
How Drive.ai Is Mastering Autonomous Driving with Deep Learning - amaks
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/how-driveai-is-mastering-autonomous-driving-with-deep-learning
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Judgmentality
It's been 10 years since the DARPA Urban Challenge. Maybe it's time for
another self-driving car competition?

One possibility is an automaker that wants self-driving car technology would
agree to acquire the winner for a certain price, but this would already
exclude most of the big players (Waymo, Cruise, Argo, Delphi, Uber).

Another possibility is the competition is funded by the big auto corporations
in order to advertise who has the best technology, similar to racing events.

The biggest benefit from a public competition like this would be to improve
public perception of self-driving cars so they're more receptive to the
technology (and more likely to buy it).

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Fricken
The first Darpa challenges were great, but we don't need these things now free
market competition is now doing it's job accelerating the development of AVs
as fast as it can possibly be accelerated. There are things like Roborace, but
the irony is that anyone capable of making an awesome autonomous race vehicle
has much more important things to do.

Google, GM, Ford, Uber- they're at the point where throwing more money at the
problem can't help it. Amongst start-ups that have yet to be swallowed up by a
big carmaker or tech company, Drive.ai is by far the most exciting.

I mean, if a billion dollars (Cruise, Otto, Argo.ai) is the going rate for a
demonstrably talented autonomous driving startup, the Drive.ai is already
worth at least that much. They've got the most futuristic approach, and
they're moving the fastest.

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unityByFreedom
Independent testing is lacking.

Right now all we have is marketing. This leads many to believe that Tesla is
ahead in self driving tech, for example. You may or may not perceive that as a
problem.

Regardless, I agree with GP that there is a space for independent testing. It
could spur development further in the right direction. There is lots of
investment now, though the target varies. Developing some tests could help
consumers see what types of autonomy they want to buy, and give developers a
chance to succeed in different areas, earning more unique awards than "best
self driving car". We haven't established a public understanding of SDC
testing criteria yet. I'm not clear whether developers agree on a set of tests
either.

It's an odd state of affairs. Testing ought to be the first thing software
engineers design.

California DMV does testing, but the results aren't sexy or widely known.
Companies participate to varying degrees depending on how they feel it would
affect their brand. Uber left CA and Tesla's participation was minimal. Also,
the reports are only annual which seems slow these days.

We could use something like the league of women voters did for presidential
debates, or like Netflix did for machine learning. Get the SDC community to
scientifically show who really has the chops, and not just rely on marketing
and branding!

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Fricken
The California DMV doesn't do any testing, all the companies with a testing
permit in California self-report.

I'm not sure how one would would even go about independent testing, now or
ever. Gill Pratt, head of Toyota's SV research lab points out that to have
statistically meaningful data about the safety of an autonomous vehicle, you'd
need to do about 8.5 billion miles of real world testing on public roads. Of
course, by the time one gets to the 8 billionth mile of testing, the early
data will be irrelevant because whatever autonomous OS is being tested will
have undergone considerable maturation and development in that time frame. I
doubt there will ever be a huge amount of 3rd party auditing.

“You can apply for a permit to deploy when… you as a manufacturer believe the
vehicles are ready to go,” says Bernard Soriano, Deputy Director of the
California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). “The traditional system of not
wanting to be sued crazy controls when manufacturers will do this.”[1]

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/.WMMMBzJ_sqk.twitter)

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unityByFreedom
> I'm not sure how one would would even go about independent testing, now or
> ever.

That's a bit short sighted isn't it? Certainly the companies themselves have
internal testing in order to help them judge, for example, whether some sensor
data is useful or not.

I disagree strongly that the only valid test comes from consumer-driving.
Plenty of things on the market go through trials before being sold to the
public, be it toys, drugs or cars.

I'm not calling for regulated testing by the government. Just something cool
that can get more people, even the companies themselves, excited about self
driving vehicles.

George Hotz could do it. He knows the tech and has the popularity to get
people's attention. Or, Chris Urmson, any others who previously participated
in DARPA, or any existing SDC company.

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deepnotderp
Doesn't every SDC company use deep learning though?

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kyleschiller
Yes, this is marketing.

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EmployedRussian
The article addresses this question:

“I think this is the first time autonomous driving has been approached so
strongly from a deep learning perspective,” says Tandon. “This is in contrast
to a traditional robotics approach,” continues Carol Reiley, cofounder and
President. “A lot of companies are just using deep learning for this component
or that component, while we view it more holistically,” says Reiley.

and

"This is why many companies working on vehicle autonomy are more comfortable
with using traditional robotics approaches for decision making, and restrict
deep learning to perception. They reason: If your system makes an incorrect
decision, you’d want to be able to figure out exactly what happened, and then
make sure that the mistake won’t be repeated."

“This is a big problem,” Tandon acknowledges.

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deepnotderp
Nvidia has been demonstrating end to end deep learning for a long
time....Andrew Ng's talks imply that Baidu's SDCs are also based on end to
end.

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ibrahima
Hmm, it might be worth noting that two of the cofounders of Drive.ai are
Andrew Ng's PhD student and his wife. Not sure what that means in terms of how
much, if any, collaboration there is between Drive.ai and Baidu.

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posterboy
Does the site really show an advertisement (for an online graduate program)
and remove the node completely before I can even read to the end?

