7 ms·

This article misses a lot of things technology wise. OK, I understand that. This article also misses a lot air companies like Daimler who showed off self drivi

by PinguTS 10y ago

This article misses a lot of things technology wise. OK, I understand that. This article also misses a lot air companies like Daimler who showed off self driving car captibilities publicly in the beginning 2000 and on the web 3 years ago. It misses the prototypes shown off by Audi and BMW. It misses also the prototypes shown by Japanese car manufacturers. From technology companies it misses Bosch who will show off at CES their own developed car and as such their expertise. It misses Delphi who works with MobilEye on self-driving platform to be used by the OEM, and it misses other TIER1 like Conti who have also shown their work. By the way, the Mitsubishi Outlander is currently the best equipped series car who can do self-driving capabilities, it has a stereo camera system and Lidar combined with other other radar sensors. Next are the luxury cars from Audi, BMW, Daimler, and Volvo. Tesla here is last with only a simple radar and camera system (no stereo view), which has also no night vision capabilities like the others have.

Tempest1981 10y ago
Would you add Nvidia to your list?
- PinguTS 10y ago
  This year, a colleague made a seminar for the Nvidia people in the UK. I was not personally present. But from what I've been told, they had no glue about automotive. The only thing they have, is a high performance processor designed for embedded use, with which they want to be an automotive supplier. AFAIK, Tesla is the first going to use them. But I believe that currently they have no automotive experience in terms of software. They are building it up, currently.
  - rrdharan 10y ago
    Nvidia is a large distributed organization so it's possible if not likely that the relative understanding of this particular UK team is not reflective of the total expertise at the company. They definitely have more than "just a processor": http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-automotive-technology.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-automotive-technology.htm... I have a friend who works in the self driving team at Nvidia in Santa Clara (apologies for the login wall): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/full-stack-engineers-self-driving-cars-john-zedlewski https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/full-stack-engineers-self-dri... They've also got some demos up on YouTube: http://youtu.be/YuyT2SDcYrU http://youtu.be/YuyT2SDcYrU
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Gys 10y ago
I just had a look at the website of the Outlander. Its not mentioned anywhere that it has self driving capabilities. The sensors are used to warn the driver and intervene if a crash is imminent. So can I conclude there is a difference in the (state of) implementation between the hardware (sensors) and the software (self-driving intelligence) ? Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in theory the number of sensors seems not the most important element ;-) Tesla seems number 1 in pushing the frontiers in marketing, so it may also ahead in software, to compensate what it is lacking on the hardware side ?
- argonaut 10y ago
  > Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in theory the number of sensors seems not the most important element ;-) I hear this comment a lot when defending Tesla's choices, and it's a red herring. The fact that humans only rely on two cameras means nothing. Repeating old comments of mine: You also don't "need" megawatts of power to play top-level Go: humans do it with 100 watts of energy. Yet Google needed who knows how many megwatts of energy to train and run AlphaGo on their massive server farm. Imagine two companies competing to win at Go, and one company had the attitude that megawatts of energy was not necessary for training and prediction, and another company threw the biggest GPU farm they could. The second company just played top-level Go this year. The first company is ~10 years away from a low-energy elite Go computer. Humans implicitly perform SLAM (simulataneous localization and mapping). What do I mean? Look around your room. Close your eyes. Visualize the room. As a human, you've built a rough 3D model of the room. And if you keep your eyes open and walk through the room, that map is pretty fine-grained/detailed too and humans can keep track of where they are in the map. Doing this accurately in moving environments (especially with lots of pure forward motion) with just two cameras is still a wide open research problem. Doing this with LIDAR/GPS/IMU/recorded maps is solved. That's why people use LIDAR. Matching the abilities of human perception is an insanely hard problem. Don't let cute problems like image classification fool you. Why make the problem even harder?
  - taneq 10y ago
    I've been wondering why no self driving systems seem to use DTAM or similar methods. Realtime dense 3D reconstruction and camera localisation on commodity hardware seems perfect for the job.
beachstartup 10y ago
the nyt is always off the mark on topics i know something about, and nothing leads me to believe they are any better about topics i know nothing about.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  That's known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/ https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnes...
  - globuous 10y ago
    I agree with this so much. However, playing the devil's advocate, I guess it depends on the journalist's background. For instance, a poli-sci major writing about a scientific/tech topic will likely get a lot of things wrong. However, the same journalist might likely have a lot of interesting things to write about international politics, because that's what his background is about. that being said, I don't know how much journalist writing about politics have studied it in the past.
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      my gut assumption is that most journalists have journalism or communications degrees, which seems to be corroborated by the data. https://books.google.com/books?id=KUyOAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=degrees+held+by+journalists&source=bl&ots=yWXCzSYUgV&sig=agHimYej06oDWHFn_YjLW4S4E-0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigsK_y5ZHRAhWHsVQKHRUjAWQQ6AEISTAI#v=onepage&q=degrees%20held%20by%20journalists&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=KUyOAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=P... not that it really matters, i have an econ degree but wouldn't call myself an economist by any stretch. the real issue, at least in the US, most news is really just either direct or indirect PR. curiously, i think 'X writer' is the term you are looking for. i.e., someone with a background in technology or fashion that reports on things is more likely to be called themselves a 'tech writer' or 'fashion writer'. it's almost like real experts don't even want to be called journalists. i certainly wouldn't. i've found that you're much more likely to find accurate reporting in industry-specific media rather than general media, because then at least the sources of funding and agenda are pretty clear.
milanove 10y ago
Covering every detail of the technology wasn't really the point of the article. It's a New York Times article. It's meant to give a brief explanation, for non-engineers, as to how this technology works. The target audience don't need to know all the different companies' achievements nor the specifics of the technology used.
Animats 10y ago
On the component front, last March, Continental acquired the automotive LIDAR product line from Advanced Scientific Concepts.[1] This may help. ASC, which is a bunch of physicists and engineers in Santa Barbara, has a very good flash LIDAR. They sell it to DoD and Space-X for about $100K. There's no reason it needs to be that expensive in volume. Continental is the third largest maker of auto parts. If they can get the ASC technology down in price, all those silly rotating things will go away. [1] http://www.continental-automotive.com/www/automotive_de_en/themes/passenger_cars/chassis_safety/adas/surround_view_technologies_en/3dlidar_en.html http://www.continental-automotive.com/www/automotive_de_en/t...
- RealityVoid 10y ago
  A disadvantage of the ASC is the far more limited field of view. I mean, the rotating thingie has 360 FOV (I personally think it's not silly at all), if you want to see that wide with the ASC's, you've got to put more on a vehicle. As a side note, how do you guys find out things like who buys who and whos's got what interesting tech? Especially when they're selling only to suppliers, as is the case here? You just stumble on the information, know someone who knows someone or what?
  - Animats 10y ago
    Once the price comes down, you can have more sensors to get full circle coverage. A typical configuration is long-range sensors aimed forward, with shorter-range sensors aimed to the sides and rear. Volvo uses an arrangement like that, and the sensors aren't very visible. One approach is to devote the top inch or so of the windshield to sensors, and design the car's headliner accordingly. Mobileye puts their camera between the rear view mirror and windshield. There are lots of companies working on low-end LIDAR. ASC's technology is known to work well; it just costs too much because it involves custom sensor ICs built with a nonstandard GaInAs process. Quanergy has been issuing a lot of press releases and getting funding, but they seem to have backed off from their < $100 solid-state sensor and are now selling $7500 rotating machinery like Velodyne's spinning top. There are also some companies touting continuous-wave systems, which usually don't work in sunlight or have much range, but are useful for indoor robots. Fraunhofer is working on a technology for making flash LIDAR sensors using a regular CMOS process.[1] If that works, these things will come down to digital camera prices in volume. Bloomberg has most acquisition information. I picked this up because I've been following ASC since the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge days, when I went to Santa Barbara to see their technology. It was just on an optical bench then, not ready to deploy, but they had the technology with long-term promise. I dragged a VC down there to talk to them, but he didn't see near-term volume application. He was right; only now is there a market in sight for LIDAR units by the millions. High production volume is probably still 5-10 years away. [1] https://www.ims.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ims/de/documents/Downloads/20150928%20GF%202%20-%20CMOS%20Spads%20for%20Lidar%20Applications.pdf https://www.ims.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ims/de/documents/D...

by PinguTS 10y ago

Tempest1981 10y ago

Would you add Nvidia to your list?

PinguTS 10y ago
This year, a colleague made a seminar for the Nvidia people in the UK. I was not personally present. But from what I've been told, they had no glue about automotive. The only thing they have, is a high performance processor designed for embedded use, with which they want to be an automotive supplier. AFAIK, Tesla is the first going to use them. But I believe that currently they have no automotive experience in terms of software. They are building it up, currently.
- rrdharan 10y ago
  Nvidia is a large distributed organization so it's possible if not likely that the relative understanding of this particular UK team is not reflective of the total expertise at the company. They definitely have more than "just a processor": http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-automotive-technology.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-automotive-technology.htm... I have a friend who works in the self driving team at Nvidia in Santa Clara (apologies for the login wall): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/full-stack-engineers-self-driving-cars-john-zedlewski https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/full-stack-engineers-self-dri... They've also got some demos up on YouTube: http://youtu.be/YuyT2SDcYrU http://youtu.be/YuyT2SDcYrU

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Gys 10y ago

I just had a look at the website of the Outlander. Its not mentioned anywhere that it has self driving capabilities. The sensors are used to warn the driver and intervene if a crash is imminent. So can I conclude there is a difference in the (state of) implementation between the hardware (sensors) and the software (self-driving intelligence) ? Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in theory the number of sensors seems not the most important element ;-) Tesla seems number 1 in pushing the frontiers in marketing, so it may also ahead in software, to compensate what it is lacking on the hardware side ?

argonaut 10y ago
> Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in theory the number of sensors seems not the most important element ;-) I hear this comment a lot when defending Tesla's choices, and it's a red herring. The fact that humans only rely on two cameras means nothing. Repeating old comments of mine: You also don't "need" megawatts of power to play top-level Go: humans do it with 100 watts of energy. Yet Google needed who knows how many megwatts of energy to train and run AlphaGo on their massive server farm. Imagine two companies competing to win at Go, and one company had the attitude that megawatts of energy was not necessary for training and prediction, and another company threw the biggest GPU farm they could. The second company just played top-level Go this year. The first company is ~10 years away from a low-energy elite Go computer. Humans implicitly perform SLAM (simulataneous localization and mapping). What do I mean? Look around your room. Close your eyes. Visualize the room. As a human, you've built a rough 3D model of the room. And if you keep your eyes open and walk through the room, that map is pretty fine-grained/detailed too and humans can keep track of where they are in the map. Doing this accurately in moving environments (especially with lots of pure forward motion) with just two cameras is still a wide open research problem. Doing this with LIDAR/GPS/IMU/recorded maps is solved. That's why people use LIDAR. Matching the abilities of human perception is an insanely hard problem. Don't let cute problems like image classification fool you. Why make the problem even harder?
- taneq 10y ago
  I've been wondering why no self driving systems seem to use DTAM or similar methods. Realtime dense 3D reconstruction and camera localisation on commodity hardware seems perfect for the job.

beachstartup 10y ago

the nyt is always off the mark on topics i know something about, and nothing leads me to believe they are any better about topics i know nothing about.

jayjay71 10y ago
That's known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/ https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnes...
- globuous 10y ago
  I agree with this so much. However, playing the devil's advocate, I guess it depends on the journalist's background. For instance, a poli-sci major writing about a scientific/tech topic will likely get a lot of things wrong. However, the same journalist might likely have a lot of interesting things to write about international politics, because that's what his background is about. that being said, I don't know how much journalist writing about politics have studied it in the past.
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    my gut assumption is that most journalists have journalism or communications degrees, which seems to be corroborated by the data. https://books.google.com/books?id=KUyOAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=degrees+held+by+journalists&source=bl&ots=yWXCzSYUgV&sig=agHimYej06oDWHFn_YjLW4S4E-0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigsK_y5ZHRAhWHsVQKHRUjAWQQ6AEISTAI#v=onepage&q=degrees%20held%20by%20journalists&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=KUyOAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=P... not that it really matters, i have an econ degree but wouldn't call myself an economist by any stretch. the real issue, at least in the US, most news is really just either direct or indirect PR. curiously, i think 'X writer' is the term you are looking for. i.e., someone with a background in technology or fashion that reports on things is more likely to be called themselves a 'tech writer' or 'fashion writer'. it's almost like real experts don't even want to be called journalists. i certainly wouldn't. i've found that you're much more likely to find accurate reporting in industry-specific media rather than general media, because then at least the sources of funding and agenda are pretty clear.

milanove 10y ago

Covering every detail of the technology wasn't really the point of the article. It's a New York Times article. It's meant to give a brief explanation, for non-engineers, as to how this technology works. The target audience don't need to know all the different companies' achievements nor the specifics of the technology used.

Animats 10y ago

On the component front, last March, Continental acquired the automotive LIDAR product line from Advanced Scientific Concepts.[1] This may help. ASC, which is a bunch of physicists and engineers in Santa Barbara, has a very good flash LIDAR. They sell it to DoD and Space-X for about $100K. There's no reason it needs to be that expensive in volume. Continental is the third largest maker of auto parts. If they can get the ASC technology down in price, all those silly rotating things will go away. [1] http://www.continental-automotive.com/www/automotive_de_en/themes/passenger_cars/chassis_safety/adas/surround_view_technologies_en/3dlidar_en.html http://www.continental-automotive.com/www/automotive_de_en/t...

RealityVoid 10y ago
A disadvantage of the ASC is the far more limited field of view. I mean, the rotating thingie has 360 FOV (I personally think it's not silly at all), if you want to see that wide with the ASC's, you've got to put more on a vehicle. As a side note, how do you guys find out things like who buys who and whos's got what interesting tech? Especially when they're selling only to suppliers, as is the case here? You just stumble on the information, know someone who knows someone or what?
- Animats 10y ago
  Once the price comes down, you can have more sensors to get full circle coverage. A typical configuration is long-range sensors aimed forward, with shorter-range sensors aimed to the sides and rear. Volvo uses an arrangement like that, and the sensors aren't very visible. One approach is to devote the top inch or so of the windshield to sensors, and design the car's headliner accordingly. Mobileye puts their camera between the rear view mirror and windshield. There are lots of companies working on low-end LIDAR. ASC's technology is known to work well; it just costs too much because it involves custom sensor ICs built with a nonstandard GaInAs process. Quanergy has been issuing a lot of press releases and getting funding, but they seem to have backed off from their < $100 solid-state sensor and are now selling $7500 rotating machinery like Velodyne's spinning top. There are also some companies touting continuous-wave systems, which usually don't work in sunlight or have much range, but are useful for indoor robots. Fraunhofer is working on a technology for making flash LIDAR sensors using a regular CMOS process.[1] If that works, these things will come down to digital camera prices in volume. Bloomberg has most acquisition information. I picked this up because I've been following ASC since the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge days, when I went to Santa Barbara to see their technology. It was just on an optical bench then, not ready to deploy, but they had the technology with long-term promise. I dragged a VC down there to talk to them, but he didn't see near-term volume application. He was right; only now is there a market in sight for LIDAR units by the millions. High production volume is probably still 5-10 years away. [1] https://www.ims.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ims/de/documents/Downloads/20150928%20GF%202%20-%20CMOS%20Spads%20for%20Lidar%20Applications.pdf https://www.ims.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ims/de/documents/D...