7 ms·

Sorry, I kinda tuned out when you mentioned lidar like it's some requirement for autonomous driving. Lidar is AMAZING for giving press demos on sunny days. For

by pkulak 9y ago

Sorry, I kinda tuned out when you mentioned lidar like it's some requirement for autonomous driving. Lidar is AMAZING for giving press demos on sunny days. For the real world with rain, snow, leaves, plastic bags, etc? Useless. The future is radar + cameras + a LOT of software blood, sweat and tears.

ckastner 9y ago
> The future is radar + cameras + a LOT of software ... all of which Waymo's solution also has, in addition to LIDAR.
freyir 9y ago
That's like saying our eyes are useless because we can't see in the dark.
- loa_in_ 9y ago
  You can't really drive in the dark, can you? What if it gets dark for 1 second on a cliffside turn?
  - Capt-RogerOver 9y ago
    It's pretty obvious that a self-driving camera-based software would take advantage of headlights on a car, just like a human does? So it never has to drive in full darkness.
    - PKop 9y ago
      You missed the analogy: Darkness is to eyesight as inclement weather/obstacles is to LIDAR
      - JshWright 9y ago
        What's the point of that analogy? Darkness can be fixed with lights on the vehicle itself. Inclement weather is entirely outside the control of the vehicle.
        vsl 9y ago
        LIDAR doesn't work in inclement weather, that's the point.
      - sqeaky 9y ago
        Our eyes also come with our brains packed full of fancy algorithms to extract value from minimal information. I am not sure what software does with noise from a lidar sensor but I have seen data from other noisy sensors and they are often useless.
    - kamaal 9y ago
      Actually you will need more than a camera input, may be even a sound input. In darkness it helps if you can hear the vehicles coming close.
      - cr0sh 9y ago
        > may be even a sound input Bingo. When we drive a vehicle, we use so much more than just our eyes to sense the environment, and hearing plays a very large part. I believe that it is something that warrants research for self-driving vehicle usage; I don't know if anyone has done such research, but I haven't seen any papers on it yet. If not, it seems like an underappreciated sensor aspect that could potentially greatly augment self-driving vehicle capabilities, and would be a very simple and cheap sensor to add to a vehicle as well. EDIT: Found this recent article... https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604272/a-sense-of-hearing-could-make-cars-safer-and-more-reliable/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604272/a-sense-of-hearing... While it seems to be focused mainly on diagnosing issues with vehicles before they become larger problems, there are hints about it being used for self-driving tasks as well.
        Diederich 9y ago
        I think you're implying that deaf drivers are fundamentally less safe than hearing drivers. Studies have been highly mixed: http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/deaf-drivers.htm http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/deaf-drivers.htm I would be comfortable saying that the advantages a deaf, many eyed, always alert self driving system would far outweigh the safety of a hearing, two eyed and sometimes alert human driver.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Actually in the dark you often drive as a leap of faith in the state of the road. I.e. with very little visibility on what can come from the side of the road (no light) or after a turn. We shouldn't. But we do.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Yes, but it will cause you to slow down. Or at least, it should. As soon as you have less than your stopping distance of space in front of the car you are going too fast.
      - cm2187 9y ago
        Again we probably should but we don't always. In fact even in daylight you drive a lot as a leap of faith. When the traffic light is green for you at a crossing and you see a car arriving on the side, you assume that you have the priority, that the car will stop and you go ahead without adjusting your speed to the coming car. This is a leap of faith in the fact that all other cars will follow the rules.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    There's always the option to enable the headlights in such a case. LEDs switch on way faster than incandescent bulbs. And if they're needed at all - a camera has way more flexibility in brightness input range than a human eye. A car like a Tesla has also highest-quality maps and GPS sensors - these alone are way better than what you get in your smartphone and are enough to keep the car from going over the cliff.
- kamaal 9y ago
  Correct, eyes in fact are useless if you can't see in the dark. Now imagine walking on top of a sky scraper in pitch darkness. Yes your eyes work in light, but in this case you will likely fall to death.
- espadrine 9y ago
  Our eyes are not LIDAR, though, and we can drive pretty well. In fact, the reason we have crashes is NOT our eyes’ lack of distance detection through laser return timing — having two eyes is enough for distance appreciation. We have crashes because of attention deficit instead. At this point, there is no reason to believe that a machine can't achieve and outperform a human on a driving task given the same inputs. Sure, human eyes have 5 million cone cells and 1080p feeds only have 2 million pixels, but 4K has 9 million, and more importantly, that level of precision is unnecessary for regular driving. And Tesla doesn’t even bet just on the visible spectrum; it also relies on radar.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    The trick is in our wetware. What the brain does with visual input is not just trivial object recognition. It relies on a complex internal model of the world to both augment the object recognition and to sometimes discard the visual data as invalid. So sure, theoretically cameras would be enough. But we're not yet there with software, we can't use the camera input well enough. So if you can side-step the need for not-yet-invented ML methods by simply adding a LIDAR to a sensor suite, then it's an obvious way to go. Compare with powered flight: we didn't get very far by trying to copy the way birds do it. The trick is in the super-light materials birds are made of, and the energy efficiency of their organisms. We only succeeded at powered flight when we brute-forced it by strapping a gasoline engine onto a bunch of wooden planks.
    - espadrine 9y ago
      > It relies on a complex internal model of the world to both augment the object recognition and to sometimes discard the visual data as invalid. That in particular is what makes the hiring fascinating. This problem is Andrej Karpathy’s expertise[0]. His CNN/RNN designs have reached comfortable results, in particular showcasing the ability to identify elements of a source image, and the relationship between different parts of the image. The speed at which those techniques improve is also stunning. I didn’t expect CNNs to solve Go and image captioning so fast, but here we are! I think the principles are already there; a few tweaks and a careful design is all it takes to beat the average driver. [0]: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf
- coldtea 9y ago
  Not really. Self driving cars should be able to drive in all of those conditions (and one condition might even quickly turn into another, e.g. sunny into rain). If a technology only helps with some of the cases (e.g. fair weather) and does not work for the others, then there are two cases: (a) A single replacement technology will be found that works in 100% of cases. or: (b) The technology will only be used on the cases it works well, and the other cases will be handled by some alternative technology equally only suited to them. In the case of (a), Lidar is indeed useless (or at best, only used as a supplementary technology in favourable conditions). And I fail to see how (b) can be the case -- that is, how there can be another technology that will solve the rain/snow/night driving problem, but which cannot also outperform/replace Lidar for fair weather driving.
  - freyir 9y ago
    > then there are two cases: Isn't it interesting that we have five senses, when we could just have one that works in 100% of the cases? A third option is a system based on multi-sensory inputs. Several inputs that are just marginal on their own can provide good performance when combined.
kamaal 9y ago
I will take your self driving car seriously if you can drive it in all conditions in India. Until then its just an attempt to make something that breaks at the next unanticipated exception.
- fooker 9y ago
  Human beings can not drive in all conditions in India. Just to get our car out of the garage, I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road. Also: bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws(in human pulled, CNG and electric varieties!)and pedestrians mixed in traffic everywhere.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    >>I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road. This is a very practical test case for a car on a road. Not just in India but anywhere in the world. Instead of N vegetable vendors you could have N traffic cops. How do you manage the human interaction part in the self driving car?
  - owenversteeg 9y ago
    Yep, I have a feeling that for driving in India/Iran/Pakistan/Bangladesh you're going to need a strong AI to negotiate with the street vendors. In Iran I even had a particularly... enthusiastic flower seller actually maneuver himself to make it even harder to drive away. Not to take away from anyone's work in this area, but I have no idea how long it'll take to go from "works in America" to "works in India". In many countries the safest option (to evade disaster) can occasionally be "floor it and break the speed limit" to get away from x dangerous thing. I'm not sure if that's something that Google is willing to write into an AI.
    - manmal 9y ago
      This will require something like Rick's (from Rick and Morty) car/spaceship.
- bjpirt 9y ago
LMYahooTFY 9y ago
Isn't Tesla parterned with Nvidia to solve the computation side of things? I thought I remembered Nvidia presenting some additional stuff about it in their Tech demo recently.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  I know Karpathy wasn't involved in the "end-to-end" research paper Nvidia published - but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't involved somehow, and if anyone could push the CNN tech in that paper further it just might be Karpathy.
PeterisP 9y ago
An autonomous driving feature that you can use on most days but not all of them is still very useful and would have a good market. It's not going to rain or snow today, and if it would, then I can take the wheel myself.

by pkulak 9y ago

ckastner 9y ago

> The future is radar + cameras + a LOT of software ... all of which Waymo's solution also has, in addition to LIDAR.

freyir 9y ago

That's like saying our eyes are useless because we can't see in the dark.

loa_in_ 9y ago
You can't really drive in the dark, can you? What if it gets dark for 1 second on a cliffside turn?
- Capt-RogerOver 9y ago
  It's pretty obvious that a self-driving camera-based software would take advantage of headlights on a car, just like a human does? So it never has to drive in full darkness.
  - PKop 9y ago
    You missed the analogy: Darkness is to eyesight as inclement weather/obstacles is to LIDAR
    - JshWright 9y ago
      What's the point of that analogy? Darkness can be fixed with lights on the vehicle itself. Inclement weather is entirely outside the control of the vehicle.
      - vsl 9y ago
        LIDAR doesn't work in inclement weather, that's the point.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      Our eyes also come with our brains packed full of fancy algorithms to extract value from minimal information. I am not sure what software does with noise from a lidar sensor but I have seen data from other noisy sensors and they are often useless.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    Actually you will need more than a camera input, may be even a sound input. In darkness it helps if you can hear the vehicles coming close.
    - cr0sh 9y ago
      > may be even a sound input Bingo. When we drive a vehicle, we use so much more than just our eyes to sense the environment, and hearing plays a very large part. I believe that it is something that warrants research for self-driving vehicle usage; I don't know if anyone has done such research, but I haven't seen any papers on it yet. If not, it seems like an underappreciated sensor aspect that could potentially greatly augment self-driving vehicle capabilities, and would be a very simple and cheap sensor to add to a vehicle as well. EDIT: Found this recent article... https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604272/a-sense-of-hearing-could-make-cars-safer-and-more-reliable/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604272/a-sense-of-hearing... While it seems to be focused mainly on diagnosing issues with vehicles before they become larger problems, there are hints about it being used for self-driving tasks as well.
      - Diederich 9y ago
        I think you're implying that deaf drivers are fundamentally less safe than hearing drivers. Studies have been highly mixed: http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/deaf-drivers.htm http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/deaf-drivers.htm I would be comfortable saying that the advantages a deaf, many eyed, always alert self driving system would far outweigh the safety of a hearing, two eyed and sometimes alert human driver.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Actually in the dark you often drive as a leap of faith in the state of the road. I.e. with very little visibility on what can come from the side of the road (no light) or after a turn. We shouldn't. But we do.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Yes, but it will cause you to slow down. Or at least, it should. As soon as you have less than your stopping distance of space in front of the car you are going too fast.
    - cm2187 9y ago
      Again we probably should but we don't always. In fact even in daylight you drive a lot as a leap of faith. When the traffic light is green for you at a crossing and you see a car arriving on the side, you assume that you have the priority, that the car will stop and you go ahead without adjusting your speed to the coming car. This is a leap of faith in the fact that all other cars will follow the rules.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  There's always the option to enable the headlights in such a case. LEDs switch on way faster than incandescent bulbs. And if they're needed at all - a camera has way more flexibility in brightness input range than a human eye. A car like a Tesla has also highest-quality maps and GPS sensors - these alone are way better than what you get in your smartphone and are enough to keep the car from going over the cliff.
kamaal 9y ago
Correct, eyes in fact are useless if you can't see in the dark. Now imagine walking on top of a sky scraper in pitch darkness. Yes your eyes work in light, but in this case you will likely fall to death.
espadrine 9y ago
Our eyes are not LIDAR, though, and we can drive pretty well. In fact, the reason we have crashes is NOT our eyes’ lack of distance detection through laser return timing — having two eyes is enough for distance appreciation. We have crashes because of attention deficit instead. At this point, there is no reason to believe that a machine can't achieve and outperform a human on a driving task given the same inputs. Sure, human eyes have 5 million cone cells and 1080p feeds only have 2 million pixels, but 4K has 9 million, and more importantly, that level of precision is unnecessary for regular driving. And Tesla doesn’t even bet just on the visible spectrum; it also relies on radar.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  The trick is in our wetware. What the brain does with visual input is not just trivial object recognition. It relies on a complex internal model of the world to both augment the object recognition and to sometimes discard the visual data as invalid. So sure, theoretically cameras would be enough. But we're not yet there with software, we can't use the camera input well enough. So if you can side-step the need for not-yet-invented ML methods by simply adding a LIDAR to a sensor suite, then it's an obvious way to go. Compare with powered flight: we didn't get very far by trying to copy the way birds do it. The trick is in the super-light materials birds are made of, and the energy efficiency of their organisms. We only succeeded at powered flight when we brute-forced it by strapping a gasoline engine onto a bunch of wooden planks.
  - espadrine 9y ago
    > It relies on a complex internal model of the world to both augment the object recognition and to sometimes discard the visual data as invalid. That in particular is what makes the hiring fascinating. This problem is Andrej Karpathy’s expertise[0]. His CNN/RNN designs have reached comfortable results, in particular showcasing the ability to identify elements of a source image, and the relationship between different parts of the image. The speed at which those techniques improve is also stunning. I didn’t expect CNNs to solve Go and image captioning so fast, but here we are! I think the principles are already there; a few tweaks and a careful design is all it takes to beat the average driver. [0]: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf
coldtea 9y ago
Not really. Self driving cars should be able to drive in all of those conditions (and one condition might even quickly turn into another, e.g. sunny into rain). If a technology only helps with some of the cases (e.g. fair weather) and does not work for the others, then there are two cases: (a) A single replacement technology will be found that works in 100% of cases. or: (b) The technology will only be used on the cases it works well, and the other cases will be handled by some alternative technology equally only suited to them. In the case of (a), Lidar is indeed useless (or at best, only used as a supplementary technology in favourable conditions). And I fail to see how (b) can be the case -- that is, how there can be another technology that will solve the rain/snow/night driving problem, but which cannot also outperform/replace Lidar for fair weather driving.
- freyir 9y ago
  > then there are two cases: Isn't it interesting that we have five senses, when we could just have one that works in 100% of the cases? A third option is a system based on multi-sensory inputs. Several inputs that are just marginal on their own can provide good performance when combined.

kamaal 9y ago

I will take your self driving car seriously if you can drive it in all conditions in India. Until then its just an attempt to make something that breaks at the next unanticipated exception.

fooker 9y ago
Human beings can not drive in all conditions in India. Just to get our car out of the garage, I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road. Also: bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws(in human pulled, CNG and electric varieties!)and pedestrians mixed in traffic everywhere.
- kamaal 9y ago
  >>I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road. This is a very practical test case for a car on a road. Not just in India but anywhere in the world. Instead of N vegetable vendors you could have N traffic cops. How do you manage the human interaction part in the self driving car?
- owenversteeg 9y ago
  Yep, I have a feeling that for driving in India/Iran/Pakistan/Bangladesh you're going to need a strong AI to negotiate with the street vendors. In Iran I even had a particularly... enthusiastic flower seller actually maneuver himself to make it even harder to drive away. Not to take away from anyone's work in this area, but I have no idea how long it'll take to go from "works in America" to "works in India". In many countries the safest option (to evade disaster) can occasionally be "floor it and break the speed limit" to get away from x dangerous thing. I'm not sure if that's something that Google is willing to write into an AI.
  - manmal 9y ago
    This will require something like Rick's (from Rick and Morty) car/spaceship.
bjpirt 9y ago

LMYahooTFY 9y ago

Isn't Tesla parterned with Nvidia to solve the computation side of things? I thought I remembered Nvidia presenting some additional stuff about it in their Tech demo recently.

cr0sh 9y ago
I know Karpathy wasn't involved in the "end-to-end" research paper Nvidia published - but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't involved somehow, and if anyone could push the CNN tech in that paper further it just might be Karpathy.

PeterisP 9y ago

An autonomous driving feature that you can use on most days but not all of them is still very useful and would have a good market. It's not going to rain or snow today, and if it would, then I can take the wheel myself.