
The most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars is distributed computing - tknaup
https://mesosphere.com/blog/2017/06/19/the-most-revolutionary-thing-about-self-driving-cars-isn-t-what-you-think/
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chrisfosterelli
So the most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars is onboard computing?
I guess that is the case if you happen to be a blog for a company who
specializes in that, but for everyone else the most revolutionary thing is
still the huge advances in computer vision and scene understanding via deep
learning...

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Animats
Self-driving cars don't really need to talk to "the cloud" much, if at all.
They need some map data, and they might contribute to map data. They can use
some traffic data, and can contribute to traffic data, which needs about as
much data as Waze. None of this is real-time; it can be seconds or minutes
behind.

Transmitting all the car's imagery to servers is an R&D activity. Google
downloads all that from their vehicles to train their machine learning
systems, but training is an offline process. Production vehicles might
occasionally upload "interesting" imagery they didn't recognize, or data from
situations where there was trouble, but there's no need to upload it all.

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sharemywin
How do 2 cars cruise 60 mph through a 4 way stop without talking with each
other.

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quasse
That's a bit different from talking to "the cloud" as the parent poster was
talking about. Cars will be using a short range radio technology like DSRC
(5.9ghz band) to communicate locally. The FCC and DOT are already pushing
mandates to have cars equipped with it.

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swolchok
Can we get this clickbait title changed? I even skimmed the article and I
still don't know what "the most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars"
is supposed to be.

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dang
I've taken a crack at it, but if anyone suggests a better title (i.e. more
accurate and neutral, and using language from the article itself), we can
change it again.

~~~
b_emery
How about: The most revolutionary thing about self-driving cars is the
underlying digital technology

FTA: "the true transformation isn’t the car, but the underlying digital
technology"

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Shivetya
No, the most revolutionary thing is the freedom from police harassment it will
lead to. Self driving cars will obey all local traffic laws to reach
certification and deny the police a power the abuse which is the right to use
a traffic stop pretextually. As in, stop you for speeding or running a light
to regardless if that was his real intent.

See [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/2017/06/16/how-self-driving-cars-could-determine-the-future-of-
policing/) for a better explanation than I can ever make. Think about it, the
abuse that can happen to minorities and poorer elements of society will be
much more difficult to execute. Even stealing from people under forfeiture
laws will be much more difficult if the officer cannot find a valid reason to
stop you for his otherwise invalid purpose

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Animats
_" (Cops) can follow self-driving cars all day but won’t be able to pull them
over."_

Yes, that's going to be interesting. I'm waiting for an event when some small-
town sheriff pulls over a Waymo self-driving car without justification, and
Waymo shows up in court with lawyers, full imagery, LIDAR scans, GPS info, a
complete video reconstruction of the event, and the browsing history of the
sheriff.

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jacquesm
For now they still have trouble staying in their lane, I don't see any lack of
reasons to pull them over, in fact I'd love to see them taken off the roads
entirely until such bugs have been ironed out. Public roads are not the place
to beta test software.

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Animats
Tesla's system is quite good at lane-keeping where there are clear lane lines.
Their problem is ramming into stationary obstacles in lane.

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jacquesm
Yes, but 'where there are clear lane lines' is exactly the problem. I know
plenty of places where there are no clear lane lines. If every one of those is
an accident waiting to happen then we first should invest in some kind of
minimal level road markings. And even then you'll have plenty of exceptions.

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ginko
If I didn't miscalculate then 4TB/8h is about 150MB/s. That's quite a bit but
I can't really say that's a shocking amount of image data to process.

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chrisfosterelli
Is there an actual source for that number at all? Intel did a marketing blog
post [0] where they said 4TB per 1.5HR, but without any actual explanation of
it, and since then a bunch of posts started using "per 8 hours".

I'm cautious of this number because the camera and sensor feeds are very often
reduced heavily in resolution and then passed for processing, so if they are
considering raw uncompressed sensor streams then that's not really
representative of the theoretical stored size of the data or the size of the
data actually processed.

[0]: [https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/self-driving-cars-
big-...](https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/self-driving-cars-big-meaning-
behind-one-number-4-terabytes/)

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Animats
In practice, far less data is saved. Tesla's production "Autopilot" saves and
uploads 15 frames when there's an "interesting event", according to the NTSB
report of a Tesla crash. (There's no imagery of the event where the vehicle
plowed under a semitrailer, because Tesla's autopilot didn't detect anything
that required braking before or during the crash.)

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wyc
I think this post should be renamed to something like "The Self-Driving Car's
Impact On Edge Computing." I thought that the most revolutionary thing about
self-driving cars would be the economic impact and resulting cultural changes,
which weren't really addressed in the article...

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sharemywin
Can't wait to see "wanna cry" at 60 MPH.

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synicalx
Previously all you had to worry about with your car was someone cutting your
breaks or stuffing some prawns in your A/C, but with "driverless" cars you
need to suddenly be concerned about Russian teenagers making you drive off a
cliff.

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polskibus
Is Mesos somehow used to deploy and orchestrate software in driverless cars?

