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11/1/17, 6:27 PM Preparing Self-Driving Cars for the Wild World of Developing Cities | WIRED Page 1 of 10 https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-chaotic-cities-traffic/ SHARE SHARE 355 TWEET COMMENT EMAIL 10.29.17 07:00 AM PREPPING SELF-DRIVING CARS FOR THE WORLD'S MOST CHAOTIC CITIES SELF-DRIVING CARS ARE no longer confined to controlled test tracks or even to placid suburban streets—they’re tackling real traffic in US cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh. They’re honing their skills amidst humans in Europe, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. They’re preparing for the day they can purify our chaotic streets with their robotic perfection. Traffic is seen backed up behind a makeshift roadblock south of Beirut, Lebanon. HUSSEIN MALLA/AP MOST POPULAR BACKCHANNEL Apple's iPhone X: The First Field Report SECURITY North Korea's Plenty Scary Without an Overhyped EMP Threat SPONSOR CONTENT Partners in Wine: Bright STEVEN LEVY BRIAN BARRETT KAVEH WADDELL TRANSPORTATION BUSINESS CULTURE DESIGN GEAR SCIENCE SECURITY TRANSPORTATION Prepping Self-Driving Cars for the World's Most Chaotic Cities SUBSCRIBE
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11/1/17, 6:27 PMPreparing Self-Driving Cars for the Wild World of Developing Cities | WIRED
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PREPPING SELF-DRIVINGCARS FOR THE WORLD'SMOST CHAOTIC CITIES
SELF-DRIVING CARS ARE no longer confined tocontrolled test tracks or even to placid suburbanstreets—they’re tackling real traffic in US citiessuch as New York, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh.They’re honing their skills amidst humans inEurope, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan.They’re preparing for the day they can purify ourchaotic streets with their robotic perfection.
Traffic is seen backed up behind a makeshift roadblock south of Beirut,Lebanon. HUSSEIN MALLA/AP
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11/1/17, 6:27 PMPreparing Self-Driving Cars for the Wild World of Developing Cities | WIRED
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Learning how to drive in places like unruly Boston,a land of creative left turns and seemingly optionalyields, comes with its challenges. But theaggressive driving and the complexity of the city’stwisting streets pale in comparison to thedeveloping world. Even Patriots fans look likegoody two-shoes compared to drivers who havelittle to zero respect for lanes, traffic signals,warning signs, and speed limits.
On wide roads without lanes and huge, anarchicintersections all over the world, human interactiondictates traffic flows, with each driver adjusting toothers’ maneuvers on the spot, regardless of whatthe rule book says.
These informal systems work for the most part, butthey come at a high cost. Of the 50 countries withthe deadliest roads, 44 are in Africa or the MiddleEast, according to 2013 figures from the WorldHealth Organization (the most recent dataavailable). Together these nations accounted fornearly 250,000 deaths in 2013—a fifth of theworld’s total.
Yet the factors that make these places the mostlikely to benefit from autonomous cars also makethem the least likely to get the technology anytimesoon.
"Many of the things that we're doing in self-drivingat the moment probably wouldn't work if we weretrying to do it in a third-world country," says RamVasudevan, codirector of the University ofMichigan's Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles.
Unstructured DrivingAutonomous driving requires understanding theintent and trajectory of everyone and everythingon the road: vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians,construction workers, playing children, pets, anerrant dart from a Nerf gun. In drivingenvironments governed by a set of rules thatpeople actually follow, the law limits the sorts ofbehaviors an autonomous vehicle should expect inthe world around it.
The fewer formal rules in place, the more theability to predict intent matters. Around wildhumans, cars can’t rely on shared guidelines to
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dictate behavior. Basic driver assists that keep carsinside painted lanes, for example, are only useful ifeveryone else on the road respects lane markings.Otherwise they’re useless, or even dangerous.
Compared to suburban and even urban America,driving environments in many Middle Eastern andAfrican countries have all the structure of ajellyfish. In Lebanon, where I live, it's common tosee cars driving the wrong way, running red lights,and zigzagging across wide roads without theslightest regard to lane markings, among othershenanigans.
"There are no rules here. Everything is possible,"said Daniel Asmar, a computer-vision expert andengineering professor at the American Universityof Beirut. "Humans can deal quite well with that,even if they get frustrated and honk at each other."For computers, the chaos would be an enormouschallenge.
Even in relatively orderly environments, aconfusing situation such as a freeway merge canmake a self-driving car hesitate long enough tohold up traffic or even cause an accident,Vasudevan says. This might be because the car’ssoftware, erring on the safe side, isn’t willing tomerge in front of a speeding car, or because the carneeded more time to understand the scene aroundit and the intent of other drivers. Put the same caron a road where stop signs, traffic signals, andyielding rules don't exist or are routinely ignored,and its reaction times will need to be a great dealsharper to survive.
What’s more, self-driving cars need the help ofmapping data that doesn’t yet exist in most partsof the world. Autonomous driving requires highlydetailed street maps that contain everything fromthe height of street curbs, to the location oftemporary construction detours, to the exactposition of street signs and traffic lights in 3-Dspace. Those maps have already been developed forcities with self-driving fleets, and they’re
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constantly being updated using data thatautonomous cars capture as they drive around.
In places like Lebanon, where two-dimensionalGoogle and Apple Maps contain basic mistakes,missing data is an enormous disadvantage. Even ifdetailed maps existed, they would requireintensive upkeep. “In a structured environment,you wouldn’t have to do it that often, becausethings are pretty much staying the same,” Asmarsays. “In an unstructured environment, wherethings are changing all the time, you can imaginehow many times you have to keep building thisplatform over and over again. It’s a really dauntingtask.”
A few wealthy countries in the Middle East arealready moving toward autonomous driving. Israelicompanies are behind important developments inautonomous driving software, and the countryopened its first test track for driverless cars lastmonth. In Dubai, a 10-seater driverless shuttlebegan trundling through a riverside businessdistrict last year. City officials are aiming for aquarter of local trips to be made without a driverby 2030, and Dubai’s police force is planning to rollout tiny self-driving patrol cars by the end of theyear.
But it appears India and China are the onlycountries that contain both driving chaos and localcompanies developing autonomous vehicles.Unsurprisingly, their efforts face extra hurdles.India's Tata has created a testing track outsideBangalore to simulate local roads, complete withfearless pedestrians and stray cattle, Bloombergreported. The company still has a long way to go:Its computer-vision systems currently fail toidentify 15 percent of vehicles on Indian roads, asenior vice president at Tata told Bloomberg,because of the sheer variety in their shapes andsizes. (When former Uber CEO Travis Kalanickvisited India last year, he joked that the countrywould be "the last one on earth" to get self-drivingcars. "Have you seen the way people drive here?")
11/1/17, 6:27 PMPreparing Self-Driving Cars for the Wild World of Developing Cities | WIRED
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China's Baidu, meanwhile, is openly working onautonomous driving, teaming up with more than 50international companies to develop its software. Ina recent video demo, Baidu CEO Robin Li sat in aself-driving car as it wound its way through Beijingtraffic—making a few unsafe maneuvers along theway. Since self-driving cars aren't currently road-legal in China, Chinese police said they'dinvestigate whether Li broke any laws. (India ismoving toward a similar ban, citing concerns aboutjob losses.) Despite the regulatory hurdles, Baidu’spresident, Ya-Qin Zhang, told Bloomberg that he’sconfident that the company’s autonomous cars willbe on the road “as early as next year.”
Didi Chuxing, the reigning ride-hailing company inChina, is taking a much more measured approach.Although it opened an office in California earlierthis year to develop autonomous drivingtechnology, the company’s president, Jean Liu,said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose that asudden, “disruptive” switch to autonomous drivingwould be dangerous. “I think people should bemore, you know, focusing on how safe it is [rather]than how soon it can come out,” Liu said.
In China, autonomous vehicles won’t just have tolearn to deal with cars, electric scooters, andpedestrians that don’t follow the rules, a Didispokesperson said—they would need to be able tounderstand regional differences in signage andtraffic signaling, which aren’t standardized inChina like they are in the US or Europe. There,Didi’s size offers it an advantage. The companysays its human drivers give 25 million rides everyday, generating more than 70 terabytes of datadaily that it can mine to develop its autonomousdriving capabilities.
Following the LeaderFor now, many companies are testing theirautonomous vehicles by throwing unexpectedscenarios at them on controlled tracks. At Castle,Waymo's secret compound for training its cars,human assistants cut off self-driving minivans athigh speed, back out of blind driveways into theirpath, and throw basketballs at them, all to test andimprove the cars' reactions.
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But artificial intelligence that's trained on one setof assumptions can fail when it meets a differentset. Studies have found that facial-recognitionalgorithms trained on Caucasian test subjectsperform poorly on African American faces, andalgorithms trained on East Asian subjects performpoorly on Caucasian faces. The same might go forself-driving cars. Software trained on worst-casescenarios that involve flying basketballs and diceymerges might freak out at the sight of two dudeshanging out the back of a station wagon on a fast-moving highway.
Despite vast regional variations in how peopledrive, manufacturers might not have to create aGhana version and an Iran version and a SouthwestIndia version of their driving software. "It's reallythe same math and the same software that's goingto exist in every cultural context," says MatthewJohnson-Roberson, a University of Michiganengineering professor and the Ford Center’s othercodirector.
What matters most is that cars are trained to reactto all of them. A spokesperson for Uber, which istesting self-driving cars in the US and Canada, saidthat its cars have driven more than a millionautonomous miles in multiple cities, underdifferent conditions and during different times ofday, in order to improve its software’sadaptability.
Even if self-driving software understands unrulydrivers and can predict how they’re likely to breakthe law, autonomous vehicles will probably beconstrained by it. Uber’s cars will always followlocal traffic laws, a company spokesperson says.Stephan Hoenle, senior vice president ofautomated driving at Bosch, agrees. "You can drivemore aggressively or defensively without breakingthe rules," Hoenle says. An autonomous vehicle'sdriving style might vary from one market toanother based on demand and expectations, butviolating the law isn’t an option—it’s too great aliability for a manufacturer.
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The problem is that in some places, drivingaccording to the letter of the law could be moredangerous than aping law-breaking human drivers.Failing to adjust when impatient commuters turn atwo-lane road into a four-lane highway by drivingon the shoulder during rush hour can quickly leadto an ugly pileup.
Back of the LineTo someone steeped in the day-to-day work ofteaching computers to drive better than humans,the details of where self-driving cars will end upmight not seem very pressing. "It doesn't evenwork here, right?" said the University ofMichigan’s Johnson-Roberson. "From anengineering perspective, I don't know anyonewho's working on this, because some of thefundamentals are still not there."
Putting off these questions risks shunting the veryregions that most need self-driving technology tothe very end of the line. Hoenle claims no part ofthe world will be excluded from self-driving cars'eventual rollout but acknowledges it won't happenall at once. Compared to the US and Europe, hesays, "normally some of these other continentshave a slower technology ramp-up curve."
The developing world will eventually catch up,predicts Carlo Ratti, the director of MIT’sSenseable City Lab. "Every technology needs tostart somewhere—and often it starts at the cuttingedge," he wrote in an email. "At the beginning, newtechnologies can increase existing societal gapsbetween the haves and have-nots. However, thesubsequent dissemination of technology can causeinteresting ‘leapfrogging’ effects and help reducegaps."
Mobile phones, for example, were at first onlyavailable to rich Westerners. Now they’re abundantin Africa, where startups are coming up with newideas for mobile banking and healthcare provision."There is no reason to think that self-driving carswill follow a different path," Ratti said.
The gap between introduction and the "leapfrog"stage might be considerably longer for self-drivingcars, which have to adapt to their surroundings,
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need gobs of data specific to each street they drive,and have the potential to kill if poorly designed.
Developers that put off questions about regionaldifferences and leave matters to the "ramp-upcurve" will be locked out of an immense market.And as their lifesaving autonomous technologyrolls onto friendly roads in places such as NorthAmerica, Europe, and Singapore, it may leavebehind the developing countries that mostdesperately need that technology.
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