Autonomous Systems

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Would you ever own an autonomous vehicle?

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Sentagur

Sentagur

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consensus said:
how soon til autonomous trucks?
that shit will put out tens of thousands of jobs everywhere.

holy fuck.
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I have seen predictions of 5- 10 years and those seem overly optimistic unless there is a massive breakthrough in either sensor accuracy/range or calculation. I would say several different technologies will need to be frankensteined together for it all to work and become widely accepted because silver bullet solutions are pipe dreams.
 
Xalara

Xalara

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Sentagur said:
I have seen predictions of 5- 10 years and those seem overly optimistic unless there is a massive breakthrough in either sensor accuracy/range or calculation. I would say several different technologies will need to be frankensteined together for it all to work and become widely accepted because silver bullet solutions are pipe dreams.
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I would put it closer to five years for freeway driving to go automated. City driving and deliveries is another story. Unfortunately freeway driving is what employs most truckers, so it isn't going to be pretty. It isn't tens of thousands of jobs, it's millions of truckers and the communities that support them.
 
Tuco

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In five years youll probably see freightliner, peterbilt and some others with very limited releases of freeway driving trucks being tested.


 
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Tuco

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UbPzmN3.png
 
chaos

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He's full of shit right there. Those robots will be made in Korea, we'll be lucky to even service them.

I need to actually drive a Tesla, the impression I got from reading articles and listening to Musk self-promote was that the technology was much further along than that.
 
Tuco

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Tuco said:
So why can I drive at night? Well, I use a ton of inference and assumptions. Everytime I turn left around a car with its lights on I'm betting that there's nothing there, but it's dangerous and if there was something there it'd be dead. It'd be trivial to set up a test case and people would run over your black hoodie-wearing mannequin everytime. Hands up don't manslaughter. When I drive into the sun and can't see shit, I'm just hoping that nobody gets in my way. If that light I can't see just turned red, buckle up everyone.
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What's funny is the evening after I made this post I was approaching a red light during a sunset. As it turned green the car traveling perpendicularly to me and toward the sun screeched to halt in the middle of the intersection. He backed up and gave me a sheepish look as I safely turned on his road the opposite direction, away from the sun. I looked in my side mirror to see how impossible it was to see the stoplight and was completely blinded by the sun.

In an autonomous utopia, stoplights would both transmit their information to local vehicles and even synchronize with them to offer an optimal flow of traffic. In a first-generation autonomous system, this is a huge corner case and is difficult to plan around. Our roadways are generally orthogonal to the rotation of the earth, and people generally drive at sunrise and sunset (morning commute). You have to handle these terrible lighting conditions and the sensor you rely on for the color of the light is blown the fuck out by the sun.
 
Tripamang

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chaos said:
He's full of shit right there. Those robots will be made in Korea, we'll be lucky to even service them.

I need to actually drive a Tesla, the impression I got from reading articles and listening to Musk self-promote was that the technology was much further along than that.
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Tesla expects to have a level 5 (highest possible level of autonomy, never requires a driver) by the end of 2017 to early 2018. Every vehicle they roll off the line including the Tesla 3's are going to have this feature baked into them. There is a company that Uber owns that claims to have a package you can retrofit an existing truck with to make it autonomous for highways in the same time period.

Despite people thinking this is going to be a slow transition I deeply believe once people see what these things are capable of they won't want to purchase anything else. I also feel these things are going to be so compelling that you won't be able to build them fast enough. Tesla is putting itself in a great position to really hoover up the market, especially if the Tesla 3 launches with working level 5 autonomy. They're going to sell a fuck load of them if they're first to market. Why would you buy anything else? Plus your car can double as a taxi when you're not using it, it's now a source of income rather than just a hunk of metal that depreciates in the garage when you're not using it.
 
BrutulTM

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Not long ago I drove through a 4-way that I knew was there and have been through hundreds of times because my windshield was dirty and I was driving into the setting sun. It's a big problem for non-autonomous drivers as well. Another time I have endangered myself and others is when I leave the house 5 minutes late for work and realize it's going to take 10 minutes to de-ice my windshield. Typically I spend 2 minutes scraping and go, looking through a tiny window that my breath is constantly fogging up. Is anyone even attempting to drive autonomously in ice and snow/blizzard conditions yet?

On the other hand, I have no knowledge to refute Tuco's pessimism, but it's hard to find anyone in the industry that agrees with him.
 
chaos

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Tripamang said:
Tesla expects to have a level 5 (highest possible level of autonomy, never requires a driver) by the end of 2017 to early 2018. Every vehicle they roll off the line including the Tesla 3's are going to have this feature baked into them. There is a company that Uber owns that claims to have a package you can retrofit an existing truck with to make it autonomous for highways in the same time period.

Despite people thinking this is going to be a slow transition I deeply believe once people see what these things are capable of they won't want to purchase anything else. I also feel these things are going to be so compelling that you won't be able to build them fast enough. Tesla is putting itself in a great position to really hoover up the market, especially if the Tesla 3 launches with working level 5 autonomy. They're going to sell a fuck load of them if they're first to market. Why would you buy anything else? Plus your car can double as a taxi when you're not using it, it's now a source of income rather than just a hunk of metal that depreciates in the garage when you're not using it.
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Yeah I'm already there. Give me a self-driving car asap so I can read and shit on the way to work.
 
Tuco

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Tripamang said:
Tesla expects to have a level 5 (highest possible level of autonomy, never requires a driver) by the end of 2017 to early 2018. Every vehicle they roll off the line including the Tesla 3's are going to have this feature baked into them. There is a company that Uber owns that claims to have a package you can retrofit an existing truck with to make it autonomous for highways in the same time period.

Despite people thinking this is going to be a slow transition I deeply believe once people see what these things are capable of they won't want to purchase anything else. I also feel these things are going to be so compelling that you won't be able to build them fast enough. Tesla is putting itself in a great position to really hoover up the market, especially if the Tesla 3 launches with working level 5 autonomy. They're going to sell a fuck load of them if they're first to market. Why would you buy anything else? Plus your car can double as a taxi when you're not using it, it's now a source of income rather than just a hunk of metal that depreciates in the garage when you're not using it.
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I don't think Tesla will make that because:
1. They haven't demonstrated much yet.
2. They're generally late (and that's ok).

I'm excited to see what they put out though.

Let's do an avatar bet that Tesla doesn't have a level 5 autonomous car in the hands of consumers by Q1 2018. Note that I'll probably forget about the bet by then.
 
Tuco

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BrutulTM said:
Not long ago I drove through a 4-way that I knew was there and have been through hundreds of times because my windshield was dirty and I was driving into the setting sun. It's a big problem for non-autonomous drivers as well. Another time I have endangered myself and others is when I leave the house 5 minutes late for work and realize it's going to take 10 minutes to de-ice my windshield. Typically I spend 2 minutes scraping and go, looking through a tiny window that my breath is constantly fogging up. Is anyone even attempting to drive autonomously in ice and snow/blizzard conditions yet?

On the other hand, I have no knowledge to refute Tuco's pessimism, but it's hard to find anyone in the industry that agrees with him.
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Ford is working on winter driving.

Part of the problem is that the people speaking about vehicular autonomy are selling a product/brand, or are researchers trying to get grant money. All the automotive companies are in the dust compared to Google, and they're all trying to step up their game and get the egg off their face. So when they make wild promises about what the world will look like in three years, it helps them in the short term and nobody will care if they're wrong or hold it to them.
 
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Tuco

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The four spinny things on top are Velodyne HDL32 lidar, about $32k each (Ford gets an unknown discount I'm sure). Ford is working hand in hand with Velodyne to develop the next gen lidar.

The course they are on is Univ Michigan's MCity autonomous testing course. I toured it when it opened and it's pretty neat.

Winter driving is fucked. You're taking your life in your hands attempting it, and everyone is ok with that. In Michigan you'll get a chorus of people driving 50mph on the freeway in those conditions and you know that if anyone fucks up everyone dies. Just watching that video and thinking about all the problems there are with "snowtonomy" as they call it makes me sick to my stomach. It's a hard, hard problem and I wish them God speed.

s030898453-300.jpg
 
Sentagur

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chaos said:
God damn right I will. This is America.
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I can see it now. Chaos sitting on the shitter in his car on the way to work. Rolling down the window and waving down the person in the next lane to ask if they has any extra TP because he just ran out.
The other driver passing a fresh roll just as a motorcycle tries to cut in between them and ends up with a lodged TP roll in his visor. The motorcycle guy loses control and after few wobbles takes off the highway and smashes into a a billboard for "Cottonelle Ultra Soft" followed by a massive explosion Michael Bay would be proud of.
screen fades out with words "Shit happens"

Edit:
Screen fades back in to Tuco sitting on a truck next to the highway whittling a piece of a wooden car bumper saying "He should have used Lidar"
 
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chaos

chaos

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Sentagur said:
I can see it now. Chaos sitting on the shitter in his car on the way to work. Rolling down the window and waving down the person in the next lane to ask if they has any extra TP because he just ran out.
The other driver passing a fresh roll just as a motorcycle tries to cut in between them and ends up with a lodged TP roll in his visor. The motorcycle guy loses control and after few wobbles takes off the highway and smashes into a a billboard for "Cottonelle Ultra Soft" followed by a massive explosion Michael Bay would be proud of.
screen fades out with words "Shit happens"
Click to expand...
Almost paradise, we're knockin on heaven's door
 
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Tripamang

Tripamang

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Tuco said:
I don't think Tesla will make that because:
1. They haven't demonstrated much yet.
2. They're generally late (and that's ok).

I'm excited to see what they put out though.

Let's do an avatar bet that Tesla doesn't have a level 5 autonomous car in the hands of consumers by Q1 2018. Note that I'll probably forget about the bet by then.
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Hah only if you want to push it to Dec 31st 2018, I definitely see Tesla not delivering by Q1 2018 but out before 2019.

I've been reading over the tech that Tesla is pushing into the last little while, it's interesting stuff. I was quasi expecting that the AI would was actually learning to drive but it's really just learning to recognize objects on the road and read signs. The new Tesla's have 8 cameras, and 12 ultrasonic sensors which are all piped into a NVIDIA DrivePX module that is specifically designed to be able to process the incoming data in real time via the AI. Over top of this data you have a decision tree (just regular programming) that interprets the data coming from the Tesla module and makes decisions based on the car's the environment. So the quality of your image recognition AI determines how well the programming over top interprets the environment and makes decisions.

It has flaws in that your cars actions are limited to what situations it's been programmed for, and it will probably have issues adapting to unforeseen circumstances. This is why all the Teslas on the road right now pipe back data to Tesla to better improve their image recognition while capturing the drivers response to those situations so they can improve the decision tree.

George Hotz (aka Geohotz PS4 hacker) was building a system where the whole driving process was AI based. This learns much faster than the Tesla system but is open to people training their AI to repeat their mistakes, like teaching the car to run red lights or ignoring stop signs. It's probably why the project got a warning letter from NHTSA to shut it down.

Also I want to say this is my best interpretation of what's out there, I'm by no means an expert so if there is something wrong with the way I'm explaining this I'd love to be corrected.
 
Tuco

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No idea how correct the above is, I'm sure those elements of AI are used at different levels, but I expect the truth is much more complex and less elegant than what they publish (and that's ok).

I'm fine with extending it to Dec 31, 2018. Let me know what you want the duration of the avatar to be for me. I'd be happy to make the duration of your avatar be until Tesla sells a level 5 automation car.
 
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