
Pixelopolis, a self-driving car demo from Google I/O built with TensorFlow-Lite - baylearn
https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/07/pixelopolis-self-driving-car-demo-tensorflow-lite.html
======
axegon_
Damn it... Just before the pandemic I had started piling up hardware to start
building something similar(I was intending to use a raspberry pi). And since I
couldn't go and look for parts in person(I'm not that crafty with my hands so
I genuinely need to see in person the part in order to be able to tell if it's
going to work) so I postponed it. And today I see this... Feeling kind of
sucks, even though I can't really explain why.

~~~
speedgoose
You should still do it! I'm sure you will have a lot of fun, and it's
perfectly normal to do something that has already been done before, it happens
all the time. Your solution doesn't have to be better, but it will be
different and interesting.

~~~
axegon_
Got other things lined up at the moment for better or worse, might go back to
it at some point. It's just that "the Simpsons did it" kind of feeling, you
know...

------
Abishek_Muthian
Amazon has been selling it's self-driving AWS Deep Racer car[1] and has been
promoting race tournaments for a while now.

Has anyone got that? Is it worth the price to test self-driving algorithms in
the hopes of making it to the full sized vehicle one day or is it best we make
our own self-driving toy card with Nvidia Jetson?

[1][https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/](https://aws.amazon.com/deepracer/)

~~~
lacker
I personally don’t but there’s a DIY robocars event near me where people
compete in races using little self driving cars. Some people were using the
AWS one but more popular in the “stock” division was the Donkeycar -

[https://diyrobocars.com/](https://diyrobocars.com/)

[https://github.com/autorope/donkeycar](https://github.com/autorope/donkeycar)

I haven’t made one, I just go with my kids to show them how cool it is to be
an engineer, but Donkeycar seems popular and performs well in the contests.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
Thank you, donkey cars seems to be very approachable.

------
Animats
They were trying very hard to use Tensorflow. It's amusing that their first
pre-training operation failed because they trained on straight roads. Direct
camera to steering is possible but not really the best approach.

Micromouse competition, 2019.[1] The first run, it's learning the maze. The
second run is a speed run.

[1] [https://youtu.be/sKFIBQ64_zs](https://youtu.be/sKFIBQ64_zs)

~~~
IshKebab
Well yeah, the whole point was to _demonstrate_ Tensorflow.

------
hendi_
105.41 MB transferred

Maybe think twice before putting a 40MB GIF on a website?

~~~
StavrosK
Well how else are you going to do video on the web?!

~~~
brutt
Animated PNG?

~~~
StavrosK
Now that's a billion dollar startup.

~~~
forgingahead
Billion dollar startup or or billions in bandwidth costs?

~~~
StavrosK
yes

------
praveen9920
Wonderful. Are there any other "robotics" projects which use android phones
instead of rasberry-pi or microcontrollers?

Imagine in future there are generic robots. Rather than trusting its custom
AI/processing, I can connect my phone to the robot and my phone gets
hardware/robotic extension and is personalised for me.

Its like ironman suit for my phone :)

~~~
dekhn
FIRST uses android phones but they drive a hardware board that handles low-
level stuff like motors.

------
sandGorgon
does anyone how the android phone is interfacing with the rest of the car
hardware ?

i did not know that android phones could do realtime i/o like this. Is this
the "Android Things" or "Android Accessory Protocol" ?

~~~
donquichotte
It's in TFA: "the Pixel 4 also controls the motors and other electronic
components via USB-C".

There's an STM32 micro-controller which presumably acts as an USB slave and
controls the servos.

~~~
sandGorgon
what SDK is this ? i have hunted and not found any easy way to do serial I/O
over usb-C in the android SDK

~~~
ezconnect
Just google "arduino android" the interface had been used by many projects for
so many years.

------
quadrifoliate
One thing I have always failed to understand about self-driving tech -- what's
the motivation for each car to do its own self-driving computation in busy
metropolitan areas?

Are there technologies that integrate with some kind of _existing_
infrastructure like beacons, etc. that would just _tell_ the car where the
streets are? If not, why not?

~~~
yardie
Smart roads have been attempted for years. Usually with some sort of antenna
or wireless/light transmitter embedded in the road itself. The cost per mile
was just too high. Far simpler to use what's already there with computer
vision and map metadata. Now that cars have GPS, A-GPS, and RTK need to tailor
roads for autonomous vehicles has been diminished.

~~~
quadrifoliate
> The cost per mile was just too high.

That's why I specified "in large metropolitan areas". I can see that it's
impractical to outfit anything outside dense cities with such beacons, but
inside the city they could augment, if not replace autonomous driving systems.
Or so I imagine.

> GPS, A-GPS, and RTK

Thanks for telling me about RTK, I did not know about this!

------
domovoykot
There is a definite resemblance to Duckietown[1], a robotics class/competition
done developed at MIT.

[1] [https://www.duckietown.org/](https://www.duckietown.org/)

~~~
flemhans
We had something similar at DTU in Denmark, albeit long before the times of
TensorFlow and other “modern” ML.

Lane keeping was a solved problem back then.

------
woile
Can this be scaled into building many small cities for self-driving cars
training? Could it be used for real scale? Kind of like GTA V is used for
training.

------
pselbert
“Please excuse the crudity of this model. I didn’t have time to paint it or
build it to scale” — Doc Emmett Brown (Decidedly not Google)

------
numpad0
Interesting that they went for expensive microcontroller based servos, I guess
they consider Realtek chip RC cars to be just toys.

~~~
rightbyte
Probably for making steering easier with angle control.

