14 ms·
Street View camera rigs do much more than just take photos
- alufers 6y agoI wonder if all the tech in those cars requires modifications to the vehicle itself, like a larger alternator to satisfy the power requirements or reinforced pillars to support the weight of the hardware. It'd be cool to hear from somebody who knows how they equip those cars.
- barbegal 6y agoThose modifications seem unlikely, You can't easily reinforce pillars in a car and they are designed to support the full weight of the car in a roll-over situation so a few 10s of kgs of equipment on the roof make little difference. Similarly, a typical alternator is rated to 2kW so far above the required power of a few LIDAR, camera and computing devices. Having said that, early vehicles did have heavy duty alternators installed (although they may have confused these with heavy duty inverters which are needed) and modified suspension components [1] [1] https://pub-tools-public-publication-data.storage.googleapis.com/pdf/36899.pdf https://pub-tools-public-publication-data.storage.googleapis...
- jeffbee 6y agoThe linked history of street view does mention that the first instance had an alternator “from a fire truck”.
- tyingq 6y agoFwiw, direct fit high-amp alternators are available for most cars. And they are in the same ballpark of ~200 amps, and high output at idle as a "fire truck alternator". So it's a fairly cheap modification just to swap out the stock alternator. ~$500 or less.
- Scoundreller 6y agoCar choice/ÉCU programming may come into play here. I thought cars were “intelligent” enough to not charge while idle or warming up because that’s when emissions and inefficiency are highest.
- jeffbee 6y agoI doubt that was the case for the depicted 1992 Chevrolet Astro Van.
- tyingq 6y agoI think it should "just work". The added load would drive voltage down, so the inputs the ECU gets continue to send the right message. So long as the alternator has enough capacity to meet the demand...
- MertsA 6y agoYeah if a manufacturer wanted to hold off on drawing a higher load to recharge the battery until after the car was warmed up they would just do that by lowering the setpoint. If you try and draw higher current from it it would still meet that lower setpoint.
- kube-system 6y agoA typical alternator for a small car is rated for something like 60-120 amps, which at a typical 14v output, is 0.8 to 1.7 kW. 2kW falls into more of a light truck or high-output category.
- dsfyu404ed 6y agoA modern car will run into suspension wear/longevity problems long before the pillars care about how much weight you put on them. This hardware is tens, maybe a couple hundred pounds. Roofs can support thousands without deformation. The vehicle will suffer increased tire/suspension wear and "bad to the point of it being hard to justify not using a bigger vehicle" handling long before the structure is in any way affected. They stack cars on cars at many junkyards and the lower cars are just fine save some scratches and dents to the roof skin.
- t0mas88 6y agoThere are a lot of companies that do this type of vehicle modification for you. It's common for a lot of professional-use vehicles also in construction / utility network maintenance etc. As others said, the roof is fine. The suspension is quite easy to adjust a bit for the extra weight and that helps also in stability due to the weight being high-up. For vehicles commonly used in these kinds of things there are higher rated alternators and batteries that are drop-in replacements for the standard one.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> that helps also in stability due to the weight being high-up I don't understand that. Isn't weight high-up shifting the center of mass upwards, making the vehicle less stable? EDIT: jstanley, olex: that makes sense, thanks!
- jstanley 6y agoI think it means the suspension adjustments help in stability, which is helpful because the weight is high up.
- olex 6y agoI think that OP wanted to express that stiffer suspension is needed for extra weight, and the same stiffness also helps keep the vehicle stable despite a higher center of mass.
- t0mas88 6y agoThanks, yes that's what I meant. You want less body roll if your center of gravity is higher, so that requires stiffer suspension and stiffer anti-roll bars to keep the vehicle more level (at the expense of some comfort).
- shadowgovt 6y agoI don't know about the street view cars, but the waymo vehicles have cooling and power run through the pillars to the camera, because the camera has to be cooled. This information was disseminated to fire departments so that if rescuers have to cut somebody out of one of waymo's cars, they don't accidentally cut through a pressurized coolant line.
- dexen 6y agoCars are typically specced to handle 75kg (~165lb) of baggage on roof rack without breaking a sweat. Think carrying skies + personal gear on a trip across Europe. And if you are concerned about momentum, please note it's common to carry two bicycles on a roof rack; with speeds of 100km/h+ they generate substantial forces due to drag and in case of cornering. I doubt the whole camera+lidar roof package is anywhere near close; best guess around 10kg (~22lb)
- Shivetya 6y ago3 times the weight of the car, 1.5x for large vehicles, is a US requirement to how much the roof can support, this is part of protecting occupants during a roll over; this was from 2010 and may have new requirements[0][1] [0]https://www.martindale.com/antitrust-trade-regulation-law/article_Meyer-Suozzi-English-Klein-PC_930250.htm https://www.martindale.com/antitrust-trade-regulation-law/ar... [1]https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2010/04/nhtsa-declines-to-revisit-roof-crush-standard/index.htm https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2010/04/nhtsa-decli...
- aidenn0 6y agoThat's a static load; the actual amount of luggage a car is rated for carrying on the roof is much less (usually somewhere in the mid 100s for a passenger vehicle).
- Spooky23 6y agoUsually any vehicle mods are done to meet bare minimum standards. A lot of the mapping cars I see are hybrids, they probably get some lower benefit there. I would assume they run these things for a fixed period and toss them to avoid opex. I’ve had exposure to lots of commercial customized vehicles, and unless it’s required by law or the use case, not an extra dime is spent.
- Peer_to_Peer 6y agoI design mobile mapping vehicles for a different company, so while I can't answer specifically about the Street View system, I might be able to provide some insight. Our smallest portable system weighs around 25lbs and can mount to just about any vehicle using strong magnets or standard roof rack. It pulls less than 10 amps so it can be powered through a standard cigarette lighter outlet or wired directly to the vehicle's battery. Our largest system weighs many hundreds of pounds and mounts on one specific vehicle in as many reinforced locations as possible. We utilize factory bolt holes on the roof, make custom brackets to support cantilevered weight off the back, and make modifications to the roof up front to support even more weight. The system typically pulls 40-50 amps however, the vehicle comes with a high output alternator and dual battery system from the factory so we don't need to upgrade them. Based on the components of the current Street View system, a roof rack is sufficient to support it's weight. I'm guessing it pulls around 20 amps so it likely has a direct connection to the vehicles battery, but wouldn't require an alternator upgrade.
- alufers 6y agoThanks for the valuable insight, 50 amps look like the sort of current you would see while a car's starter motor is running. Out of curiosity, do you shut down the equipment automatically when the engine is killed? I imagine drawing so much current may interfere with the starter motor.
- steerablesafe 6y agoRelevant xkcd (alt text): https://xkcd.com/1204/ https://xkcd.com/1204/
- lalos 6y agoThey have been previously used to collect SSID names and other WiFi network metadata. See https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
- ForHackernews 6y agoNot just metadata: Wasn't the controversy that they were sniffing data packets, too?
- uptown 6y agoYup: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
- shadowgovt 6y agoYes, the firmware had been configured for open logging and was slurping the packets and dumping them to a debug file.
- barbegal 6y agoYes but (if we believe they are telling the truth) this was only done accidentally and they only intended to sniff the SSIDs. https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collec...
- jetrink 6y agoI remember the outrage that this revelation generated and I am still stumped by it. First, the probability that a Google car happens to capture sensitive information as it drives past your residence once per year is basically zero. Even if it did, it would still require detective work to correlate it to you specifically. Second, if you are worried about people recording data broadcast by your WiFi router, it's up to you to secure your network. I would be much more concerned about a neighbor snooping on my traffic. What did people imagine that Google was doing with these random snippets of data?
- mavhc 6y agoI assume they're using them to make global HD maps for Waymo too
- tyingq 6y agoI wonder what the total "BOM" cost per street view vehicle is.
- jeffbee 6y ago$20k-$60k. https://www.trekview.org/blog/2019/history-of-google-street-view-cameras/ https://www.trekview.org/blog/2019/history-of-google-street-...
- tyingq 6y agoInteresting, though that seems to be the camera system cost only.
- panoramas4good 6y agoCorrect. I would hazard a guess, after accounting for discounts (in 2012, there were 250 GSV cars on the road [1]), that the camera kit (inc. sensors) could easily cost > $50k. The list price of the the LIDAR scanner used is $8k alone (the cars use 2). [1] https://petapixel.com/2012/10/15/a-glimpse-of-googles-fleet-of-camera-equipped-street-view-cars/ https://petapixel.com/2012/10/15/a-glimpse-of-googles-fleet-...
- barell 6y agoIt says DGPS (Digital Global Positioning System) is it the same as Differential GPS?
- Someone1234 6y agoThe article just got it wrong, their source is about Differential and they put "Digital" instead.
- panoramas4good 6y agoAuthor here. That was a typo. Should read Differential GPS. Now corrected. Thank you!
- yters 6y agoIf the CIA was driving down US streets photographing, scanning and sniffing everything, I think we'd have a different reaction. At least with Google we know all the data is in good hands.
- jrockway 6y agoUltimately, the Constitution protects your right to photograph public places. Street View is keeping that freedom alive by exercising the right; if someone wanted to make it illegal and the law was on their side, they could make plenty of money by going after Apple and Google. That protects us ordinary folks. A couple years ago I got yelled at for taking this picture: https://petapixel.com/2016/08/11/dont-think-port-authority-wants-see-photo/ https://petapixel.com/2016/08/11/dont-think-port-authority-w... I told the guy that Google has plenty of pictures of the Holland Tunnel and that if it were so illegal, the lawyers probably would be going after them. They aren't, which is pretty telling as to where they think the law actually is.
- chillingeffect 6y agoThis legality deserves reconsideration in today's technology: To an individual taking pictures, the public is no great resource and can not be significantly used as a source of asymmetric power. An individual's "public" is a small sphere around them as far as an affordable camera can see. To nation-states and large corporations, the "public" becomes virtually all of the spheres around every individual. It can be combined into a database which is no longer accessible to the individuals in the database, making it no longer public. It can then be used asymmetrically by the organizations against individuals. For example, mass-gathered public real estate information can be pitted against individual buyers and sellers of their homes. It biases the market toward those who can collect the most information using capital an individual with a single camera could never collect. In the case of google streetview, a monopoly has been formed. When our country was formed, such asymmetric power was scarcely imaginable. We need to reconsider whether mass gathering of information should be allowed.
- user_0x 6y ago
- freefriedrice 6y agoThe camera acronym is "SICK"? As a sales rep, that would be a tough one to pitch. Like Moland Springs water.
- detaro 6y agoNo, that's the name of the company making them, named after the last name of the founder.
- freefriedrice 6y agoWell now I feel like a dolt.
- rsanek 6y agoThis should have a label of (2019) -- article is nearly 5 months old now.
- lonk 6y ago...accidentally, in some cases collecting network data packets...
- ethanbond 6y agoAs I note above, Google hired a wardriving expert onto Street View. Assess for yourself how accidental you believe that collection to be.
- jb775 6y ago"Accidentally" collected network packets (including traffic on the network, websites being visited, etc)..... whoops!
- shadowgovt 6y agoTBF to Google, that's something anyone can do. If a person really doesn't want their activities known, it's incumbent upon the person to not do those activities over an unsecured wifi network. That's the radio equivalent of shouting your browsing history in public. (This is one of the oldest privacy arguments and extends outside the radio spectrum. Philosophically, if you stand naked at your own bay window and I walk by on the street and chance to spy your genitals, and the fact they were seen bothers you, who screwed up here?)
- jb775 6y agoWell if I'm walking up to everyone's bay window taking nude pics of them, then saving the pics to a server that would eventually be linked up with their personal accounts....I certainly wouldn't claim it to be an "accident".
- shadowgovt 6y agoThat's true! But it in no way describes what Google did with the raw packets they sniffed. A better analogy for what Google did was drive around, snap pics of everything, and realize they had some photos of nude people in the debug folder. (It's a better analogy for a couple reasons, one of them being that's actually a problem they continue to have to deal with in the non-debug folder. ;) I know they've automated the process of blurring faces; I wonder if they also have a nude body detection ML algorithm to identify keyframes of images taken that shouldn't make it through the quality-control hoppers to end up in Streetview?)
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoSo they say. Giving their track record, I don't see any reason to trust them about it.
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoThis is genuinely creepy for that wifi names can lead to finding the person's name and thus you have found to a few minorities their location, and name. And also for local businesses you can now track and use that data forgood or bad.
- SeanFerree 6y agoVery cool!
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoHey that main website is cool! [1] I literally just ordered a GoPro Fusion last night so that I can create 3D captures of hiking trails using photogrammetry. I will then use the 3D trail models for reinforcement learning for my off road robot. [2] The basic pipeline is images to Meshroom (perhaps with pre-processing since Meshroom doesn't seem to support 360 cameras), then instant-meshes to reduce the poly count of the mesh, Blender to map the texture on to the new low poly mesh, save as .glb file in Blender, then open in habitat-sim for machine learning. Blender was the hardest part to learn, but tutorials on youtube walk through the whole process. Interestingly the GoPro Fusion is pretty cheap now, as GoPro has a new model which is apparently not much of an improvement. So while the new model is $499, the Fusion is currently $179 on Amazon. Previously I have tried photogrammetry of trails with cell phone video. It works really well but the narrow field of view of the cell phone camera compared to the whole 360 degree scene means the resulting 3D reconstruction has lots of holes, and the model is only well reconstructed immediately around the trail - wider terrain is missed. The 360 camera captures all angles, front and back, sides and top. It should make for some fun immersive video to throw on youtube but it will also be great for photogrammetry. I found this research paper [3] which supports my thinking that 360 cameras are useful for photogrammetry. [1] https://www.trekview.org/trek-pack/ https://www.trekview.org/trek-pack/ [2] https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/ https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/ [3] https://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci.net/XLII-2/69/2018/isprs-archives-XLII-2-69-2018.pdf https://www.int-arch-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci....
- panoramas4good 6y agoThanks! Would love to hear more about your project. Sounds very cool. We're working on some computer vision problems (we plan to open-source soon). Perhaps there's an opportunity to collaborate? https://www.trekview.org/greenhouse/ https://www.trekview.org/greenhouse/ Drop me an email dgreenwood at trekview dot org.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoThey that looks like something I want to do too! I like the idea of my robot being able to identify all the native plants around it. My mom is a landscape designer and she knows the latin names for almost every plant we come across, so it's something I want to support in my robot. I'd love to collaborate! I will email you. :)