
Google's self-driving car gathers almost 1 GB/sec - hammock
https://twitter.com/Bill_Gross/status/329069954911580160
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hammock
Dear moderator, why did you change the title? I worked hard to abbreviate it
to 80 characters without changing the wording or editorializing. And it's not
the fact that I found interesting, it was the picture. Thanks.

For the record I had _GOOG Self-Driving Car gathers almost 1 GB/sec.What it
"sees" making L turn [pic]_

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dsl
I really dislike the mods here changing titles to bend to personal views. I've
had a few submissions that gained good traction and got heavy upvotes until a
mod changed the title to something meaningless and unrelated.

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jlgreco
They seem to mostly change the titles to what the title of the actual article
was. This is of course a _terrible_ policy when the blog in question [edit:
does not] use descriptive titles, or titles that only make sense if you are
coming from the perspective of already being on the blog.

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dsl
A good example would be the post I made about a third party audit of
CloudFlare's security and how they failed to block any of the most basic
widely known attacks. The mods change to the academic title of the PDF paper
failed to provide any sort of enlightenment about why it was interesting at
all to HN readers.

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Game_Ender
He is off by an order of magnitude. The Velodyne 64 on that car only has a 100
Mbit connection [1]. Each of the 5-10 radars on that vehicle is connected over
a 1MBit CAN bus [2]. The front facing is almost definitely a Gigi-E or
Firewire camera so it's at most 1000MBit.

Doing the math: 100 + 10*1 + 1000 = 1100MBit != 8192Mbit (1 GB)

1\.
[http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/products/brochure/HDL-64E%20S...](http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/products/brochure/HDL-64E%20S2%20datasheet_2010_lowres.pdf)

2\. <http://www.kvaser.com/zh/about-can/the-can-protocol/19.html>

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beambot
If other robots I've worked with (eg. the PR2) are any indication... 1GB/sec.
is probably on the low end for the total data throughput. The PR2 had a high-
res camera (GigE?), quad stereo cams in head (narrow and wide FoV), dual
"wrist" cameras, a Kinect (usually), dual Hokuyo UTM LRF's, full 14+ DoF
kinematics at 1KHz, and lots and lots of diagnostic info (eg. "heartbeat",
system diagnostics, localization signals, IMUs, etc).

Granted, we didn't log all that data all the time, but TL;DR: I wouldn't
nitpick over a factor of 8 based on your own calculations.

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Game_Ender
That was an upper bound to show the absurdity of his non sourced "fact". The
reality is much lower because the main sensor is the Velodyne, and it only
produces 5-6MB/s. The primary focus of his picture is the Velodyne point
cloud. Which he says is "1 GB per second" which is 100 times larger than it
really is.

I have worked on several fully autonomous vehicle projects based on Velodynes
and their processing and logging rates are around of 5-20MB/ (as you would
expect) so seeing someone quote "1 GB/s" is pretty awful.

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steve19
how well does the Velodyne work in heavy rain or snow?

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netrus
Wow, never thought about that in the Google Car context. To be fair, I dislike
driving in heavy rain myself, and most people drive much slower in such
conditions. Still, that might be more of an issue in rainy Hamburg compared to
the Bay Area ...

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iharris
There's a great presentation about Google's self-driving car here (check the
second half for video of the real-time telemetry that it gathers):

<http://youtu.be/YXylqtEQ0tk>

One of the things that I found really interesting is how the car inches
forward at a stop sign in order to show the "driver's" intent to other
drivers. Lots of actions that seem to be second-nature for human drivers have
to be carefully emulated here.

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kyrra
Thanks you for the link. It looks like the picture here is almost the same as
what is shown in that video (from 1.5 years ago).

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Samuel_Michon
It is exactly the same. The picture on Twitter was the frame shown on 9:07 in
the video. Given that the image is from a 1.5 year old promo video, which
probably has been circulating all over, that puts the rest of the information
in a new perspective as well.

Here’s a comparison I just put together: <http://imgur.com/IfxYZL2>

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peterwaller
For perspective, the ATLAS [1] experiment at the LHC records O(400 MB/sec). To
disk. Permanently. (With a duty cycle of something like ~0.5, in principle).
So, I guess that's a different ballgame than temporary acquisition for
decision making, but still. A decade ago it seemed like an insane amount of
data and now it is becoming more normal by the day..

ATLAS "sees" something more like 1.5 MB * 40 MHz, but the vast majority of it
is discarded after at most three seconds and there is zero suppression
involved. Most of "the full data for a collision" isn't even involved in the
decision making whether to keep a particular event.

[1] <http://atlas.ch/>

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Jabbles
A number I've found useful is that 1080p60 raw video is roughly 1Gb/s (using
YUV). So the car has the equivalent of 8 such cameras. Doesn't seem
unreasonable.

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HCIdivision17
The impressive bit is paying attention to that much meaningful data. It would
be extremely taxing to actively pay attention to that many screens for an
extended period of time; granted, filtering limits that, just as peripheral
vision does for us. I tend to take for granted the immense amount of data
processed subconsciously.

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salman89
What are things city planners can do from an infrastructure perspective so
that we can drop the amount of data that needs to analyzed in real time? For
example, can we use special paint for road lines in order to make the cost of
detection of road lanes lower?

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notatoad
keeping up with maintenance is probably the most important thing towards
making either self-driving or human driven cars safe. faded, worn, or poorly-
visible road markings and signage has got to be a huge challenge. Signage and
marking is already very well standardized and optimized for low ambiguity.

making anything special is probably just going to make things more difficult -
the cars have to be able to drive anywhere, regardless of whether the road has
the correct markings or not.

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salman89
I'll argue that signage and marking is already very well standardize and
optimized for low ambiguity for human vision, but we are able to build things
that humans cannot see but technology can.

The cars do have to be able to drive anywhere, but that doesn't mean we cannot
improve quality of service in other areas. Suppose we can build roads where
self driving cars can safely travel 100mph+ due to special infrastructure - I
do see that as a big benefit.

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jewel
For reference, the raw RGB data for 1080p video at 30 fps works out to 178
MB/s.

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croddin
How much data does a human driver gather per second?

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roc
From what I've seen on the highway? About 160 characters.

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DasIch
Does anyone know what happens with this data? Obviously it is analyzed in
realtime for driving but is it also stored for machine learning purposes? Is
that data shared so that other cars can take advantage of it?

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dsl
It's 1 GB/sec of data from sensors. Likely processed, but not stored.

To get 1 GB/sec write throughput in a moving car you would need to be using
some form of solid state storage, which would be pretty darn pricey over an
hour test drive.

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spellboots
It's likely far cheaper to store it than it would be to run the test again.
This is Google, they can certainly afford it – I'd be incredibly surprised if
they weren't storing it.

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dsl
Having developed autonomous vehicles in a previous career, I can tell you that
raw sensor data is far less useful than you think. By the time you are
starting to hand over controls to the system itself you are pretty damn
confident that your pipeline up to the control logic is all very solid.

Also, i'm not entirely sure what you think the costs involved in a test are?
We purchased about 20 acres of land for a test track, but that was the only
real expense involved in day to day development.

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Game_Ender
The true data rates (see my other posts) are most likely around 5-10 MB/s.
Which is so low the benefits out weigh the costs. After all, what if their is
an issue with the software? How are you going to reproduce without the logs,
especially on a R&D system like Google has (yes it's still R&D, they can't
even drive in the rain).

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dsl
Your "true data rate" is completely wrong. You have no idea at what frequency
they are converting analog to digital signals. You don't know for sure they
are using off the shelf sensors. Your ignoring data sources in your
calculations like OBD from the ECU or even GPS and AGPS data. etc etc.

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conductor
Computers get hacked evey now and then, I predict software assassinations in
the future, i.e. somebody hacks into a self-driving car, installs a software
component which will be activated at some point (i.e. when it identifies a
specific car/human and crash into it). Then it can auto-destruct, no evidence
left. I ask, who will be responsible?

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piyush_soni
Probably find the hacker? Just like what we do right now ...

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conductor
Here are my analyses:

When somebody hacks into one's computer, he can't do any physical harm, he
sure can steal money, spy on the victim, but he can't make the computer burn
or somehow harm the victim.

The computers that can be used for doing real damage (i.e. bomb activation,
drone command and control centre, etc.) are well protected from the hackers
(not connected to the internet and physicall inaccessable).

Controrary to this, the self-driving cars are potentially dangerous and will
be widely accessable and hackable, I see this as a real problem. We should not
allow a computer to do things that can kill people, and a computer-driven car
can kill people.

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shreyansj
> We should not allow a computer to do things that can kill people

Should we not allow computers (auto-pilot) to fly airplanes?

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conductor
Though your example is not the best (pilots are still there and can disable
the auto-pilot and drive in the manual mode) I will correct myself: I think we
should now allow computers, which can be easily accessed and potentially
altered/hacked, to do things that can kill people.

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piyush_soni
The thing is, computers as of today are dangerous enough already, and
depending on which ones you hack can cause enough destruction as of today. So
of course, security is important for all of them and I'm sure Google's self-
driving car will do something to be as secure as they can.

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cstavish
Would it be possible for someone to remotely interfere with the sensors on
this car, causing a malfunction or collision?

