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Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”
- randomdrake 10y agoSuper cool to see NVIDIA releasing hardware specifically meant to be a platform for building self-driving systems[1]: "NVIDIA DRIVE™ PX 2 is the open AI car computing platform that enables automakers and their tier 1 suppliers to accelerate production of automated and autonomous vehicles. It scales from a palm-sized, energy efficient module for AutoCruise capabilities, to a powerful AI supercomputer capable of autonomous driving." I hadn't heard of this before and with their purported pivot to an AI company, I can't wait to see what other platforms they develop in a similar capacity. [1] - http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html
- dogma1138 10y agoNVIDIA has been trying to pivot into a "services" company for a while, NVIDIA GRID/Gaming Cloud, computing etc. "AI" or at least fused sensor automation seems like a good place for them since they already have both the hardware and the software expertise for this. NVIDIA actually gave up on even attempting to do console graphics again since they didn't want their pipeline to be suffocated by these draconian single customer contracts. What keeps AMD's graphics department alive these days, is exactly what would have prevented NVIDIA from pushing their business forward.
- moyta 10y agoWell, that and AMD has x86-64 & ARM licensing and experience sitting right there in house, ready for Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc to say what IP Blocks they want, with a 3 month lag until that custom chip is ready. Nvidia did make what could have been an x86-64 chip, but had to can that since they couldn't get the relevant licensing from AMD & Intel to allow its production and sale, hence why everything they sell is ARM.
- erk__ 10y agoThe new nintendo console/handheld have Nvidia graphics.
- dogma1138 10y agoIt's the NVIDIA Tegra SOC this is different than having to fill your pipeline with custom graphics for a mainstream console. Nintendo just licensed the SOC from NVIDIA, the PS4 had a custom chip from the green giant, and AMD does custom APUs for the PS4 and Xbone,
- sp332 10y agoWho thought making decent autonomous cars was going to take as long as 2020? I mean for regulations etc maybe, but not for the tech. Earlier this year I expected it to be done later this year. Edited for clarity (I hope).
- kyberias 10y agoWhat "it"?
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- dingo_bat 10y agoIn general, people tend to overestimate technological advancement in the short term.
- sp332 10y agoThat's kind of the opposite of the point of the article.
- ghaff 10y agoMany people. And I still don't expect to see general-purpose (secondary roads/cities, range of weather conditions) for decades.
- 60654 10y agoThis exactly. I did robotics in the late 90's and it's interesting to see how many fundamental problems still remain unsolved. And the trajectory of tech advancement is positive for sure, but not _nearly_ as fast as popsci and marketing articles suggest.
- revelation 10y agoNot to mention that, since you did robotics in the 90s, there might just be another point where the entire field of AI falls off a cliff, again.
- tener 10y agoVery cool: with capable CUDA device in a car, one should be able to mine some crypto coins with it! With some luck the car should be able to pay for itself! Alternatively, having in mind Elon's creative approach to finances, Tesla could get some significant hashing power with its fleet! Edit: looking at the downvote I suppose the joke wasn't obvious?
- Retric 10y agoIn the 9years I have been on HN I have up voted 3 really good jokes and downvoted thousands of so so ones. Before you post a joke think is it that good. Because, jokes are like spam on message boards they add clutter without aiding the discussion.
- tener 10y agoWow, really? I just don't see how this is a spam. They definitely add some value, unlike some other stuff out there.
- ilaksh 10y agoI thought it was kind of funny but to be honest I couldn't tell you were joking. It's hard not to assume people are just dumb.
- arkitaip 10y agoHN is a humor free zone and I for one appreciate it!
- Razengan 10y agoThe idea of ubiquitous and powerful computers in eveyrone's possession contributing to some global processing while they're idle, is actually fascinating.
- greglindahl 10y agoIt was, until most of those computers got a power-saving mode -- electricity is not free. Also, note that some things (like bitcoin mining) are so specialized that they run poorly on general-purpose cpus and gpus. Still, there is a thriving set of "do this computation at home" projects: Folding@Home, SETI@Home, ...
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- Animats 10y agoI'm still not happy with self-driving on vision alone, or vision augmented with radar. There are too many hard cases for vision. Everybody who has good self-driving right now - Google, Otto, Volvo, GM - uses LIDAR. Self-driving is coming to the first end users in 2017, in Volvo's test of 100 vehicles. Volvo has multiple LIDARs, multiple radars, multiple cameras, redundant computers, and redundant actuators. They're being cautious. Yet they're getting there first. With the new hardware, Tesla ought to be able to field smart cruse control that doesn't ram into stopped vehicles partially blocking a lane. They've rammed stopped vehicles at speed three times now. At least with the new hardware things should get better. Do they still have the radar blind spot at windshield height?
- bluthru 10y agoWhat's a hard case for vision? That's how our eyes work. LiDAR has problems with precipitation too.
- kchoudhu 10y agoDepth map extraction from vision in real time depends on accurate algorithmic merging of past frames, color gradients and motion vector extraction to come up with a 3D map of what's around the vehicle. Contrast this with LIDAR, which can present a depth map in real time by sending out an array of light pulses and timing how long they take to come back to the IP. Which method is more likely to have implementation errors?
- dolzenko 10y agoSo its not just 2 cameras? Fun, do you have a (entry level) link ?
- kchoudhu 10y agoStereo adds just another layer of data to merge, yeah. I should add a disclaimer: I'm waaaaay out of date. The last time I worked on this stuff was back in 2005 during the DARPA Grand Challenge. And while I'm fairly confident that the basics are still the same (the fact that we're still discussing monocular vs. stereo vs. LIDAR is testament to that...), I'm going to defer to someone more up-to-date to provide more recent research/documentation.
- varelse 10y agoNVIDIA's Drive PX 2 has too high power consumption and too low perf/W for the moment. They're winning this space because they are there more than that they are the best possible solution. And they may continue to win because successful execution of an 80% product is worth far more than a 90+% powerpoint processor cough TenSilica et al. cough, or because this is such a huge potential market, it might actually go to a successful competitor. 2018 and beyond will be very interesting. For while it's really desirable have the deep learning equivalent of x86 assembly language (CUDA) across a full stack from training to inference, in the end, IMO cost will be king. I'm not a big fan of $150K high-end servers filled with $5000 GPUs that can be bested with clever code on a $25K server fill with $1200 consumer GPUs. But I am a huge fan of charging what you can while you are unopposed. It's just that I think that state is temporary.
- maxerickson 10y agoIs 10 watts the correct figure? The powertrain uses 300+ Watts, so it seems like a manageable number if it is correct.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoThat's a big "+" on your figure - it's about 300 Watt-hours per mile, or 3600W constantly, if you're going 60 mph. For comparison, one horsepower is about 750 watts - a Tesla is a very low-drag car. Anandtech reported [1] that the TDP of the whole board is around 250W. The Tegra SoCs are probably around 10W, but that doesn't get you much in the way of GPU horsepower. 1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9903/nvidia-announces-drive-px-2-pascal-power-for-selfdriving-cars http://www.anandtech.com/show/9903/nvidia-announces-drive-px...
- maxerickson 10y agoYeah, I screwed up the math. Point stands though.
- vectorjohn 10y ago
- bcantrill 10y agoCould someone who understands this space weigh in on how technically interesting this is? (Or isn't?) In particular, their research paper on "End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars"[1] seems to yield a system that requires an unacceptable amount of manual intervention: in their test drive, they achieve autonomous driving only 98% of the time. But I have no real expertise in this space; perhaps this result is impressive because it was end-to-end or because of the relatively little training? Is such a system going to be sufficiently safe to be used in fully autonomous systems? Or is NVIDIA's PX 2 interesting but not at all for the way it was used in their demonstration system? [1] http://images.nvidia.com/content/tegra/automotive/images/2016/solutions/pdf/end-to-end-dl-using-px.pdf http://images.nvidia.com/content/tegra/automotive/images/201...
- ilaksh 10y agoIt's incredibly freaking amazing if they are using deep learning to drive via mainly cameras only 98 percent of the time. No one else can do that. 98 percent is obviously a lot.
- bcantrill 10y agoThanks -- that answers the question! So fair to say that it's impressive because of the absence of LIDAR and/or other sensors -- and that by adding LIDAR to such a system one could presumably get towards 0% manual intervention?
- sushirain 10y agoThe difference between 98% and 99.999% is very difficult to solve, and it's not going to happen in the next 5 years. LIDAR can't help, for example, with obeying a police officer gesture.
- pimlottc 10y agoThe headline reads confusingly to me. It sort of sounds like it's saying the system is five years in future but what he meant is that Telsa itself is five years ahead of the competition in this area. (Off-the-cuff verbal speech is often a bit hard to follow when written down exactly word-for-word)
- matheweis 10y agoI thought the reason for Tesla switching away from Mobileeye was that Mobileeye and Tesla couldn't come to an agreement on price and data licensing? https://electrek.co/2016/09/15/tesla-vision-mobileye-tesla-autopilot/ https://electrek.co/2016/09/15/tesla-vision-mobileye-tesla-a... ... and because Mobileeye wasn't comfortable with Tesla using their system for level 4 & 5 driving: https://electrek.co/2016/09/16/mobileye-responds-to-tesla-again/ https://electrek.co/2016/09/16/mobileye-responds-to-tesla-ag...
- meow_mix 10y agoThis article seems to relate mostly to the computer vision problems associated with self-driving systems, but what about weather conditions? Is this a solved problem?
- sushirain 10y agoWeather conditions are a sensor / computer vision /control problem. It is far from solved.
- tim333 10y agoThe PX 2 is kind of a cool computer. 8 teraflops, 250W, liquid cooled. I imagine it would run a good bit less than that most of the time. 8 teraflops is about 8% of Moravecs estimate of brain equivalence so assuming you use ~8% of your brain driving it may be about right.
- emcq 10y agoThe brain doesn't do floating point operations. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
- tim333 10y agoYeah but Moravec's arguments were based on the rough processing power he found necessary to achieve equivalent performance in the simple robots he was building. So it's a two apples equals one orange for making fruit salad kind of estimate.
- zump 10y agoQuestion: Does NVIDIA do remote jobs for engineering positions?
- pistle 10y agoFirst, I'm all for AI-based transportation solutions, but why does it seem like there aren't nearly enough redundancies being considered? There are just going to be competing proprietary solutions? In the US, the NHSTA should get ahead of things and push for open standards and potentially for some level of development of standard safety features like being able to set some form of material or device on objects to mark them in ways that can transmit specific information about objects like other cars, fixed structures, etc. I could make 10's of millions selling stickers or paint additives that would mark a human-driven car's edges to help "protect" it from automated vehicles' AI.
- mrfusion 10y agoHow well would a modern car do in the darpa grand challenge? I'm curious how far we've come.
- frik 10y agoI doubt a self-driving car without a LIDAR would make it - on the same "test road" as in 2006. But it shouldn't be a problem for others like Google, Volvo, Ford, etc We need an independent review of self-driving cars in a few years. It will be quite interesting how good they really are in different driving situations like different road and weather conditions. Say good buy to only-camera+radar based cars on a snowy road with bright winter sun (low sun rays) or heavy rain in a dark foggy night.
- throwaway123dse 10y agoOne thing I haven't seen discussed: Many times I'm driving and have the police wave me through a traffic light. Would a self-driving car realize what's happening? What about a driver waving me to get ahead?
- drcross 10y agoIt's not a solved problem but it's something that people are working on. https://youtube.com/watch?v=8aEWHdduPwc https://youtube.com/watch?v=8aEWHdduPwc This is the Mercedes car that communicates to pedestrians about the vehicle's intent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_communication_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_communication_system... Something like this might feature prominently as well.
- Belenus 10y agoNot only is NVIDIA getting those three things that Huang mentioned, but they are also planning, and maybe getting, a monopoly. Think, rapidly switching from chip-making to AI, before anybody else, but not for self-driving cars. Then, when Tesla decided to start self-driving cars, NVIDIA hopped in and now Tesla is going to use their Drive PX2 supercomputer. This is a smart move by NVIDIA, after all, they're five years ahead!
- MarkMc 10y agoI would love to see a betting market give a prediction about whether a Tesla car sold today will have full self drive capability by 2018.
- Joyfield 10y agoNoob question here. How does multiple LIDARs not interfere with each other?