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1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just fee
by Robotbeat 6y ago
1) Fiducials. This makes it so incredibly easy to map the physical world to the digital world, and vice versa. I guess it’s not under the radar, but it just feels like such a superpower. Sub pixel accurate 6dof tracking & unique identification for anything you want. It’s like a cheat code for computer vision as it makes the whole problem trivial. I half expect fiducials on all public streets within 10 years. On every Consumer product. All over the place, and some of them maybe invisible.
2) Custom silicon. Open source tools & decentralization of fab tech (by countries not wanting to be subject to international trade problems... as well as Moore’s Law slowing) are gonna make this like making a PCB.
3) Electric airplanes. With wings. “Drones” as VTVL electric helicopters have been big for a decade, but there are physical limitations to that approach. if you want to see the future, look at drone delivery in Rwanda by Zipline. But also, I think we’ll see passenger electric flight start small and from underserved regional airports sooner than you think, doing routes and speeds comparable to High Speed Rail (and with comparable efficiency) but much more granular and without massive infrastructure.
4) Small tunnels by The Boring Company and probably competitor companies with similar ideas. When you can build tunnels for one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than today, cheaper than an urban surface lane, then why NOT put it underground? And they’ll be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London Underground uses. Gets lot of hate from the Twitter Urbanist crowd, but what TBC has done for tunneling cost (on the order of $10 million per mile) is insanely important for how we think about infrastructure in the US.
5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight.
6) Geoengineering. I’m not happy about it, but it’s insanely cheap so... it’ll probably happen.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> Fiducials If you mean what I think you mean (tiny marks on everything that encode information to help computers figure out what they're looking at), I agree. In particular, I've long been waiting for someone in self-driving sphere to give up on trying to crack the problem with just imaging the world as it is. In a saner world, countries would already be standardizing machine-readable markers on roads and posts and traffic signs. I'm still hoping someone will wake up and make use of this "cheat code".
- jimhefferon 6y agoForgive me, genuine question. What happens when it snows?
- NotPavlovsDog 6y agomachine readable can involve more than visible spectrum. Radar and light beam reflectors, non-vis spectrum strobes, radio beacons, swarm. Volvo was working on this years back, before "autonomous" - cars sharing data via wireless comms, using installed navigation markers by roads and more. There are ways, just no central will. Google, among others, is using private (external, not owned or controlled by google) wi-fi access points as radio beacons for navigation today. Good old wardriving google. This is one factor facilitating navigation in cities when GPS is spotty. And then you have cell towers. Centralized, standardized navigation facilitation solutions would be better, more reliable, not require mobile internet access for alignment with beacons, as they would be in a stored database in the vehicle, etc.
- Eduard 6y agoOr what happens if some kids prank a fiducial towards a cliff?
- saaaaaam 6y agoI mean you’d hope that self driving cars had a certain amount of error correction and weren’t just looking at one data point...
- eyelidlessness 6y agoHope is not a great thing to depend on when it comes to multi-ton fast moving objects
- Robotbeat 6y agoWhat if someone redraws road lines (or fakes the speed limit signs or whatever) to confuse drivers today? With machine-readable signage based on fiducials, not only can you error-correct the signage (making it highly resistant to simple alterations and ambiguous readings), you can also encrypt it and get 6 degree of freedom vehicle vs signage pose information. All from a single camera view. That makes it MUCH more resistant to abuse than machine-learning of human-readable signage... arguably more resistant to abuse even than human readable signage is to humans. (Also, I’ve thought of additional ways that fiducials could be resistant to such measures.)
- lettergram 6y agoFiducials are amazing and way under utilized. I’ve worked in the space and there’s a ton of innovation to be done. https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/ https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/ Imagine encoding virtual objects or NPCs into a fiducial without a database... basically a 3D model + actions into a piece of paper you can attach anywhere.
- Eduard 6y agoSo I imagined it, and I came to the conclusion it's not more than a QR code.
- pmarreck 6y agoYes, I too thought this, how does a QR code not already accomplish this need?
- Robotbeat 6y agoA QR code IS a type of fiducial. There’s an entire spectrum of fiducial types based on 2D bar code matrices. QR code is the most well known. But 2D matrices are not as resistant to motion blur, so there are advantages to some of the other types.
- mustacheemperor 6y agoFrom what I understand (which is limited) a QR code can function as a fiducial but the cutting edge of fiducials far exceed QR codes in terms of recognition speed and can be understood in terms of their relative 3D orientation to the scanner much more accurately and efficiently than QR codes. The docs page for AprilTag[0] makes for an explanatory example, "AprilTags are conceptually similar to QR Codes, in that they are a type of two-dimensional bar code. However, they are designed to encode far smaller data payloads (between 4 and 12 bits), allowing them to be detected more robustly and from longer ranges. Further, they are designed for high localization accuracy— you can compute the precise 3D position of the AprilTag with respect to the camera." [0]https://april.eecs.umich.edu/software/apriltag https://april.eecs.umich.edu/software/apriltag Something with the recognition speed and 3D orientation understanding of an AprilTag and with the information density of a QR code seems like it could be quite a useful innovation.
- Hizonner 6y ago> And they’ll be for pedestrians, bikes, and small subways like the London Underground uses. Assuming such tunneling is in fact practical, I vote for burying the vehicles and letting the pedestrians have the surface...
- Robotbeat 6y agoI completely agree. That really is the ideal scenario and we should indeed make the surface safe for kids to walk around with no fear of getting run over... Banish the cars underground. However there are cases where that isn’t practical or where there are weather constraints that make tunneling desirable (for instance, in Minnesota).
- vitorbaptistaa 6y agoFor a real world example of this, check Madrid's city centre. This is exactly what happened in the last few years, and the result is amazing.
- bsmitty5000 6y ago> 5) Reusable launch technology. The world still doesn’t grok this. They will. It (long term) enables access to orbit comparable to really long distance airfare or air freight. I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. Back then though there may have been one or two SpaceX landings. since I left I haven't kept up with this debate at all. Do you know if ULA changed their stance after all the successful launches?
- Robotbeat 6y agoNot that I'm aware of. But I do know others in the industry have changed their minds, like for instance RocketLab. Peter Beck, who said that if they ever were going to make a reusable rocket he'd eat his hat, actually did announce a reusable rocket and later did actually eat (part of) his hat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk&t=188s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqxJw5ISdk&t=188s (Love that he actually did it haha!)
- 2rsf 6y agoso did the ESA European Space Agency with their Themis project [1] [1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/12/Themis https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/12/Themis
- Robotbeat 6y agoYup, I’m a fan although disappointed they have only announced the testbed instead of an orbital rocket.
- 908B64B197 6y ago> I worked at ULA for a year about five years ago. At that time they were arguing that it wasn't going to be cost effective. When you sell the rocket and not the launch on cost plus contract, it's indeed not cost-effective.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
- jjeaff 6y agoRegarding the boring company, i have seen at least one engineer's breakdown of their tech and it appears they are using off the shelf tunneling equipment and their costs are in line with and sometimes higher than several other established companies that dig smaller tunnels like the Boring Company does. It seems the only competitive advantage they have is the bully pulpit that is Elon Musk and his blind followers that can popularize the idea of small tunnels.
- Robotbeat 6y agoExcept it doesn't matter if their only "innovation" is normalizing using sewer tunneling type equipment with sewer tunneling type costs. That's a MASSIVE advantage over the insane costs we have for tunneling projects in the US.
- presentation 6y agoTo me, seems the real problem is, why are tunnels built in the US orders of magnitude more expensive than tunnels built literally anywhere else? It's a people problem, not a technical one. There are plenty of tunnel projects around the world that are in my opinion far more valuable than shuffling around private cars (the scale of public transit through such tunnels is many orders of magnitude more impactful). But until the US gets its labor costs in check building infrastructure is poor cost-value ratio there.
- loldk 6y agoI found myself at odds with some friends who believe Elon is a scumbag. I actually thought and still somewhat do think he's not that bad of a guy, but I need evidence! Aside from his seemingly facetious tweet about coups... is there anything you can share that proves he's directly responsible for being amoral or showing a pattern of amoral behavior?
- coolspot 6y ago> 4) ... When you can build tunnels for one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than today, cheaper than an urban surface lane ... Didn’t Las Vegas 1.5 mi tunnel cost ~$50MM ? I don’t think 1.5mi of surface road (not considering right-of-way costs) costs that much.
- hinkley 6y agoRoads cost a ridiculous amount of money. They start at a million per mile and go up from there. Think about how many miles of road their are just in your neighborhood. The people who complain about how much of our cities are paved have a substantial point.
- Robotbeat 6y agoWhy wouldn't you consider right-of-way costs?
- Robotbeat 6y agoIt was about 1.7 miles two-way, or about $3.4 million, or ~$15 million per mile including the stations and “rolling stock.” The tunnel in Hawthorne is about $10 million for a mile. The advantage, of course, is in the very thing you’re not considering: right of way costs. Of course it’s cheaper to not have to tunnel at all, but there are buildings and people on the surface. And NIMBYs. So including the right of way costs, tunneling is cheaper than an urban road per lane-mile. Tunneling projects (for larger tunnels) are about $900 million per mile in the US (can be even greater). $300 million per mile overseas. So about $10-15 million per mile is indeed about one or two orders of magnitude cheaper. Making do with smaller tunnels is a big advantage, one that I think other companies and transit agencies in the US should strongly consider as a method to address the insane infrastructure costs we have. If we have to use smaller subway trains like the London Underground uses, so what? At least we could actually get them built. We’re unlikely to saturate their capacity anyway, and I’d much rather have 4 times the routes than twice the subway train diameter.
- nairboon 6y ago> 2) Custom silicon I know about libresilicon [1], are there any others in this space? [1]: https://libresilicon.com/ https://libresilicon.com/
- 2rsf 6y ago> passenger electric flight There are unsolved physical limitations to that with no solution in the near horizon AFAIK, the energy density of batteries is simply to low (energy per kg) for airplanes to be efficient. > from underserved regional airports sooner than you think, doing routes and speeds comparable to High Speed Rail (and with comparable efficiency) but much more granular and without massive infrastructure I didn't understand that, is there a limitation for using normal jet fuel planes from regional airports?
- benhurmarcel 6y ago> the energy density of batteries is simply to low (energy per kg) for airplanes to be efficient. Technically, hydrogen airplanes with fuel cells are electric and much more feasible, but I don't think that's what his post meant indeed.
- lovemenot 6y agoFiducials. Yes good. The more the better. But we humans cannot read them. So use UV or near infrared instead of visible spectrum. Same low-cost sensors, less territorial conflict.
- Robotbeat 6y agoIt’s also possible to use fiducials that have a human-readable component (like QR code’s with a logo in the middle).