Autonomous Systems

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Would you ever own an autonomous vehicle?

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Tuco said:
Autonomous trucks are a fun problem. The big challenge with breaking into them is that for passenger vehicles just being able to minimize the participation of the driver is great, but for autonomous trucks the goal is to remove the driver from the vehicle entirely. Adding levels of driver assistance is all well and good, but you're not going to save much in salary by telling the driver, "You can sleep on the job as long as you wake up with this alarm goes off...".
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What if you put a big ass LTE antenna on the truck so that you'd always have good internet and just put IT workers in the trucks as part of their job? Give them $10k a year more to ride the truck 6 months a year and you have the cheapest truck driver ever. :)
 
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Tuco

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Cad said:
What if you put a big ass LTE antenna on the truck so that you'd always have good internet and just put IT workers in the trucks as part of their job? Give them $10k a year more to ride the truck 6 months a year and you have the cheapest truck driver ever. :)
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Long range assisted teleoperation is a big part of my area of research. I can't say too much about it besides, yes, that's a thing in one way or another.
 
Tripamang

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Tuco said:
Another cool part about autonomy and robots. The core sensor in all of these is lidar, which are the big spinney things you see on most autonomous vehicles. The big one, the velodyne hdl64e, is $80,000. The smaller ones Ford is using now are the velodyne hdl32s which are 30k. Velodyne released some smaller ones for 8k. Ibeo's range from 12-20k.


There's some very cool developments on that front from quanergy and velodyne to come up with solid state lidar:
Quanergy Announces $250 Solid-State LIDAR for Cars, Robots, and More

The tech behind this is really cool. They use arrays of transistor to direct beams in a very controlled fashion. The capabilities and cost are far beyond everything we have now.

View attachment 1966
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I know nothing about LIDAR or really imaging hardware in general, but wouldn't multiple units in close proximity cause interference? Or can they actually tell whether or not the reflection they're registering is from their laser.
 
Siddar

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Lleauaric said:
Heres something else that wont exist in a decade.. humans cutting your lawn.

Think about landscapers that primarily just cut lawns these days. Lets say a landscaper has a pretty decent sized business, has a few dozen lawns, a few trucks and crew of guys. Whats that cost? 30 bucks a week at most?

How would he compete against a guy who has an autonomous driven truck, with mowers that use pretty much the same technology as Roomba, that can go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (super quiet electric powered mowers), no meal breaks, no health insurance, no breaks, no sick days... nada. You just show up at a customers house, take some measurements, feed that information into the computer, then go back to shitposting at ReRe while the money flows in from your robotic minions.

Shit, you want to stop mexican immigration? You don't need walls, you just need robots. No Jerbs, No Immigrants.
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Change that from your lawn to farm labor and you would be right Mexicans will be the first victims of the new robot revolution.
 
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Tuco said:
Long range assisted teleoperation is a big part of my area of research. I can't say too much about it besides, yes, that's a thing in one way or another.
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That idea just occurred to me as I read the posts. I should really open some businesses.
 
Tuco

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Tripamang said:
I know nothing about LIDAR or really imaging hardware in general, but wouldn't multiple units in close proximity cause interference? Or can they actually tell whether or not the reflection they're registering is from their laser.
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They can if they are looking directly at each other, and these type of lidar can get confused when it's in very close (sub 1 meter) to a reflective object (Like a flat piece of sheet metal). However all the reasonable configurations you might see have no problem with interaction between them.

The bigger problem with lidar is obscurants. As in massive dust clouds or heavy snowfall.

OPAL lidar are focused on that and are super expensive. You can imagine the kind of dust these kick up:

neptec1-650x336.jpg

helicopter-dust-storm.jpg


I'm not sure how they do that, or what class of laser they use. My guess is they are basically shooting light sabers around.
 
Sentagur

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What i would like to know is are trains fully autonomous yet or do they still require meatbags behind the levers? I dont recall reading anything about large scale autonomous operations of trains be it cargo or passenger. Wouldn't those be the ideal test-bed for something like this tech?
 
Tuco

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Sentagur said:
What i would like to know is are trains fully autonomous yet or do they still require meatbags behind the levers? I dont recall reading anything about large scale autonomous operations of trains be it cargo or passenger. Wouldn't those be the ideal test-bed for something like this tech?
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No idea about autonomous trains. My guess is they have different levels of autonomy depending on the application and the appetite for automation. When you're talking about this many-million dollar, many ton system carrying millions of dollars worth of goods, the cost of having a human managing a mostly autonomous system isn't a big deal.
 
Tripamang

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Tuco said:
Doesn't go fast enough and isn't agile/small enough.
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I couldn't find the article but there is another version that uses blade legs to get around that can get up to a decent speed and deal with most terrain.
 
Ukerric

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Lleauaric said:
How would he compete against a guy who has an autonomous driven truck, with mowers that use pretty much the same technology as Roomba, that can go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (super quiet electric powered mowers), no meal breaks, no health insurance, no breaks, no sick days... nada.
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Given the hilarious consequences if you have a Roomba and a pet that decides to shit on your floor, it needs a slight improvement in technology.

Tuco said:
This is exactly right. I don't think we'll ever drop passenger control over vehicles, it'll just become either discouraged or foolish. Ex: how it was in iRobot.
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I can picture human driving being forbidden on public roads if the statistics ever hit the point where "99 of the 121 road deaths last year were linked to a human trying to drive".
 
Aldarion

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Of course human drivers will be banned if robot cars become feasible and reasonably safe. Its like some of you have just arrived in the US and think its still 1940 where the American population values liberty and independence. Its not. You're in the country thats banning large sodas and talking on the cell phone while driving. Of fucking course self driving will be banned. The only question is when.
 
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See? The American people have lost their taste for freedom and happily sacrifice it for a tiny reduction in perceived risk. There is zero question that self driving will be banned. And when it is, Astro will immediately post saying "yeah self driving is fucking dangerous"
 
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For a certain segment of society, walking and chewing gum at the same time presents a safety hazard. We must immediately ban walking while chewing gum, for the childrenz
 
Tuco

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Aldarion said:
Of course human drivers will be banned if robot cars become feasible and reasonably safe. Its like some of you have just arrived in the US and think its still 1940 where the American population values liberty and independence. Its not. You're in the country thats banning large sodas and talking on the cell phone while driving. Of fucking course self driving will be banned. The only question is when.
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Phrases like "of course" have no place in a serious discussion of this topic.
 
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kaid

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Tuco said:
They can if they are looking directly at each other, and these type of lidar can get confused when it's in very close (sub 1 meter) to a reflective object (Like a flat piece of sheet metal). However all the reasonable configurations you might see have no problem with interaction between them.

The bigger problem with lidar is obscurants. As in massive dust clouds or heavy snowfall.

OPAL lidar are focused on that and are super expensive. You can imagine the kind of dust these kick up:

View attachment 1972
View attachment 1973

I'm not sure how they do that, or what class of laser they use. My guess is they are basically shooting light sabers around.
Click to expand...


The ideal probably would be to use LIDAR with some radar sensors to help augment them in heavy rain/snow conditions that would cause lidar some major issues but that comes down to cost probably.
 
kaid

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Ukerric said:
Given the hilarious consequences if you have a Roomba and a pet that decides to shit on your floor, it needs a slight improvement in technology.


I can picture human driving being forbidden on public roads if the statistics ever hit the point where "99 of the 121 road deaths last year were linked to a human trying to drive".
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Oh yes this will eventually be a thing. Or you simply won't be able to get car insurance or lose your car insurance if you try to drive manually. It won't be like that initially but down the road bet your ass that would happen.
 
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