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Anyone care to explain the technological situation of Cruise? I feel like I read mix messages all the time about them. Some say that Cruise is just putting up s

Anyone care to explain the technological situation of Cruise? I feel like I read mix messages all the time about them. Some say that Cruise is just putting up smoke and mirrors while others make it seem like they're the closest thing to level 4/5 autonomy compared to anyone else. I'm super curious where they actually stand in terms of technology.

maxerickson 9y ago
The problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear picture of the actual state of each implementation. The blog post linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15435063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15435063 sure makes it sound like they are making serious progress on the hard problems.
- Animats 9y ago
  The problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear picture of the actual state of each implementation. The CA DMV autonomous vehicle reports of accidents and disconnects are the closest thing available to objective data right now. Waymo is way ahead on disconnects. Cruise is getting rear-ended a lot lately. Google used to get that a lot, but they seem to have gotten past that. (The main compatibility problem with autonomous vehicles so far is being rear-ended. The typical situation is that the autonomous vehicle advances into an intersection, detects some good reason to stop like cross-traffic previously occluded, stops, and gets rear-ended. The accel/decel profile for entering occluded situations may have to be made more compatible with human behavior to get the human drivers behind to behave properly. This isn't a big problem; damage in those collisions is very low.)
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Heh, that would be inside information would it not? If nothing else, the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit shows how hotly contested self driving technology is, and LIDAR technology in particular. I've built a number of mobile robots over the years, and watched many others build them as well as part of a robotics club. One truism is that most robotics problems are pretty easy given ideal sensors and sensors for every variable :-). When I started building robots I quickly understood that 'sensor fusion' is more about trying to tease reality out of a very noisy cloud of data than it is AI or fancy software. I spent a month trying to get a robot to go precisely straight so that my dead reckoning algorithm would work.
- syntaxing 9y ago
  True, it would be pretty awesome if Cruise had some of their code open sourced to have a peek at their technology. I was looking at Google's Cartographer and it's pretty neat to see some of their SLAM work. It would be nice to see something equivalent from Cruise that shows what they're capable of without revealing all of their tricks.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    I don't disagree, but you did see where Levandowski got $120 MILLION DOLLAR BONUS from Google right? There are literally billions of dollars of investment risk riding on the outcome of self driving coding and so nobody in a 'company' context would be likely to be motivated to share anything at all about how they were going about it. It would be like asking folks who wrote lottery software to open source their PRNG implementation so that people could see how cool their technology was :-). The brief upside of 'coolness' is massively outweighed by the major downside of 'used this against you and cost you millions.' right?
tmpnam7280557 9y ago
We (Cruise Automation) are in serious trouble on the software side of things.
tmpnam7280557- 9y ago
We (Cruise Automation) are in serious trouble on the software side of things. GM Super Cruise shipped, but despite the name, Cruise Automation made essentially no contribution. We're not going to be shipping anything.

maxerickson 9y ago

The problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear picture of the actual state of each implementation. The blog post linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15435063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15435063 sure makes it sound like they are making serious progress on the hard problems.

Animats 9y ago
The problem is that outsiders aren't going to have a clear picture of the actual state of each implementation. The CA DMV autonomous vehicle reports of accidents and disconnects are the closest thing available to objective data right now. Waymo is way ahead on disconnects. Cruise is getting rear-ended a lot lately. Google used to get that a lot, but they seem to have gotten past that. (The main compatibility problem with autonomous vehicles so far is being rear-ended. The typical situation is that the autonomous vehicle advances into an intersection, detects some good reason to stop like cross-traffic previously occluded, stops, and gets rear-ended. The accel/decel profile for entering occluded situations may have to be made more compatible with human behavior to get the human drivers behind to behave properly. This isn't a big problem; damage in those collisions is very low.)

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Heh, that would be inside information would it not? If nothing else, the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit shows how hotly contested self driving technology is, and LIDAR technology in particular. I've built a number of mobile robots over the years, and watched many others build them as well as part of a robotics club. One truism is that most robotics problems are pretty easy given ideal sensors and sensors for every variable :-). When I started building robots I quickly understood that 'sensor fusion' is more about trying to tease reality out of a very noisy cloud of data than it is AI or fancy software. I spent a month trying to get a robot to go precisely straight so that my dead reckoning algorithm would work.

syntaxing 9y ago
True, it would be pretty awesome if Cruise had some of their code open sourced to have a peek at their technology. I was looking at Google's Cartographer and it's pretty neat to see some of their SLAM work. It would be nice to see something equivalent from Cruise that shows what they're capable of without revealing all of their tricks.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  I don't disagree, but you did see where Levandowski got $120 MILLION DOLLAR BONUS from Google right? There are literally billions of dollars of investment risk riding on the outcome of self driving coding and so nobody in a 'company' context would be likely to be motivated to share anything at all about how they were going about it. It would be like asking folks who wrote lottery software to open source their PRNG implementation so that people could see how cool their technology was :-). The brief upside of 'coolness' is massively outweighed by the major downside of 'used this against you and cost you millions.' right?

tmpnam7280557 9y ago

We (Cruise Automation) are in serious trouble on the software side of things.

tmpnam7280557- 9y ago

We (Cruise Automation) are in serious trouble on the software side of things. GM Super Cruise shipped, but despite the name, Cruise Automation made essentially no contribution. We're not going to be shipping anything.