6 ms·

Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against

by thearn4 10y ago

Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.

tajen 10y ago
I'm surprised by their technology: > The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. Concerning the bridges, can't they do like the Kinect: Match the image with depth-sensing lasers, so they can detect the boundaries of the bridge, stray away from pedestrians, filter out fire hydrants and trees but slow down when encountering other objects?
- rattray 10y ago
  It's possible that they don't rely on the minutiae of the maps, just use them for planning. For example, "don't take 5th street, it's full of potholes" or "we can't drop off the passenger on this block, there's a fire hydrant – will have to drop them off on the next block, so plan accordingly". On the other hand, if the cars won't drive properly without these maps, in which case I too would be extremely hesitant to trust them.
  - cgearhart 10y ago
    They definitely use the maps. In order to accurately localize the car, a detailed map can be used as part of the likelihood function for location to answer "how likely is it that the vehicle is at position (x,y) given the most recent measurements?" If you don't have an accurate map, it's very difficult to come up with a likelihood function that is accurate enough to keep the car in its own lane.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      The car can't follow the lane markings?
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Lane markings are good if they're there. Often they get obliterated by construction, wear, weather, precipitation. Sometimes there are several sets, rewritten after construction and only partly erased. Humans can have a hard time following them.
      - millcoo 10y ago
        Most residential streets in Pittsburgh, as in a great deal of the rest of the world, do not have lane markings, though many are two-way and have parked cars on one or both sides of the road. Pittsburgh provides an additional difficulty, that many of these roads are too narrow for what is asked of them. Here's a typical example, rather on the roomy side: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9.95h,83.68t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sQ2hkTTCoyRis7gRHayh7OQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9... One of the tricks of driving in an older city with on-street parking is weaving in and out of unused spots to make way for oncoming vehicles that have no means to move over themselves—or won't, for fear of clipping a side-view mirror, or because they can't bring themselves to care about how little space they've left for others. Sometimes you have to stop and wait for one car to make its way through a tight stretch before going through yourself, rather like pulling up to a one-lane bridge that has been generated at runtime. The trouble is that the lanes have to be imagined with respect to the current conditions, bearing in mind what other drivers are likely to expect of you; knowledge of the road is not enough. This is a social problem as well as a technical one, and I will be interested to see the solutions.
    - 794CD01 10y ago
      Keeping the car in its lane is overrated. Any human who drives in snow knows the rules. If there are other cars around, center yourself with respect to them. If there are not, lanes are irrelevant. Even many narrow side streets in snowless areas force you to improvise in a similar way to handle oncoming cars.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jayjay71 10y ago
  This is the way Google does it as well, and in my opinion is a fundamental architectural failure. There's a reason after several years Google still has tested in so few locations. Delphi has a more robust system (in theory), but the accuracy isn't quite as good. To the best of my knowledge Ford is also taking a different approach which doesn't depend on super-detailed maps to operate. The technology to compare the surroundings against a map is far easier than figuring out the surroundings and then navigating within that (not to trivialize this - both are extraordinarily difficult and nobody has made a fully self-driving car yet). But hey, like they always say in YC - do things that don't scale. Uber is clearly pushing ahead faster than anyone else, and they have a hell of a team behind this project. Regarding bridges - to oversimplify the simple answer is they're far noisier for the sensors (all of them, including cameras) and it just wreaks havoc on the sensor fusion system.
  - Retric 10y ago
    You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      There were 4 million miles of road in the USA in 2013. Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle? In a fleet of such vehicles? In a reasonable time? Its a big job, and $2.50 a mile seems pretty low.
      - Retric 10y ago
        2.50$ is more than double what trucking costs per mile that should cover every lane mile at normal speeds. Now building 100 cars with this equipment is not going to be free, but trucks also burn far more fuel. Anyway, you doing this is hard, for a multi billion dollar per quarter company it's pocket change.
        10y ago
- rsfern 10y ago
  You have to start somewhere. In addition to bootstrapping the program in a few cities, they are probably using this data to improve their pothole detection systems. Pittsburgh's a great city for that sort of thing.
- cgearhart 10y ago
  > ...will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. It's not a question of detecting the potholes, but of localizing the vehicle and tracking other objects in the vicinity (like other cars in traffic). High-fidelity maps make the system more robust because it can eliminate lots of measurement noise by averaging the readings from a constellation of landmarks. > can't they do like the Kinect This is essentially what they are doing. The problem is more difficult when the Kinect is moving.
- danielweber 10y ago
  If you have a fleet of networked cars, then as soon as one car encounters a new pothole, all the cars know about it.

by thearn4 10y ago

Lots of hills, and will have plenty of ice and snow in a few months. It seems to me like a logical place to test the resilience of a self-driving system against some predictable corner cases.

tajen 10y ago

I'm surprised by their technology: > The company has been creating extremely detailed maps that include not just roads and lane markings, but also buildings, potholes, parked cars, fire hydrants, traffic lights, trees, and anything else on Pittsburgh's streets. If one city requires that much work, they're not scalable. Even if we assume the LIDAR on every Uber car collects the new data, the car will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. Concerning the bridges, can't they do like the Kinect: Match the image with depth-sensing lasers, so they can detect the boundaries of the bridge, stray away from pedestrians, filter out fire hydrants and trees but slow down when encountering other objects?

rattray 10y ago
It's possible that they don't rely on the minutiae of the maps, just use them for planning. For example, "don't take 5th street, it's full of potholes" or "we can't drop off the passenger on this block, there's a fire hydrant – will have to drop them off on the next block, so plan accordingly". On the other hand, if the cars won't drive properly without these maps, in which case I too would be extremely hesitant to trust them.
- cgearhart 10y ago
  They definitely use the maps. In order to accurately localize the car, a detailed map can be used as part of the likelihood function for location to answer "how likely is it that the vehicle is at position (x,y) given the most recent measurements?" If you don't have an accurate map, it's very difficult to come up with a likelihood function that is accurate enough to keep the car in its own lane.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    The car can't follow the lane markings?
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Lane markings are good if they're there. Often they get obliterated by construction, wear, weather, precipitation. Sometimes there are several sets, rewritten after construction and only partly erased. Humans can have a hard time following them.
    - millcoo 10y ago
      Most residential streets in Pittsburgh, as in a great deal of the rest of the world, do not have lane markings, though many are two-way and have parked cars on one or both sides of the road. Pittsburgh provides an additional difficulty, that many of these roads are too narrow for what is asked of them. Here's a typical example, rather on the roomy side: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9.95h,83.68t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sQ2hkTTCoyRis7gRHayh7OQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4435279,-79.8936687,3a,75y,9... One of the tricks of driving in an older city with on-street parking is weaving in and out of unused spots to make way for oncoming vehicles that have no means to move over themselves—or won't, for fear of clipping a side-view mirror, or because they can't bring themselves to care about how little space they've left for others. Sometimes you have to stop and wait for one car to make its way through a tight stretch before going through yourself, rather like pulling up to a one-lane bridge that has been generated at runtime. The trouble is that the lanes have to be imagined with respect to the current conditions, bearing in mind what other drivers are likely to expect of you; knowledge of the road is not enough. This is a social problem as well as a technical one, and I will be interested to see the solutions.
  - 794CD01 10y ago
    Keeping the car in its lane is overrated. Any human who drives in snow knows the rules. If there are other cars around, center yourself with respect to them. If there are not, lanes are irrelevant. Even many narrow side streets in snowless areas force you to improvise in a similar way to handle oncoming cars.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jayjay71 10y ago
This is the way Google does it as well, and in my opinion is a fundamental architectural failure. There's a reason after several years Google still has tested in so few locations. Delphi has a more robust system (in theory), but the accuracy isn't quite as good. To the best of my knowledge Ford is also taking a different approach which doesn't depend on super-detailed maps to operate. The technology to compare the surroundings against a map is far easier than figuring out the surroundings and then navigating within that (not to trivialize this - both are extraordinarily difficult and nobody has made a fully self-driving car yet). But hey, like they always say in YC - do things that don't scale. Uber is clearly pushing ahead faster than anyone else, and they have a hell of a team behind this project. Regarding bridges - to oversimplify the simple answer is they're far noisier for the sensors (all of them, including cameras) and it just wreaks havoc on the sensor fusion system.
- Retric 10y ago
  You could drive down every road in the US for under 10 million dollars. So as long as you can keep them updated I don't think highly detailed maps are a problem. Especially if this is supposed to be a backup for GPS.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    There were 4 million miles of road in the USA in 2013. Sure you could drive them - but drive them in a special sensor-equipped vehicle? In a fleet of such vehicles? In a reasonable time? Its a big job, and $2.50 a mile seems pretty low.
    - Retric 10y ago
      2.50$ is more than double what trucking costs per mile that should cover every lane mile at normal speeds. Now building 100 cars with this equipment is not going to be free, but trucks also burn far more fuel. Anyway, you doing this is hard, for a multi billion dollar per quarter company it's pocket change.
      - 10y ago
rsfern 10y ago
You have to start somewhere. In addition to bootstrapping the program in a few cities, they are probably using this data to improve their pothole detection systems. Pittsburgh's a great city for that sort of thing.
cgearhart 10y ago
> ...will trip sooner or later if it can't detect potholes. It's not a question of detecting the potholes, but of localizing the vehicle and tracking other objects in the vicinity (like other cars in traffic). High-fidelity maps make the system more robust because it can eliminate lots of measurement noise by averaging the readings from a constellation of landmarks. > can't they do like the Kinect This is essentially what they are doing. The problem is more difficult when the Kinect is moving.
danielweber 10y ago
If you have a fleet of networked cars, then as soon as one car encounters a new pothole, all the cars know about it.