirely unsurprising to find people don't like a car that tells them "whups, I guess it's time for you to take over" too late for them to be able to deal with the situation.