Tesla’s ‘autonomous driving’ is tested on real children

Carmine Cupani wanted to clear things up. So he asked his son to stand in front of his Tesla car as he drove through a parking lot.

The resident of the state of North Carolina, in the United States, proposed to refute a video widely publicized of a Tesla with the beta software of “full autonomous driving” – which allows the car to steer, brake and accelerate, but requires an attentive human driver ready to take the wheel – advancing on child-sized mannequins.

Dan O’Dowd, the CEO of a software company that published the video earlier this month, believes the US National Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) should ban “full autonomous driving” until Tesla CEO Elon Musk “prove you won’t run over kids.”

That’s when Cupani, who runs a dealership focused on imports and Teslas, got involved and recruited his son. While describing himself as a “BMW guy”, Cupani says the software can’t compare to what a Tesla offers.

It’s also not the first time Cupani has enlisted his son, who he says is 11, in a possibly viral motoring exercise: earlier this year, he posted a video of your child driving his Model S Plaid — which can go from 0 to 100 km/h in 1.99 seconds — in a private parking lot. The video has been viewed over 250,000 times.

“Some people look at it and say, ‘Look at this crazy dad, what is he doing? CNN . “I do a lot of things like that, but always making sure my son doesn’t get hit.”

Cupani filmed the test of “total autonomous driving” in a parking lot. Her son stood near the end of a hallway with a smartphone to film the test. The father then revved the Tesla across the parking lot and turned on “full autonomous driving,” reaching 35 miles per hour, or nearly 60 km/h. The Tesla braked firmly and came to a complete stop – right in front of the son.

Cupani took another test with his son on a street using Autopilot, Tesla’s most rudimentary driver assistance software, and found that he also stopped for his son.

“This Dan, this guy says he’s an expert at this, an expert at that,” Cupani said. “Well, I’m an expert in future automotive technology, a professional driving instructor.”

Cupani is among the many Tesla supporters who opposed O’Dowd’s video and set out to create their own tests. Some asked their children for help. Others made homemade mannequins or used inflatable dolls.

The passionate defenses and criticisms of “full autonomous driving” show how the technology has become a talking point in the industry. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) recently said that the term “full autonomous driving” is misleading and represents a reason to suspend or revoke Tesla’s license to sell vehicles in the state. Ralph Nader, whose 1960s critique of the auto industry helped spark the creation of the NHTSA, echoed critics of “full autonomous driving” this month.

However, this is also an example of the unintended consequences of releasing disruptive, unfinished technology — and it shows how far some Tesla loyalists are willing to go to defend the company. So many people were conducting their own experiments that a government agency took the extraordinary step of warning people not to use children to test car technology.

“Consumers should never create their own tests or use real people, especially children, to evaluate the performance of technology.

Tesla test

Earlier this month, Tad Park, a California resident, saw that another Tesla car enthusiast wanted to test “full autonomous driving” with a child, and offered to two of their children. Park told CNN Business that it was “a little difficult” to get his wife to agree. She only accepted when he promised he would drive the vehicle himself.

“I will never cross the line because my children are so much more valuable than anything else,” Park said. “I’m not risking their lives, no way.”

Park’s tests, unlike O’Dowd’s, started with the Tesla at 0 km/h. In all of Park’s tests, the Tesla stopped before his two children in the video, including a 5-year-old. Park also said that he didn’t feel comfortable testing his children at speeds greater than 40 mph, as O’Dowd did with the mannequins.

Franklin Cadamuro, who lives in Toronto, Canada, created a “box boy”, a child-sized figure made from used cardboard boxes from Amazon. “Don’t blame me for what the car does or doesn’t do,” he posted on start of video. “I’m a huge Tesla fan.”

His Tesla slowed as it approached the “box boy”, and then accelerated again, hitting the cardboard dummy. Cadamuro speculates that this may have been because the cameras couldn’t see the lower boxes when they were immediately in front of the bumper and so could forget they were there.

Human babies learn at about eight months that an out-of-sight object still exists, many years before they can even get a driver’s license. But the skill can still elude some AI systems like Tesla’s “total autonomous driving.” Another fan of the automaker had similar results.

Cadamuro said his video started out as entertainment, but he wanted people to see that “full autonomous driving” isn’t perfect.

“I think a lot of people have extreme opinions about the ‘full autonomous driving’ beta,” said Cadamuro. “People like Dan think it’s the worst thing in the world, but I have some friends who believe she’s almost perfect.”

Cadamuro said he also performed other tests in which his Tesla, driven at higher speeds, effectively deviated from the “box boy”.

For a computer vision system like the one Tesla vehicles use, quickly and accurately detecting smaller objects such as small children will often be more difficult than identifying large objects or adults, according to Raj Rajkumar, a professor at Carnegie University. Mellon who studies autonomous vehicles.

The more pixels an object occupies in a camera image, the more information the system has to detect features and identify the object. The system will also be affected by the data it is trained on, such as the amount of images of young children it is exposed to, for example.

“Computer vision with machine learning is not 100% foolproof,” Rajkumar said. “Just like the diagnosis of a disease, there are always false positives and negatives.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment and generally does not engage with the professional press.

“Rules of Wild West Chaos”

After Tesla fan criticism of its original tests, O’Dowd released another video In this month.

Some Tesla supporters criticized the fact that O’Dowd used cones as lane markings in his original tests, which may have limited the sedan’s ability to drive around the dummy. Others claimed that O’Dowd’s test pilot had forced the Tesla to advance over the dummy by stepping on the accelerator, which was not visible in the videos released by O’Dowd. Some Tesla enthusiasts also highlighted blurry messages on the car’s screen, as an indication that O’Dowd’s driver was stepping on the gas to manipulate the tests.

O’Dowd told CNN Business that the blurry messages referred to unavailable supercharging and uneven tire wear. CNN Business was unable to independently verify what the message said, as O’Dowd did not provide any clearer video of what happened in the car during testing.

In his second video, O’Dowd tested it without cones on a residential street and showed the inside of the Tesla, including the gas pedal. The Tesla, as in O’Dowd’s other tests, hit the infant dummy.

Earlier this year, O’Dowd lamented in an interview with CNN Business that no industry testing body examines the code for “full autonomous driving.” “The US government has no performance standards for automated driver assistance technology such as Autopilot.

O’Dowd is the founder of the Dawn Project, an effort to make computers safe for humanity. He ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the US Senate this year in a campaign focused solely on his critique of “total autonomous driving.”

NHTSA is currently investigating Tesla’s driver assistance technology, so changes may be on the way.

“The software that controls billions of people’s lives in self-driving cars must be the best software ever written,” demanded O’Dowd. “We’re using Wild West chaos rules and we’ve come up with something that’s terrible.”