
Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform - KKKKkkkk1
https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo
======
rwmj
These open source driving platforms are an interesting way to test out the
limits of liability disclaimers on software. This license has:

    
    
       8. Limitation of Liability. In no event and under no legal theory,
          whether in tort (including negligence), contract, or otherwise,
          unless required by applicable law (such as deliberate and grossly
          negligent acts) or agreed to in writing, shall any Contributor be
          liable to You for damages, including any direct, indirect, special,
          incidental, or consequential damages of any character arising as a
          result of this License or out of the use or inability to use the
          Work (including but not limited to damages for loss of goodwill,
          work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all
          other commercial damages or losses), even if such Contributor
          has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

~~~
nsxwolf
Count me out on ever contributing to a project like this. I really don't want
to be a test case.

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mwfunk
This isn't because it's unreliable or because you (the developer) would be a
test case. I mean, I don't know anything about this project so I can't vouch
for it, but pretty much every open source project in this area is obligated to
have this kind of verbiage and it has nothing to do with the quality of the
project.

This is so you can contribute to an open source project without worrying about
some random person suing you. This is to protect the contributors, which
includes anyone who submits changes, which would include you. If you see an
autonomous driving project that doesn't have language like this, that's the
project you want to stay away from, not this one.

~~~
nsxwolf
Maybe I wasn't clear. I don't want to be a test case for the _disclaimer_.

Just because you write it down doesn't make it so. Even if a lawyer wrote it.

~~~
mwfunk
But if there's no disclaimer at all, then someone can sue you, even if the
whole case is BS and the software you contributed to wasn't at fault. It's
still something you'd have to deal with. Never contribute to something that
doesn't have this sort of disclaimer- it means both that you would be leaving
yourself open to lawsuits (justified or not), and that the people running the
project don't know what they're doing.

If an open source project in this area doesn't have a disclaimer like this,
the people running that project are clueless, and if they're clueless about
that, they're almost certainly clueless about the much more complicated
technical stuff, so it wouldn't be a project which would be desirable to
contribute to in the first place.

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Animats
Autonomous driving based purely on machine learning from vision is scary.
Machine learning is, after all, a statistical method. It's going to do really
great most of the time, and really badly once in a while.

~~~
pd0wm
The exact same can be said about human drivers. Why do we demand that
autonomous driving is 100% safe? I would be completely fine with autonomous
cars that sometimes crash, but are still less likely to do so than with human
drivers.

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nsxwolf
We accept that human drivers kill thousands upon thousands of people. We won't
tolerate deaths from automation even in the single digits.

That may not be rational but it's also unlikely to change.

~~~
devy
Yet, Robots and automated machines (not the autonomous vehicles) still
killed/injured a few dozen people since 1984 according to U.S. Department of
Labor. [1]

[1]:
[https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/AccidentSearch.search?acc_keyw...](https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/AccidentSearch.search?acc_keyword=%22Robot%22&keyword_list=on)

Worldwide stats will be far more than that. We've accepted it, haven't we?

~~~
nsxwolf
They're freak accidents. We wouldn't tolerate deaths day in and day out to the
tune of 40,200 in the US in 2016.

..too lazy to find and paste stat from mobile

~~~
devy
You said we won't accept those deaths "even in the single digit", not 40k+
deaths, which is a few orders of magnitude higher.

Also I don't understand why we would accept freak accidents but not other
accidents? An accdient is an accident. A death is tragic regardless what
caused it.

~~~
nsxwolf
We don't accept the robot deaths. Any time one happens people scramble to
"make sure this never happens again". When someone dies in a car accident, we
yawn.

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bradhe
How many more projects are going to get launched with the name "apollo"?

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heretoo
Only until we have an ApolloGate scandal.

~~~
kbaker
Or until the Apollo 1 release....

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siliconc0w
It'd be cool to have some sort of independent 'weissman score' style benchmark
for these systems. Maybe just RMSE or similar against ground truth
steering/throttle over a battery of different environments/weather/terrain. It
looks like it uses LIDAR and Baidu has a pretty impressive AI team so it'd be
really interesting to see how they stack up against, say, Comma AI's openpilot
or Tesla's autopilot.

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the_common_man
This is by the Baidu AI team.

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rottyguy
I'd imagine this could work on a small fleet of miniature cars (rc size?). A
model town/city could be built with various obstacles for training a large
amount of the ai, I would think.

~~~
dbcurtis
The autonomous racing league that meets in Oakland is doing exactly that.
Typically the R/C car uses wifi to connect back to an AWS instance for the
heavy lifting.

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jnbiche
> Typically the R/C car uses wifi to connect back to an AWS instance for the
> heavy lifting.

Wow, and the latency is manageable for the task?

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koffiezet
Well, the average human reaction time is 215ms, which would be considered
unacceptable in online-gaming, where 50ms would already be on the high side of
things, I normally see 30ms or so.

Let's assume 50ms or 20 updates per second, and a car driving at 40m/s or
about 145kmh / 90mph, the reaction time of the of the computer is after the
car moved 2 meters (about 6.5 feet). A human would only react after about 8.5
meters (about 28 feet) - quite the difference.

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ingenieroariel
The list of partners looks quite interesting, including Ford, Bosch and
Delphi.

It is apparently based on ROS like Autoware.

~~~
sbarre
And so many Chinese automotive companies I'd never heard of!

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kensoh
Interesting, surprised that this isn't submitted yet. This is the project by
Baidu. Thanks OP!

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alexhornbake
Maybe I'm missing something, is this is a platform strictly for developing ML
techniques? Or is it intended to actual run in a vehicle... on ubuntu, in a
docker container?

I'm no expert, but I would think you'd want a realtime OS for this. Right?

~~~
sgillen
More likely is that the car would have a Linux box running this software that
connects to one or more micro controllers. The micro controllers handle any
sensors/actuators with real time requirements, and may be running an RTOS or
just bare metal.

~~~
alexhornbake
Hmmm, thanks for the additional info. Still seems like a bad idea. Based on
your assertion, what happens when the RTOS/microcontroller does not receive a
"decision" before the scheduling deadline? Many things can hang a Linux box...
the reason why RTOS exists is because nothing can stop the scheduler. I would
be very curious to hear from the Apollo developers. What is the intended
platform and developer audience? Is this intended to actually run in a
vehicle?

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zaro
There are way to make Linux an RTOS, including work on pushing RT
deterministic scheduler in the mainline[1].

[1]
[https://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page](https://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page)

~~~
alexhornbake
Ahhh... Found it... The project has it's own Kernel. I stand corrected. This
is super cool. [https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo-
kernel](https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo-kernel)

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nnm
Is it functional as of today? The perception directory is almost empty (only
skeleton).

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beachbum8029
Awesome. Now to just get a couple LIDAR cameras...

~~~
dbcurtis
Cheapest Lidar I know of with reasonable quality is a Neato vacuum cleaner. Go
to Target, get a vacuum, give it a lidar-ectomy, throw away the sucky parts,
and you still have the cheapest LIDAR in town. 350 pionts, 5HZ scan rate.
Indoor range about 5m, outdoor 2+m with a sun shade, accuracy at 5m about +/\-
2cm. Great for hobby robots. Totally not sufficient to drive a car at highway
speeds.

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acover
Would this work on an electric bicycle?

Edit: or more stable tri-cycle/quad-cycle

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sbierwagen
There have been various autonomous 2-wheeled vehicles, though riding an
autonomous vehicle that uses lean steering, like a bike, would seem to entail
a little bit more excitement than I'd want to have.

~~~
sharpercoder
Imagine a driverless bicycle driving back to its base after being used byw the
renter. A flywheel keeps its balance while stopped before traffic (lights),
the electromotor thrusts it.

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vswar
An open autonomous driving platform - seems great.

