| > That is, in a reliable control pipeline, the upper bounds on the errors of data sources are known a priori. Now we have natural neural networks in the control loop for some reason despite their unknown error bounds. To give another example: is there a sensor for vehicle placement relative to road edges with known upper error bound, which is less than width of the road? No, we have GPS, radar, lidar, camera data that we need to interpret somehow. A car that reliably avoids collisions (Can it, though? It needs to predict road situation to do it reliably), but can occasionally veer off the road, doesn't strike me as particularly safe. > to be overridden by reliable control pipelines when required. Those reliable pipelines needs to be mostly reactive. And there's a limit on what they can do. You can't avoid a collision when a car emerges from around a corner with 0.1 seconds to react. You need complex processing of those "simple" data sources to detect zones that can't be observed right now and to assess a probability of the said situation. All in all, we already have unreliable human part in the control loop of a vehicle. A control system that is provably robust in all real world situations will be the ultimate achievement and not a prerequirement for wide use of self-driving cars. |
Not in any automatic control loops. All control loops that do this have a human as the final piece of the pipeline, and that human is legally responsible for the outcome of the control loop. That defeats the point of automatic control.
> To give another example: is there a sensor for vehicle placement relative to road edges with known upper error bound, which is less than width of the road?
No, which is why these control pieplines have a human in control. For the experimental pipelines that do not have a human in the end of the control loop, they do have other control pipelines to avoid collisions, and the only that their control algorithms guarantee is a lack of collisions, not the ability for the car to stay on a lane. That is, the car might leave the lane under some conditions, but if it does, it will detect other objects and avoid crashing into them (although those objects might crash into it).
> All in all, we already have unreliable human part in the control loop of a vehicle. A control system that is provably robust in all real world situations will be the ultimate achievement and not a prerequirement for wide use of self-driving cars.
Right now, control loops without proven error bounds are not allowed by certification bodies on any control-loop in charge of preserving human lives in the aerospace, automotive, medical, and industrial robotics industries.
Allowing control-loops without known error bounds to be in charge of human lives would lower the current standards of these industries. Could be done (the government would need to create a new kind of regulation for this), but at this point it is unclear how that would look like.