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One Thing That Makes Google's Self-Driving Cars Work

• dang 12y ago
  We edited the linkbait title.
  • wmf 12y ago
    They didn't even get the linkbait right; it's supposed to be "one weird trick".
• delluminatus 12y ago
  Very interesting. I never knew that Google was collecting all this data for their cars; I assumed they worked by assessing the scene in real-time. I guess this means that, if Google's self-driving cars are ever widely legalized, their users may have to stick to a set of "allowed roads", and not venture off the beaten path without manual control. Like the author says, the idea really does have a strong whiff of Googleyness. Bind-bogglingly ambitious, technically extremely impressive, and fairly creepy.
  • trhway 12y ago
    > if Google's self-driving cars are ever widely legalized, their users may have to stick to a set of "allowed roads" one can also imagine that to renew car registration one would have in addition to evidence of insurance to also provide evidence of updated subscription to the Google road database
    • dave5104 12y ago
      I'm sure the end goal is to actually be able to plop down a car anywhere and have it go, doing all of the data processing in real time. Even if Google could map out all those details, the world just changes too darn often. Feels like it'd be a liability to rely on potentially out of date Google information.
  • davidcbc 12y ago
    I'm not sure about the technical feasibility, but to me the obvious answer seems to be integrating the map creation into the car and crowd source it. Maybe it takes X number of times driving manually on a road before the map has an adequate quality for self driving and then once the map is "good enough" tweaks are made for changing road conditions each subsequent time a Google car drives on it.
• mempko 12y ago
  HERE maps has been mapping the world at this precision for years. Look up HERE HD map and our partnership with Mercedes. Disclaimer, I work for HERE and my opinions are my own and I don't speak for the company. It is just frustrating to read articles that make statements similar to, and i am paraphrasing here, "there is possibly no other company other than google that can get this level of detail".
  • tantalor 12y ago
    SlashGear has a good story, http://www.slashgear.com/inside-the-nokia-here-hd-maps-putting-google-on-notice-18325742/ http://www.slashgear.com/inside-the-nokia-here-hd-maps-putti...
  • gfodor 12y ago
    i think the sentiment isn't that other companies can't gather that scale of data, but that they probably are unable to tie the whole stack together and apply state of the art algorithms to it. it seems that the self driving car project is formulated as one giant online learning problem. google seems to stand head and shoulders above pretty much anyone when it comes to running production-quality, large scale, online learning algorithms.
    • deleted 12y ago
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• jwise0 12y ago
  If you're wondering what the One Trick is to decide whether it's worth reading the article, it's that their maps of Mountain View are more detailed than normal maps: they're full world-level models of all of the spaces and areas of streets in the city. (The article also touches on general machine learning strategies, rather than hard-wired functionality.) If you wish a less irritating title, then, I'd put it at: "Google-scale machine learning and data collection is the thing that makes Google's self-driving cars work"
  • ctdonath 12y ago
    TL;DR: 1. They map the streets to inches, right down to the height of the curb. 2. They record prior trips in such detail, data-mine it appropriately, and then hand-massage the results. So far they've done this in little more than the Mountain View area. Having done the hard work in that limited region to that much detail, they now can derive how to automate the process. I imagine their recent high-detail-mapping "phone" will be a key part of this, tracking minute aspects of how someone travels from A to B, and merging that info with many other identical & overlapping trips so the cars can make the trip darn near blind, with a little help from monitoring immediacies (like actual position, pedestrian detection, weather, etc).
    • encoderer 12y ago
      Having played with a Tango device, if the phone is a part of the plan, they're playing the game like 5+ years out. Tango is a long way from a device that could somehow help map things as described.
      • grrowl 12y ago
        At Google's scale, they have to think 5+ years out. The technology doesn't just "become" good, it's enterprises and entities which iteratively reach that point. Street View helped them get this far, maybe Tango's research makes the last mile. The self-driving car itself has been in the works for 4.5 years already, with actual commercialisation at least that far away again (by my shot-in-the-dark estimation). edit: Although there's a distinction between tech that can be previewed (Tango, Street View) and those which is developed in relative secrecy.
• gfunk911 12y ago
  This also seems like a good place for some 80/20 value. Doing this for all highways and major roads would be a small fraction of all roads, but likely cover a very large percentage of miles driven. Car drives 90% of the way, and you take over for the first and last couple minutes. Or trucks drive a known route, and somebody meets them at the end.
  • peeters 12y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. Sure it'd be cool to have your car park itself and all, but I don't mind doing that myself. The value is in dealing with the monotony of commuting or taking a road trip. If I could be doing something else on middle 95% of that 150km trip I take every couple of weeks, that'd be awesome.
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  • tgb 12y ago
    Plus their current cars are presumably capable of performing such a "crawling" by being manually driven, perhaps a couple of times over the road. Crowd source the problem one these go on sale (though maybe future versions won't have all this lidar and jazz).
  • JulianRaphael 12y ago
    I guess the acquisition of Waze and the investment in Uber will play out really nice for them with regards to the "crawling" of streets you describe. Uber and Waze cover the most important urban areas, where the majority of all miles are driven. At one point they'll probably equip all Uber cars with the right technology to map out the most important territories. Feed in all the data from Waze and you should have a decent starting point for the main urban areas.
  • dredmorbius 12y ago
    The US Interstate Highway system is a very small fraction of total road miles (1%), but carry 25% of traffic (vehicle miles). So yes, the old 20/80 rule applies, for small values of 20 and large values of 80.
• mchusma 12y ago
  The article made it seem Nissan's engineers couldn't fathom not using car-to-car communication to enable autonomous driving. I found it hard to believe anyone act that way. Relying on car-to-car communication would create an enormous chicken and egg problem. I suspect the author overstated the level of disbelief here.
• WalterBright 12y ago
  I wonder about things like: 1. sudden road changes, like the appearance of potholes 2. avoiding puddles which can cause one side of your car to hydroplane 3. taking a 'rain line' when the road is wet. (Traffic tends to put slight ruts in the road. They're enough to make slight puddles. If you drive slightly off-center, your tires will be on the high spots and less likely to hydroplane, that's that 'rain line'.) 4. avoiding icy spots
  • wffurr 12y ago
    That's why the car has a ton of sensors all over it. For modeling all the dynamic behavior occurring on or around the previously-modeled road. It's much easier for the on-board processing to start with a baseline and then figure out how the world differs than to start from scratch from the sensors.
    • WalterBright 12y ago
      Detecting puddles can be awfully tricky, they can be lighter than the road or darker than the road, depending on the angle of the light. There are other issues, too, such as I've been behind gravel trucks that were constantly dropping gravel, and other vehicles with a clearly unstable load that I get away from. I also give wide berth to cars that don't appear to be driven in a stable manner.
  • gerbal 12y ago
    One of the reasons Mountain view is a good test bed is the comparative absence of weather. The LIDAR system the car relies on doesn't work in rain, snow, or fog. Also, it would have a lot of trouble with the massive changes to roads and driving patterns caused by seasonal snow accumulation in the mid-west and north east.
  • jpindar 12y ago
    5. Areas that are often covered in deep snow. If "curbs" are defined as the raised area next to the street that you can't drive over, then the curbs change from one day to the next, jutting far out into the lane. And the number of lanes also changes - two lane roads often become one lane, either due to lack of room between the snow piles or because drivers on some roads spontaneously form a single file down center of what used to be two lanes.
• joosters 12y ago
  Doesn't this make the cars, in some sense, less 'autonomous'? Plonk a google car down in some unknown street and it won't be able to drive there. Or, more likely, if you haven't kept your google car data subscription up to date (or can't agree with their latest privacy policy change), your self-driving vehicle suddenly becomes useless?
  • hyperion2010 12y ago
    Of course. We are still decades away from being able to replicate the human visual system (and whole brain really) that is needed to unable autonomous vehicles. Of course by then we may not need them anyway because anywhere not covered by a sufficiently high bandwidth signal in 30 years is probably somewhere you wouldn't take a self driving car to anyway.
• stormbrew 12y ago
  Really this is something that almost everyone who drives does subconsciously every time they drive. Driving in a new environment is stressful and more difficult because you haven't mapped out the terrain and so you're working entirely from what you see and not from a virtual model in your own head. Obviously the Google car's data collection is more extreme and precise than that which happens in your head, but that seems like it's mostly just because they don't yet entirely know what they need. And this, in the long run, will be part of the advantage of these cars once they get the process more automated. I expect that when you can finally buy one of these cars they'll have a (perhaps opt-out) system where terrain data is collected and merged into Google's own system to provide better data for future drives for not just you, but everyone else as well. And that'll be one of the reasons it'll be safer. If also a whole bunch more creepy.