3 ms·

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 the

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”.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        The standard Aruco library in openCV is not the most stable fiducial tracking. But there are lots to choose from
andrew_v4 6y ago
Hello from Montreal, a city that is booming where you can't go a block without hitting a giant hole in the road or a bridge that's about to collapse. Having proper lines painted is pretty far along our hierarchy of needs. That said, I can easily imagine machine readable markers leapfrogging most of the existing infrastructure deficit. It's easier to get money for a futuristic sounding project than for routine shoring up of infrastructure so it doesn't keep falling apart. (Just like many codebases)

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”.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      The standard Aruco library in openCV is not the most stable fiducial tracking. But there are lots to choose from

andrew_v4 6y ago

Hello from Montreal, a city that is booming where you can't go a block without hitting a giant hole in the road or a bridge that's about to collapse. Having proper lines painted is pretty far along our hierarchy of needs. That said, I can easily imagine machine readable markers leapfrogging most of the existing infrastructure deficit. It's easier to get money for a futuristic sounding project than for routine shoring up of infrastructure so it doesn't keep falling apart. (Just like many codebases)