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Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he
by jpfr 11y ago
Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars.
What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person.
1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals.
2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk.
3) Implement some of the recent ideas from deep reinforcement learing [2,3]. For training, feed the system with the oberservations from test drives and reward actions that mimick the reactions of actual drivers.
In 2k lines of code he probably does not have a car model that can be used for path planning [4] (with tire slippage, etc.). So his system will make errors in emergency situations. Especially since the neural net has never experienced most emergencies and could not learn the appropriate reactions.
And guess what, emergency situations are the hard part. Driving on a freeway with visible lane markings is easy. German research projects autonomously drove on the Autobahn since the 80s [5]. Neural networks were used for the task since about the same time [6].
[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-with-Arduino-and-Seeed-C/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-vehicle-CAN-BUS-wi...
[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971 http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971
[3] http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702 http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702
[4] http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konferenzbeitraege/Ruf-Ziehn-et-al-2014-Evaluation-of-an-Analytic-Model__ICMC2014.pdf http://www.rem2030.de/rem2030-wAssets/docs/downloads/07_Konf...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project
[6] http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&context=compsci http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2874&c...
- bcohn91 11y agoWhy is the first comment on HN minimizing this truly impressive project? Of course it's not perfect, he's ONE person.
- Aleman360 11y agoBecause this article reinforces our bizarre cultural notion that one person deserves all the credit for some innovation. Nevermind the ridiculous amount of engineering that was required to build all the tools he's using and the order of magnitude more engineering required to make this a safe, mass producible product. But nah, let's just praise the founder, allow him to get rich while we all do the dirty work.
- username3 11y ago1. Make a working prototype 2. Impress investors 3. Hire others to finish the job 4. Profit Tesla customers invest in Musk. Musk invests in Hotz. Hots invests in developers. Developers in researchers. We're all delegating until we find someone who can finish the job. We're investing in people to hire the right people.
- azinman2 11y agoYou're assuming that Hotz then does nothing, and also Musk. You really think Musk is sitting around with all this free time not doing anything? You don't think it would all fall apart without the key people still in key roles? It doesn't work this way. You just move up the value chain.
- wdmeldon 11y agoThis comment is depressingly cynical. This is probably the single best definition of "hacking", as the community often refers to it, that I've seen in a very long time. One guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt, throws together a minimal prototype built on top of existing technology. Just look at the picture of it. Claims of commercial viability or beating Tesla are a bit ridiculous, but this is pretty damn amazing.
- Aleman360 11y agoIf this is the "hacker ethos" then I want nothing to do with it: > “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz declared in the story. “Laws are something made by assholes.” > “ ‘If’ statements kill.” > “I want power. Not power over people, but power over nature and the destiny of technology. I just want to know how it all works.”
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoHotz is pretty eccentric, but he's also pretty incredible. While technology wouldn't progress very far if everyone was like Hotz, I also don't think it would get very far without people like Hotz.
- tptacek 11y agoPutting a prototype self-driving car on actual roads without understanding the difficulty of that project seems like a legitimate, substantive criticism, and I don't care how many people are involved in the project.
- unclebucknasty 11y agoNow, that's a very valid criticism. I don't care about his personality, but testing the car on live roads is asinine. And, this journalist jumps in and excitedly plays up how he was afraid for his life, etc. Yeah, instead of going after the sensationalism, how about you discourage him from endangering the lives of others who weren't given the opportunity to make such a stupid decision?
- jpfr 11y agoThe guy clearly is technically brilliant. But I was referring to the results. Not how the results were achieved. In the video, he claims to want to achieve level 3 driving. Let's see how he can do the following under non-perfect conditions: - switching lanes - stopping at lights - turning cornerns - turning left corners in traffic Then we can move on to the more difficult situations.
- samstave 11y agoI feel as though there are improvements that can be done in the environment of driving; Have all stop lights have a beacon that will tell cars their state, "the light is green on north south, red on east west" Have exit signs have beacons as well.
- stcredzero 11y agoHave you thought this out? What happens when someone hacks their own beacons for lulz? So then the beacons have to have public key cryptography. Now all of the firmware will need to be audited and kept updated. Will there be over the air updates? What if someone cracks or steals the key? It seems to me that a target as juicy as "getting control of the North American road network" would be worth a major national power throwing a significant fraction of its resources at it, so that inflates the computing power such devices will need.
- MOil 11y agoWhat if someone would install their own traffic light right now?
- stcredzero 11y agoThat's immediately visible to people with eyeballs. The first sign that something is going wrong isn't going to be a car colliding with another car. It's going to be, "Hey, why are those kids installing a light with a step ladder?" Have you seen a traffic light? They're pretty substantial. How long would it take for you to make one in a hackerspace? Contrast this with hacking OTA updates for traffic beacons. You might not even have to change any atoms around to do your dirty deed. You might not even have to be there physically.
- rjvir 11y agoWho cares about how many people built it? What matters is the end product, which is something that existed in the 80s.
- ryandrake 11y agoYes, It's one person. WE GET IT. This article is a hero worship piece about a guy rather than a story about the technology. It's like how you can't find an article about Theranos that isn't actually just a photo-shoot/celebrity worship article about its founder.
- steego 11y agoEarly investors love genius superheros because lesser investors are willing to pay a premium to invest with companies with a superhero and a story.
- eitally 11y agoI think it's fair given his mission to "crush Mobileye".
- golergka 11y agoBecause "minimizing" is an emotional notion, and it's irrelevant. But providing a response to over-enthusiastic reception is informative if only because it presents the other side of the issue. In other words, I don't care if this guy is painted as a genius or script kiddie. He's not relevant in my life, and I will forget about him a week later. However, the lessons about machine learning and engineering that I can find in thsi article is the reasons I subscribe to HN (yes, I don't really know shit about these topics, and don't have enough time to fill gaps with real sources), and this comment is the most informative, just because he tries to cover what the article didn't.
- webmasterraj 11y agoOne person can build something that starts a revolution. See Woz/Apple. The real issue here is that self-driving cars are probably the wrong place for that to happen in AI. At best, a solo project creates a crappy prototype where there was no product before (again, see Woz/Apple). The expectation for driverless cars is too high – they need to be 100% good, because your life is on the line, not 80% good. What's the AI project that would blow people away, even if it was a shadow of a working prototype? I think that's the real question.
- oldmanjay 11y agoI don't follow why AI vehicles need to be 100% good. Plain old human-driven vehicles sure aren't and we accept their utility as being worth the trade.
- rolux 11y agoIn one word: liability.
- elliottpayne 11y agoIn two words: actuarial tables
- unclebucknasty 11y agoImagine the day an AI vehicle causes an accident that otherwise would not have happened. Even if AI cars are statistically better than humans on average, it's an issue of control. It's true that most accidents are avoidable and caused by human error, but most people are (perhaps overly) confident in their own ability to drive safely (this is also why people text and drive).
- dclowd9901 11y agoWe, as the flawed beings we are, can't accept both giving up control and not getting guaranteed safety as a result.
- tim333 11y ago
- tdb7893 11y ago"Built a self driving car" set the bar way too high for what this guy did
- atarian 11y agoIt's a custom on HN. Look what happened when DropBox was announced on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- Animats 11y agoIt's neat that one person did that. But debugging on-highway? Bad idea. Finding a safe place to test an autonomous vehicle on a budget is hard, but not impossible. Our initial testing in 2004 was in a large unused Sun parking lot in Fremont.[1] (Sun got carried away with expansion plans, and started building a big facility there. They paved the parking lots and poured the building foundations, then stopped construction.) Later off-road testing was at the Woodside Horse Park. We also looked into testing at the Hollister off-road vehicle park, and discovered we could book a sizable area on a weekday for our exclusive use. We never used that, though. We'd also looked into using the old FMC tank test track in San Jose, but never found a good contact there. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/8CZsJZ6SPbA2 https://goo.gl/maps/8CZsJZ6SPbA2
- dabeeeenster 11y agoCompletely agree. There's absolutely no way you could use this approach for level 4 autonomy. Level 3, fine, but not level 4.
- berberous 11y agoIn the video, he says his company is only targeting Level 3.
- dabeeeenster 11y agoAh I didn't see that. Fair enough. I still agree with the parent comment that the (important) edge cases like avoiding a crash will not be well handled potentially.
- RealGeek 11y agoHe built an impressive prototype, considering he hacked it together in a month. This is just the start, not the end.
- metafunctor 11y agoI'm afraid this may be also the end, more or less. From this point onwards, things get so much harder and more labor-intensive, that doing everything alone seems impossible.
- ogreveins 11y agoI don't see why it would. Once you get enough base data you can start simulating the data from what you have, inputting different scenarios without actually encountering them IRL. Faking sensor input and randomizing should get it most of the way there.
- 51Cards 11y agoWhen lives are involved handling edge cases is everything. The person stepping off a curb, the cyclist that falls in front of you, the car that weaves in its own lane and can't be used as a reference, traffic lights that are out of order, stop signs hidden by trees... and on and on. Mess one of these up while autonomous and severely injure someone and you're done. Human drivers might only see one of these cases a month, or 6 months, but not driving over someone in that case is what is critical. Not saying it's an impossible task, but IMO it will require a lot more training data than humanly possible for one person to generate.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoFaking input is how most people test their buggy, crappy software. It rarely matches reality.
- vonmoltke 11y agoI have significant experience in faking sensor data (specifically radar), and can tell you from it that fake sensor data is terrible. There is way too much going on in the real world to accurately create sensor data without actually recording sensor data. That is, you can manufacture the situation for the sensor to capture much more effectively than you can manufacture the data from a model. Even pseudo-faking like we were trying to do, wherein as generated signal is injected into actual, recorded background noise, is fraught with problems. Anybody who tries to develop a control system based solely on such data is in for a rude awakening when they try it for real for the first time.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoI'm not confident we can argue Google or anyone else has done much better. You might notice Google has never announced testing their cars where snow occurs, for example. I think it's likely that much more of self-driving car development is smoke and mirrors than people realize. Best case scenarios are promoted as examples of how innovative a company is. Great PR, not necessarily a practical result.
- hueving 11y ago>I'm not confident we can argue Google or anyone else has done much better. You might notice Google has never announced testing their cars where snow occurs, for example. This is a sensor limitation. They have fully admitted this several times (heavy rain too). Equating the fact that this guy can't handle any emergency situations with a sensor limitation all of the lidar systems suffer from is stupid. Google has shown many times that they have logic to handle routes around obstructions, construction, etc as well as cars running red lights, pedestrians walking into the street, etc. At least read up on something before you call it smoke and mirrors.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoI actually have read up on it before I called it smoke and mirrors. While this is a year ago now, this is well after their cars were heavily marketed as being pretty sufficient and capable of detecting problems. ...Yet it couldn't detect the existence of a stoplight if it wasn't explicitly mapped ahead of time. And apparently, according to a Googler, the mapping required to make a road work with Google's self-driving car system is "impractical" to do at a nationwide scale. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... I'm not saying it won't ever happen, I'm not saying there haven't been developments in the technology. But people seem to have a disconnect in expectations of where the technology is, and where marketing departments for these tech companies want you to believe the technology is.
- hueving 11y ago
- ch 11y agoI don't really see your complaint here. He did build A self-driving car, not THE self-driving car. Its an impressive hack as you noted, maybe it can turn into something bigger with more time and energy. So what is the point of shouting this down with an "ITS INCOMPLETE", it wasn't as if this is a KickStarter promotion or even a product. Geez. Get back to hacking.
- Johnny555 11y agoIt's more of a lane-assist in good conditions, but not expected to navigate city streets or handle unexpected conditions. So yes, it's an amazing project for a single person, but it's not really a self-driving car.
- nkozyra 11y agoPath planning shouldn't require a ton of lines of code, really. I've seen in-use path planning and localization in the sub<2K LOC range.
- cmontella 11y agoIn 2007 for the DARPA Urban Challenge, the Benn Franklin Racing Team used Matlab for their car. The entire thing ran on 5000 lines of code compared to similar performing cars written in C/C++ which used over 100K lines of code. http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlpressroom/pdf/Articles/The%20Ben%20Franklin%20Racing%20Team%20and%20the%20DARPA%20Urban%20Challenge.pdf http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlpressroom/pdf/Articles/The...
- iab 11y agoThat is true, and was very impressive. Consider how expressive matlab is though - x = A\b is one line in a .m file, but can correspond to several hundred of lines of fortran.
- dysfunction 11y agoWell that makes sense, given that basically all machine learning is transformations over matrices and that is Matlab's bread and butter. The equivalent C code might perform better when optimized, but it is going to be far longer and uglier. There's a reason a lot of ML work is prototyped out in Matlab first.
- cmontella 11y agoI would say basically all of robotics is transformations over matrices. As for Little Ben, there was actually no machine learning involved. Planning was sample-based on an occupancy grid. Localization was map-based.
- Nav_Panel 11y agoIt's pretty cool that it can be done on the cheap, though. I imagine a lot of people would be willing to pay a couple hundred dollars to retrofit their car to get autosteer alongside their cruise control feature. Small personal example: my family lives out in the suburbs. My dad works in a neighboring city. His commute is about a half hour, 20 minutes of which is a straight shot on a major highway. I'm sure he'd be willing to pay a few hundred to reclaim that 20 minutes each way to read a book/the newspaper, check his email, browse the internet, etc. It'd also be good for road trips.
- Splines 11y agoI don't know if I'd be comfortable completely giving up control to a driving computer, even on a straight highway. I am totally for a computer telling me when I'm driving dangerously because I'm distracted or tired.
- cmontella 11y agoOn the "cheap" relatively. The sensor he uses on the top of the car alone costs $8000. If you want to do it right, you'd also need a really nice IMU system to... I'm not sure what he's using but they can get very pricey.
- darkmighty 11y agoDo you have a link for the best (commercial) IMUs around/how much they cost? I'm curious -- are they just clusters of MEMs like the ones on a phone or something more advanced, like interferometry based?
- cmontella 11y agoI haven't paid attention to IMUs in a while. Here is one that I had some experience with in grad school: http://www.oxts.com/inertial-interface-to-navcoms-sf-3050/ http://www.oxts.com/inertial-interface-to-navcoms-sf-3050/
- RogerL 11y agoDefine "best". We've used a quarter million dollar one at my current company, and at a previous job we spent far, far more than that for military airframes. Groves "Principles of GNSS, Inertial, and Multisensor Navigation Systems" contains a good description of the various technologies used and their accuracy limits for navigation. Consumer grade MEMS are fine for airbags, the pedometer in your phone, but are not sufficient for intertial navigation, even when aided with other sources. At around the $2K-30K you get systems that can provide accurate navigation for up to 2 minutes or so. They are used in things like missiles. Aviation grade IMUs need to meet SNU 84 standard, which requires a maximum horizontal position drift of 1.5km in the first hour of operation. These will run 100K and up. Marine grade (subs, rockets, ICBMs) run $1 million and up, and have a maximum drift of 1.8km per day. None of them are good enough for autonomous cars w/o sensor fusion.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago>He has implemented the happy case. I could probably do this using ROS, opencv, and pcl. At least on a level where the car could recognize the road well enough to drive on it, but I imagine both my car and his car are nothing that any sane human would want to sit in. That last 20% focusing on safety and edge cases is going to be 100x the work/innovation/testing/staff/code/talent/smarts here. As a side note, I am intrigued by the idea of a FOSS self-driving car. Its a little worrysome we'll never see the code Tesla, Mercedes, etc are using.
- turnip1979 11y agoCan you use the Canbus to actuate?
- hackeram 11y agoGreat observations and references @jpfr. Learning for the AI does not have to be from real world experiences only. Simulated/controlled emergency situations would help as well! Further even if the 2K lines of code stretches a bit more to deal with unknown situations that isn't so bad either
- gbhn 11y agoBut this is a fundamental problem: The learning approach might need 100s of examples of drivers reacting to a bicycle on a sidewalk while turning right into a parking lot to get the right training input. Or perhaps it can learn from examples of bicycles and sidewalks and driveways to do the right thing. The point is, there are millions of edge cases, so getting examples of them all for training or verification is a very large task. The alternative is to build a more general world model where it's possible to work from the other direction and gain confidence that yes, the car senses all other obstacles correctly, and yes, it has algorithms that attempt to eliminate collisions in any circumstances. That's a fairly different approach, which ends up being much heavier in terms of effort and investment.
- samstave 11y agoMake the AI play grand theft auto for many thousands of hours.
- Animats 11y ago"Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars." I'm painfully aware of this. Ten years ago I ran one of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge teams. That's about what we produced with less than three full time equivalent people. We didn't have to handle other vehicles, but we did have to handle off-road conditions. Ours didn't make many mistakes, but it was very conservative and kept stopping to rescan its environment with a line-scanning LIDAR on a tilt head. I'm scared of happy-case automatic driving implementations. Tesla went down that road and had to back up, removing some features. Cruise's PR indicates they were going that way, but they now realize that won't work.
- frame_perfect 11y ago2) It's probably not a disk. I'd bet it's an SSD, or something. I doubt he'd use an HDD considering how relatively cheap it is now... and considering how loaded he probably is.
- mtanski 11y agoSSD = solid state DISK
- frame_perfect 11y agoFuck
- samstave 11y agoI thought it was drive, not disk.
- frame_perfect 11y agoActually no. It's only referred to that because people are stupid. It contains neither an actual disk nor a drive motor to spin a disk. HDD = HARD DISK drive SSD = SOLID STATE drive
- czechdeveloper 11y agoSSD can also stand for Solid State Disk. Disk does not imply moving parts.
- itchyouch 11y agoWith Neural Nets, training the AI to handle emergencies will be all about exposing as many emergency situations as possible. What's better about an AI powered by neural nets is that you could train an AI to go offroading. Get enough data and you've got a model for dealing with a given situation. Google's biggest strides with OCR, Voice recognition, Spam filters and other AI tech early on came from its ability to gather a huge corpus of data. The real challenge is two fold. Gathering data, and feeding the AI with inputs with data actually matters. This is the secret sauce that Hotz refers to in the article as the information he's not willing to disclose. That information will become commoditized in due time (like low-latency optimization for HFT), but it will take plenty of institutional money & experience (Google, Apple, Tesla, Ford, etc) to get it there.
- nradov 11y agoThe trouble with using neural nets for safety-critical real-time systems is that it's really hard to do the necessary level of validation. You can't accurately predict how the system might react in totally novel or unexpected situations. Which isn't to say that human drivers handle those situations well, but most of the time they don't do something totally bizarre or dangerous.
- analyst74 11y agoHumans totally do things that are bizarre or dangerous when in shock, but we've come to accept that as a personal responsibility and a price the society has to bear.
- zymhan 11y agoExactly. People may swerve and over-correct, causing their car to flip, for example.
- nradov 11y agoElectronic stability control (standard in US passenger cars since 2012) has already mostly solved that problem. http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers/Rollover/Electronic+Stability+Control http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers/Rollover/Electronic...
- ksk 11y ago>Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. Could you explain on what basis you claim this? Do you have intimate knowledge of his prototype, the amount of work he put in, or the novel ideas that he brought to the project in addition to integrating pre-existing tech? From what I can understand, your argument seems to be "lets see if I can guess what he did". If you're an authority in this field, then your guess could be very accurate I suppose.
- agumonkey 11y agoThat's the feeling I got from the video too. Maybe he tried too hard to make it appear as 'this is not as hard as big corps say it is!' but it also felt like 'hey, ML + basic CAN controls = self driving !'.. then I disagree. I want a computer with some general knowledge of physics + ML, not just abstracted drivers pattern on self play.
- Tloewald 11y ago“We’ve figured out how to phrase the driving problem in ways compatible with deep learning,” Hotz says. OK, maybe it's BS, but he's not saying what you say he's saying.
- argonaut 11y agoWhy is deep learning this magic pixie dust you sprinkle on anything and it works? Have the people who are suggesting this actually gotten deep reinforcement learning to work on complex, long-time-frame, real-world continuous control problems before? I would be very surprised if you got deep reinforcement learning to perform well on a self-driving task, even on a highway. If you did, well, your faculty position at Stanford is waiting for you.
- LoSboccacc 11y agothey're very powerful calssificators and from the outside it seems they can learn to distinguish between arbitrarily complex states. more states? add neurons! more search space? add layers! except they have unpredictable resonances, especially multi-layer networks: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/8064-the-deep-flaw-in-all-neural-networks.html http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc... they're just starting to understand this, but I believe the myth of the 'do it all dnn' is gonna die. it's time to start thinking about cluster of independent neural network, supervising each an independent aspect of the search space and/or each other.
- outworlder 11y agoA project like this is extremely impressive. The guy deserves a lot of credit (and maybe some investment?). That's hacking in the truest sense. The parent's checklist misses a bunch of things. For instance "1) Hookup a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car". That alone is not trivial. It is trivial if you want to read the car's odometer, but good luck doing more than that. For instance, people are still trying to make sense of the reported battery cell voltages in the Nissan Leaf. All interesting features are not documented and require serious reverse-engineering. "Hooking up to the CAN-Bus" can easily become a task for a whole month, full-time. Not to mention that the most useful features for the self-driving part are probably not accessible by the CAN-Bus - people are still trying to unlock the doors of the aforementioned Nissan Leaf. Steering, acceleration and braking are unlikely to be on the CAN-Bus "2) Attach a bunch of peripherals" is also hand wavy, and same goes for the rest of the post. It would be like dismissing SpaceX accomplishments by saying: "1) Build rocket frame. 2) build engine 3) Program flight software 4) Fill up the tanks with fuel 5) Push a big red button". The devil is in the details. With that out of the way: if the events happened as described, this guy should be convicted of reckless "driving". Taking a prototype that had only started working a few hours prior to an actual test run in a freeway with other cars is insane. What about some simpler, more useful and less dangerous goal? Such as a lane-departure warning add-on for cars which lack that capability? The article title is the worst part though. It's not "clever dude created a self-driving car prototype by himself". It is "Dude is taking on Tesla by himself". Which is bullshit. EDIT: Fix typo.
- lawnchair_larry 11y agoIt's only impressive to outsiders who aren't aware that this hasn't been new for a very long time and is reusing the work of others. There are tons of videos and documentation from amateurs and hobbyists hooking computers up to the canbus. In parallel to the tech community, the tuner/mod community have also been doing this on their own. It's been old news for years, led to many funny pranks and stunt hacks, culminating in charlie miller and chris valasek's media stunt last year.
- engi_nerd 11y agoHow is it not impressive to take bits of knowledge from multiple domains (programming, instrumentation, electrical engineering, control laws, etc) and fuse them together into a single thing? We all take from the good work of those around us. But how many people seriously do things with that work? Not many, and disdaining people who do so is not productive or, in my view, a good thing.
- noetic_techy 11y agoI agree this is 80/20 complete at the moment, but the gripes you have are not insurmountable if his model can truly learn with proper inputs. What if you could simulate these conditions in a safe/controlled environment, and remove the driver from harm via remote control? Maybe build a virtual world that simulates the inputs as best as possible. That would be the cheap way, although you may lose fidelity. If you had enough money you could build a simulated town/city, similar to a movie set, that throws all possible dangerous scenarios at you and operate the car remotely through these scenarios.
- austenallred 11y ago> Guy builds a fucking self-driving car. By himself. > Not that outlandish for a talented person What planet are you living on? I don't know what you did today, but I played with some jquery animations. This guy drove around in a self driving car that he built himself. It doesn't solve for edge cases? Neither do 90% of CRUD apps. Holy shit. Give some credit where credit is due. This is not an ordinary or average outcome.
- BHSPitMonkey 11y agoWell, he didn't actually build the car. He built a system that operates the existing car's steering and speed controls. And comparing the proper software solution to a CRUD app undermines the work that's been done by the big players in the space for the past several years.
- austenallred 11y agoWell yes, he only built the software that operates a car without a person driving it, connected it to a car, and did it all by himself. One person. My point was that what 99% of HackerNews does is likely nowhere near as interesting or as difficult, so when the top comments are all shitting on someone who did something that's actually pretty amazing, HackerNews can go to hell. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I'm done here.
- Houshalter 11y agoWhat he did was extremely impressive. But he's up against really high expectations. People expect him to have made massive breakthroughs in self driving car technology. Against that expectation, it doesn't seem so impressive.
- joe563323 11y agoThat is true. But getting a car to auto drive by a single guy in a month is really super human level.
- 11y ago
- kybernetikos 11y agoYou're probably right (since pessimism and cynicism are pretty successful predictors whenever anyone is trying something bold), but we have nothing like enough information to know if he's done something revolutionary or not. As the article makes clear, he doesn't want to give too much away, so of course you're stuck with a vague summary which sounds like he's just done what any smart person skilled in the art would do. General cynicism isn't really adding much to the conversation in my opinion, since almost everyone here probably knows this already, and too much cynicism can put people off starting projects and people starting projects is something we should cherish. I do think your point about emergency situations is substantive though. Perhaps he is only planning for self-driving while supervised by humans, but his idea for training as described (become an uber driver) would not at all produce the kind of dataset that would assure me that I would be safe. I think a lot of training with advanced drivers in simulators where you can have crazy life threatening situations would be the absolute minimum. I'd be worried that bad habits picked up on the thousands of uber rides would kick in during an emergency rather than the couple of situations that would be feasible to train on in real life.
- datashovel 11y agoI think most people would agree it's one thing to understand how the pieces work together "in theory", and an entirely different level actually building a functional prototype.
- monksy 11y agoI would argue that you're half there. You'd have a car that could navigate roads, but ultimately it couldn't get you to where you want to go. Here has been dedicated on making maps at a quality level that is needed for automous cars. A few issues with the data that is available currently is that the data isn't very detailed, and you're at the mercy of volunteers (tiger(old), openmaps data), or for a company that's main focus isn't maps. (Google) http://360.here.com/2015/06/02/take-create-autonomous-cars/ http://360.here.com/2015/06/02/take-create-autonomous-cars/
- heisenstalt 11y agoWhy take someone down when what they've done is awesome?! Just suggest improvements, be constructive.
- rmason 11y agoThroughout history there are many cases of the lone tinkerer who achieves the breakthrough going up against much better funded adversaries. Take the case of the Wright Brothers who faced two well funded adversaries. Samuel Pierpont Langley had a chair at Harvard, worked at the Smithsonian and had among others funding him $50K from the US War Department. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was an avid aviation enthusiast and an already wealthy man. One of Bell's assistants was Glenn Curtiss who went on to found his own plane company. Who would bet on two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio? No one, yet they were the first to fly. The first popular microcomputer would surely come from IBM or HP yet it didn't. Two guys in a Cupertino garage built it and neither of them was a college graduate. This guy may fail but I am not going to bet against him. In fact I hope they televise the race between the Comma and the Tesla. I'll bring the popcorn.
- WalterBright 11y agoTracing the Wright's development process, it's the first example I know of of a directed research and development program. The Wrights formulated a clear goal, identified the problems needing solutions, developed a series of prototypes aimed at proving each solution, did laboratory experiments to resolve others, invented physical theories to resolve still more, carefully documented their progress, etc. I.e. they did much more than simply throw some ideas and parts together and see what stuck, like every other contemporary experimenter.
- rmason 11y agoI agree, but the Wright's went counter to common thought at the time. Like Peter Thiel's favorite question, what do you believe that few else do? Ever since I played around with Prolog in the nineties I came to believe, just like digital eventually triumphed over analog, that neural networks will eventually triumph over rule sets based software. I did not know when it will become apparent, but I firmly believe that it is coming.
- WalterBright 11y agoI know it's far from production ready. But he's demonstrated an ability to put together quite a diverse collection of hardware and software and get it all to work together. I'm impressed.
- MichaelMoser123 11y agodoing complicated stuff with closed hardware is very impressive. controlling hardware is - hard.