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Driving Instructor to an Autonomous Driving System

While watching the Tesla FSD videos from AI DRIVR, one thing about autonomous driving caught my attention. My previous perception about autonomous driving and its categorization was that -

  1. Either car has full control over the driving and requires drivers assistance when it cannot determine the correct course of action, or
  2. That car automates only certain aspect of driving (eg. cruise control), and leaves the rest to the human driver.

But one additional aspect that appeared really significant to me there was having the ability to act like a driving instructor to the autonomous driving system. This occured on several of the Tesla FSD videos, where the human driver didn’t take control over the car from the autonomous driving system, but rather gave it a hint what it could do. Some examples seen there were - giving it a nudge when being stopped at the intersection that it is safe to advance, or requesting the lane change when the car seems unsure about doing it. Other things that come to my mind and follow this suit would be keeping the steering wheel while turning and thus saying to the car that it is turning too sharply, or tapping the brake to tell the car to slow down, or tapping the accelerator to tell the car that it is okay to take over another vehicle.

This whole “driving instructor” functionality to me seems like a really good approach to bridge the gap while developing an autonomous system of level 2 and above. The important thing is that the system still has the ability to get the vehicle to a safe state if it is unable to perform anymore, but the instructor thing allows for a partially done system to still be usable. Then, with time as the system improves, driver’s assistance would be required less and less. And, about the improvement, this assistance aspect has a real value if the driving system behavior is monitored and that data aggregated to improve the system.

“It is Human to Make Mistakes”

Another noticeable thing while watching the videos, and something that AI DRIVR has also mentioned on a couple of occassions is the ability of the autonomous driving system to gracefully deal with mistakes. It is one thing to detect that you in a mess and just freeze there and yepl for hooman’s assistance, and other thing is to try to make things better. Some examples of that would be -

  • Trying to move to the side of the road if there’s not enough room for the vehicle from the opposite direction to pass.
  • Trying to claw your way through an intersection after selecting the wrong turn lane.

These examples ride on the fact that other human drivers will be aware of your mistake and that they will react to it, and not behave like autonomous drones with preprogrammed paths. They give you some leeway for it and not a middle finger, and even move aside themselves, or they will react but will yield anyways like for the second example.