4 ms·

Forgive me, genuine question. What happens when it snows?

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
machine 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 ago
Or what happens if some kids prank a fiducial towards a cliff?
- saaaaaam 6y ago
  I 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 ago
    Hope is not a great thing to depend on when it comes to multi-ton fast moving objects
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  What 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.)
- btgeekboy 6y ago
  What happens today when some kids move road cones so they point to oncoming traffic as a prank? You can have a car react the same way I did in that situation - slow down, take in the entirety of the situation ("cones say X, but that leads you into oncoming traffic") and ask the operator for directions or maneuver accordingly. Just because some Teslas are dumb enough to drive into barriers today doesn't mean we can't continue improving the technology.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    You’re actively paying huge dollar figures to experiment with your survival. Which I don’t judge even if I find it too risky for my taste. But your giant expensive experimental hunk of alloys and minerals is also a death sentence for others when it messes up.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      Which is why we should use something less experimental and black-boxy than machine learning and more verifiable and robust like fiducials. (Regardless of whether we're talking about using machine vision for attempts at "self-driving," autopilot, or just driver safety features like lane-keeping or auto-braking or automatic speed limit reading.)
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Same thing that happens to humans. You see parts of the signage. Or none of it, and drive on memory (and follow the behavior of other cars). The idea behind adding special markings for computers is that you can waste a lot of time and effort trying to perfect algorithms interpreting signage optimized for human consumption, or... you can spend much less time and effort, to much better effect, setting up additional signage that's easy for computers to consume and provides information relevant to computers (which is not necessarily the same as what humans need). Note that roads are controlled, artificial environments. There's always someone responsible for maintaining a road and signage on it. The infrastructure to deploy additional markings dedicated to self-driving cars already exist.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Yup. Or have signage at an angle that deflects snow. Or has a heater or wiper. Or as others have said, use non-visible-light fiducials. Humans rely on road lines and signs as well and when those are covered, human capability is reduced and they have to drive slower.
  - curioushacking 6y ago
    For the fiducials we previously worked on, the goals was to maximize error correction for the types of occlusions commonly on signs. Because most signs are vertical, there is a lower likely hood of a ton of snow on them. The more common occlusion is an edge occlusion from either a natural road feature, or other vehicles. For snow that generally disrupts the sign fiducial, we had a few solutions. The first is that if fiducials are dense enough, then dead reckoning may be sufficient until the next fiducial is observerd. The second is to try and build different layers of data with different error correction capabilities. One system developed could relay a low number of bits from a far distance and reasonable error correction capability. The remaining bits were then much smaller and readable from up close. The thought being that if you are able to fully resolve a fiducial in one area then assuming an apiori map of fiducials, the first 16 to 24 bits of a 64 bit code is likely enough to accurately resolve location.
semi-extrinsic 6y ago
Forgive me, genuine question: even in the richest countries we apparently don't have enough budget to paint new yellow lines in the middle of the roads when they get worn away - how are we going to afford something like this? The vision of self driving going much beyond driver assists like we have today is going to die a slow death as more and more people realize it just isn't worth the CAPEX and OPEX. Humans brains are cheap in comparison.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Fiducials don’t need to be ON the road. They can be on signage or whatever. But fiducials are cheap. Just paint. (And you can, in fact, draw them by hand using a ruler, a square, and patience.) They are error-detecting and error-correcting digital signage that gives you precision 6dof orientation “for free.” (And you can do even better... can stick a bunch of them all over a deformable object to map back the shape and deformation.... without lengthy registration and with only a single camera... unlike vidicon) And they’re easy to implement in software. Can be extremely fast (<10ms... no real limit as you can implement it in an FPGA) and fairly lightweight and can use basically any kind of digital camera (good or bad).
  - ssivark 6y ago
    Are there such fiducials+libraries available today?
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      You can use almost any 2D matrix barcode as a fiducial, and those include error correction/detection already. Signing it would be easy.
      - ssivark 6y ago
        I’m familiar with ARUCOs, but in my experience they tend to be somewhat finicky (Eg: mid-identified with a little bit of noise or unfavorable lighting), and accurate poses tend to require a lot more fiducial markers than might be considered “reasonable”.

machine 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 ago

Or what happens if some kids prank a fiducial towards a cliff?

saaaaaam 6y ago
I 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 ago
  Hope is not a great thing to depend on when it comes to multi-ton fast moving objects
Robotbeat 6y ago
What 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.)
btgeekboy 6y ago
What happens today when some kids move road cones so they point to oncoming traffic as a prank? You can have a car react the same way I did in that situation - slow down, take in the entirety of the situation ("cones say X, but that leads you into oncoming traffic") and ask the operator for directions or maneuver accordingly. Just because some Teslas are dumb enough to drive into barriers today doesn't mean we can't continue improving the technology.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  You’re actively paying huge dollar figures to experiment with your survival. Which I don’t judge even if I find it too risky for my taste. But your giant expensive experimental hunk of alloys and minerals is also a death sentence for others when it messes up.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Which is why we should use something less experimental and black-boxy than machine learning and more verifiable and robust like fiducials. (Regardless of whether we're talking about using machine vision for attempts at "self-driving," autopilot, or just driver safety features like lane-keeping or auto-braking or automatic speed limit reading.)

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Same thing that happens to humans. You see parts of the signage. Or none of it, and drive on memory (and follow the behavior of other cars). The idea behind adding special markings for computers is that you can waste a lot of time and effort trying to perfect algorithms interpreting signage optimized for human consumption, or... you can spend much less time and effort, to much better effect, setting up additional signage that's easy for computers to consume and provides information relevant to computers (which is not necessarily the same as what humans need). Note that roads are controlled, artificial environments. There's always someone responsible for maintaining a road and signage on it. The infrastructure to deploy additional markings dedicated to self-driving cars already exist.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Yup. Or have signage at an angle that deflects snow. Or has a heater or wiper. Or as others have said, use non-visible-light fiducials. Humans rely on road lines and signs as well and when those are covered, human capability is reduced and they have to drive slower.
- curioushacking 6y ago
  For the fiducials we previously worked on, the goals was to maximize error correction for the types of occlusions commonly on signs. Because most signs are vertical, there is a lower likely hood of a ton of snow on them. The more common occlusion is an edge occlusion from either a natural road feature, or other vehicles. For snow that generally disrupts the sign fiducial, we had a few solutions. The first is that if fiducials are dense enough, then dead reckoning may be sufficient until the next fiducial is observerd. The second is to try and build different layers of data with different error correction capabilities. One system developed could relay a low number of bits from a far distance and reasonable error correction capability. The remaining bits were then much smaller and readable from up close. The thought being that if you are able to fully resolve a fiducial in one area then assuming an apiori map of fiducials, the first 16 to 24 bits of a 64 bit code is likely enough to accurately resolve location.

semi-extrinsic 6y ago

Forgive me, genuine question: even in the richest countries we apparently don't have enough budget to paint new yellow lines in the middle of the roads when they get worn away - how are we going to afford something like this? The vision of self driving going much beyond driver assists like we have today is going to die a slow death as more and more people realize it just isn't worth the CAPEX and OPEX. Humans brains are cheap in comparison.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Fiducials don’t need to be ON the road. They can be on signage or whatever. But fiducials are cheap. Just paint. (And you can, in fact, draw them by hand using a ruler, a square, and patience.) They are error-detecting and error-correcting digital signage that gives you precision 6dof orientation “for free.” (And you can do even better... can stick a bunch of them all over a deformable object to map back the shape and deformation.... without lengthy registration and with only a single camera... unlike vidicon) And they’re easy to implement in software. Can be extremely fast (<10ms... no real limit as you can implement it in an FPGA) and fairly lightweight and can use basically any kind of digital camera (good or bad).
- ssivark 6y ago
  Are there such fiducials+libraries available today?
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    You can use almost any 2D matrix barcode as a fiducial, and those include error correction/detection already. Signing it would be easy.
    - ssivark 6y ago
      I’m familiar with ARUCOs, but in my experience they tend to be somewhat finicky (Eg: mid-identified with a little bit of noise or unfavorable lighting), and accurate poses tend to require a lot more fiducial markers than might be considered “reasonable”.