Toyota's Gill Pratt: "No one is close to achieving true level 5 [self-driving cars]"
autonomy
driving
self-driving
cars
ai
robots
toyota
weather
january 2017 by jm
The most important thing to understand is that not all miles are the same. Most miles that we drive are very easy, and we can drive them while daydreaming or thinking about something else or having a conversation. But some miles are really, really hard, and so it’s those difficult miles that we should be looking at: How often do those show up, and can you ensure on a given route that the car will actually be able to handle the whole route without any problem at all? Level 5 autonomy says all miles will be handled by the car in an autonomous mode without any need for human intervention at all, ever.
So if we’re talking to a company that says, “We can do full autonomy in this pre-mapped area and we’ve mapped almost every area,” that’s not Level 5. That’s Level 4. And I wouldn’t even stop there: I would ask, “Is that at all times of the day, is it in all weather, is it in all traffic?” And then what you’ll usually find is a little bit of hedging on that too. The trouble with this Level 4 thing, or the “full autonomy” phrase, is that it covers a very wide spectrum of possible competencies. It covers “my car can run fully autonomously in a dedicated lane that has no other traffic,” which isn’t very different from a train on a set of rails, to “I can drive in Rome in the middle of the worst traffic they ever have there, while it’s raining," which is quite hard.
Because the “full autonomy” phrase can mean such a wide range of things, you really have to ask the question, “What do you really mean, what are the actual circumstances?” And usually you’ll find that it’s geofenced for area, it may be restricted by how much traffic it can handle, for the weather, the time of day, things like that. So that’s the elaboration of why we’re not even close.
january 2017 by jm
Keeping Your Car Safe From Electronic Thieves - NYTimes.com
What the hell -- who designed a system that would auto-unlock based on signal strength alone?!!
security
fail
cars
keys
signal
proximity
keyless-entry
prius
toyota
crime
amplification
power-amplifiers
3db
keyless
april 2015 by jm
In a normal scenario, when you walk up to a car with a keyless entry and try the door handle, the car wirelessly calls out for your key so you don’t have to press any buttons to get inside. If the key calls back, the door unlocks. But the keyless system is capable of searching for a key only within a couple of feet. Mr. Danev said that when the teenage girl turned on her device, it amplified the distance that the car can search, which then allowed my car to talk to my key, which happened to be sitting about 50 feet away, on the kitchen counter. And just like that, open sesame.
What the hell -- who designed a system that would auto-unlock based on signal strength alone?!!
april 2015 by jm
A Case Study of Toyota Unintended Acceleration and Software Safety
january 2015 by jm
I drive a Toyota, and this is scary stuff. Critical software systems need to be coded with care, and this isn't it -- they don't even have a bug tracking system!
toyota
safety
realtime
coding
etcs
throttle-control
nasa
code-review
embedded
Investigations into potential causes of Unintended Acceleration (UA) for Toyota vehicles have made news several times in the past few years. Some blame has been placed on floor mats and sticky throttle pedals. But, a jury trial verdict was based on expert opinions that defects in Toyota's Electronic Throttle Control System (ETCS) software and safety architecture caused a fatal mishap. This talk will outline key events in the still-ongoing Toyota UA litigation process, and pull together the technical issues that were discovered by NASA and other experts. The results paint a picture that should inform future designers of safety critical software in automobiles and other systems.
january 2015 by jm
Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences
october 2013 by jm
This is exactly what you do NOT want to read about embedded systems controlling acceleration in your car:
On top of this, there was no error-correcting RAM in use; stack-killing recursive code; a quoted 94% stack usage; risks of unintentional RTOS task shutdown; buffer overflows; unsafe casting; race conditions; unchecked error code return values; and a trivial watchdog timer check. Crappy, unsafe coding.
firmware
horror
embedded-systems
toyota
camry
safety
acceleration
misra-c
coding
code-verification
spaghetti-code
cyclomatic-complexity
realtime
rtos
c
code-reviews
bug-tracking
quality
The Camry electronic throttle control system code was found to have 11,000 global variables. Barr described the code as “spaghetti.” Using the Cyclomatic Complexity metric, 67 functions were rated untestable (meaning they scored more than 50). The throttle angle function scored more than 100 (unmaintainable).
Toyota loosely followed the widely adopted MISRA-C coding rules but Barr’s group found 80,000 rule violations. Toyota's own internal standards make use of only 11 MISRA-C rules, and five of those were violated in the actual code. MISRA-C:1998, in effect when the code was originally written, has 93 required and 34 advisory rules. Toyota nailed six of them. Barr also discovered inadequate and untracked peer code reviews and the absence of any bug-tracking system at Toyota.
On top of this, there was no error-correcting RAM in use; stack-killing recursive code; a quoted 94% stack usage; risks of unintentional RTOS task shutdown; buffer overflows; unsafe casting; race conditions; unchecked error code return values; and a trivial watchdog timer check. Crappy, unsafe coding.
october 2013 by jm
related tags
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