
Student's self-driving car tech wins Intel science fair - uladzislau
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/students-self-driving-car-tech-wins-intel-science-fair-1C9977186
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hahainternet
Once again the title of a post doesn't remotely represent its contents. In
this case a student's solution costing $71,000 less passed 47 of 50 self
imposed trials.

Google on the other hand have driven half a million miles with their solution.

Object recognition from video is probably the future, it's how we work after
all. The title though? Quite misleading.

~~~
hkmurakami
3/50 is an unacceptably high failure rate for automobiles... "in-factory"
failure rates are measured by PPM (parts per million) and in-field failures I
imagine must be in the order of "trillionths" in order to maintain reliability
across millions of cars driving tens of thousands of miles per year each.

edit: I don't mean to dismiss the student's accomplishments, but wanted to
bring some perspective

~~~
yk
3/50 is I think a meaningless failure rate. If the system overlooks 3 out of
every 50 pedestrians standing on the road by themselves and happily runs them
over, then it is certainly unacceptable. If there is a test, in which the
system is shown groups of pedestrians, in total 50 and it mistakes a group of
3 for a large immobile object, then it is probably acceptable, as long as it
always labels pedestrians as 'do not run over.'

And for the entire fleet of autonomous cars, the system does not need to be
safe. It just needs to be better than humans driving. Realistically to gain
acceptance they would need to be an order of magnitude better, which
translates to roughly 1 fatal accident per year per 10^5 self driving cars.
The current numbers for the US are 36000 fatalities and 250M cars.

~~~
DanBC
> And for the entire fleet of autonomous cars, the system does not need to be
> safe. It just needs to be better than humans driving.

I really hope this is true. I really want self-driving cars everywhere, now.
Road Traffic accidents kill very many people and this is an example of Google
using money and smarts to do good.

But looking at the way people deal with risk makes me wary.

People drive cars all the time even though driving is a bit risky. People
don't really understand how good or bad their own driving is. There's a bunch
of cognitive biases and rationalisations.

I hope people who are experts in communications are ready to dispel the FUD
backlash against self driving cars.

~~~
objclxt
> _But looking at the way people deal with risk makes me wary._

One of the problems is insurance. Right now, everyone needs to have insurance
to drive. If I accidentally hit a pedestrian or rear-end another driver they
can claim on my insurance.

Let's say that a software bug results in someone getting hit and injured by a
self-driving car. Who's liable? I am not sure that this is FUD, so much as a
genuine question. It is because driving is risky that drivers must have
insurance. Presumably most people would want self-driving cars to be insured
if there was a chance of failure (even planes, one of the safest forms of
transport, get insured against crashing).

We could very well have a situation where cars self drive, but drivers are
still expected to pay attention to the road and 'drive' to avoid liability.

I suspect there's going to be a _lot_ of lobbying on both sides before mass
deployment of self driving cars.

~~~
yk
I think we have quite some experience with insuring unsupervised systems.
After all, I am not supposed to supervise my coffee machine, but if it causes
a fire then my insurance has to pay.

On the other hand, I think that the politics of self driving cars could get
rather interesting, especially if widespread adoption is fast, say 5 years
until a self driving car is no longer extraordinary and 10 years until one
just assumes that a new car is self driving. Then I think we get a initial
phase, were they are seen as modern. After this, when every single accident
gets widely reported, I think it is possible that the public completely
splits, on one hand the traditionalists, who maintain that only a human should
drive. And on the other hand the people who say that self driving cars are
safer than humans. And the laws will shift according to the relative strength
of the two groups. ( With probably some rather ridiculous political
compromises in between, perhaps you are allowed to read a newspaper, but not
to drink coffee. )

------
ok_craig
So the 3d radar used by Google costs $75,000, but it seems unlikely they'd try
to sell the tech to the mass market at that price. How likely is it that this
is just the price of their R&D units, and that they'll have that reduced
significantly for production models? What do you HN-ers think is a reasonable
price for this kind of technology?

In any case, congrats to the student! His work sounds impressive.

~~~
netcan
IMO, there is _some_ market for private self driving cars at almost any price,
if it's usable and legal. The minimum volume at which they can be produced,
legalized may be too high though for any kind of niche luxury market though.

The path to substantially replacing human driven cars though is (I think) some
sort of driverless taxis. The price where driverless taxis take over is
probably somewhere around where the cost per km of driverless is lower. That
could be pretty high. Assuming other operational costs are similar to regular
taxis $150k-$200k for a driverless vehicle that lasts 3-5 years sounds viable.

Driverless cars have been sitting around the edge of our consciousness as
"experimental but interesting" for a long time. But, the economic changes they
introduce are potentially enormous, wide. I think there's a good chance that
privately owned cars become rare, for example. General purpose cars may go
away. A golf cart is just fine for going 5-10 miles in urban traffic.

This space is big enough for Google/Ford/IBM sized giants to emerge in. Makers
of the cars, makers of the driver, makers of the UI, operators of the taxi
companies, who knows what else. Maybe makers of digital roadsigns. Maybe
selecting destinations from a screen creates the kind of effect Adwords has
had.

~~~
devrelm
> A golf cart is just fine for going 5-10 miles in urban traffic.

I hadn't thought of this. Imagine Google buying garages all over NYC and
filling them with driverless Smart cars (or similar). A button is added to
your phone's Google Maps app, so that in addition to "Get Directions" and
"Navigate", you also have the option of "Pick Me Up".

So, you search for where you want to go on Google Maps and tap "Pick Me Up",
with the option of telling it how many people are in your party. Within 5
minutes enough Smart cars for your party stop within 20 feet of you, even if
you've already started walking, thanks to your phone's GPS. You get in the
car, which has no steering wheel, and touch "Go" on the in-dash touch-screen
to start the car driving to your destination.

I could get used to that.

~~~
netcan
Exactly.

Driverless is not just doing things the way we have been but without operating
the car. It changes everything. The economics. The culture. etc.

------
ivan444
Everytime I see a news report from a field that I'm familiar with, I get
disappointed...

Definitely, congrats to the student! He really did astonishing work. But,
nothing that could be useful in production. As I'm familiar with use of
computer vision in traffic from academic and industrial point of view, I know
situations this system has to deal with. And, I know what are the state-of-art
results in that area. Computer vision is heavily used in traffic, but, self
driving car is still out of its reach.

~~~
DanBC
I'd be really interested to hear some of the problems, and solutions to those
problems, that computer vision has with self driving cars.

It'd also be interesting to hear about the difference between well funded
laboratories (Google); Student labs; and commercial products.

It'd make an excellent post for HN if you ever have the time.

~~~
linker3000
Some commercial stuff on sensor technology and object detection
implementations:

[http://www.conti-
online.com/www/automotive_de_en/themes/comm...](http://www.conti-
online.com/www/automotive_de_en/themes/commercial_vehicles/safety/adas/)

There's also a lot of work going on with driverless technology.

Disclaimer: I work for a Conti subsidiary that develops camera-based surround
view and object detection systems but not directly on the products (IT
Support)

<http://www.asl360.co.uk/>

------
stevenrace
So 'OpenCV' + a webcam is supposed to replace Lidar?

Props to this kid for being forward thinking, but this is a rather uninformed
news article.

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netcan
A little bit of a meta-point:

The article, like most articles uses an attention grabbing headline from the "
_$71,000 cheaper_ " point. The point of that is to give your brain a low
resolution picture of the story. Enough to interest you and get you to read.
Regardless of how you feel about that, if it worked (you are reading the
article) it's best to forget about the conclusions/objections you started
developing from the headline after you read the article. They're just a
distraction.

Obviously, this isn't a drop in replacement for Google's system. Google
probably haven't even been optimized their system for price anyway.

The interesting points here IMO is that (a)Google system cost ~$75k (b) a
student was able to cheaply play in this space and get somewhere and (c) he
did it by replacing the expensive 3d radar with a cheap 3d radar + webcam.

------
robomartin
From my vantage point the utility of self driving cars is in highway driving.
I don't really care for auto city driving.

In that context perhaps the problem is somewhat simpler if one assumes the
infrastructure will be modified to help these cars. A lot could be done if
each car communicated with roadside beacons and other locating systems. Some
will voice concerns about privacy. I couldn't care less. Your movements are
already far more traceable than they were fifty or a hundred years ago.

If I could manually get on the Golden State; engage auto pilot and be alerted
a couple of miles before my exit in San Jose I'd be thrilled. I wouldn't even
care if the thing pinged me every 15 minutes to see if I am awake.

~~~
ics
This doesn't help anyone's paranoia coming from _robo_ martin! (Kidding aside,
I think your profile cv got a little mangled. Try double line-breaks and log
out for a sec so you can see it.)

Personally I would much rather have better above-ground transportation in the
city than on the highway, but at that point I should be wishing for self-
driving buses.

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chaostheory
The HN title is really bad and just plain misleading. It needs to be changed
to the original news article title. The student didn't take a Google prototype
and modify it. He built his own car and software. I'm pretty sure none of it
was from Google.

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jchook
If we relinquish control of our automobiles to a central system, even busy
intersections would not require vehicles to slow down or speed up more than ~5
mph to all safely pass through. Just one example of how auto-autos could
achieve an unprecedented balance of safety and efficiency.

My question is, how far beneath the current human-driver accident rate will
the AI-driver accident rate need to be before you accept that it is a better
driver than you?

~~~
andyakb
I think the language used to push these needs to be centered around protecting
good drivers from all the other bad drivers. "You aren't the problem, _they_
are the problem and these cars are simply able to better anticipate the
mistakes others will make."

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Apocryphon
So you pair up this student with the high schooler who created the
supercapacitor, and they'll disrupt a Google-Tesla alliance years before it's
even conceived.

------
lekanwang
Has anyone located a more detailed project description or paper? Using camera
imagery is definitely nothing new, and in many autonomous systems with
radar/lidar (including the Google car), cameras still supplement the lidar
imagery. I'm wondering how he improved on the current research.

------
short_circut
Does anyone know how he addressed the issue of bright lights hitting the
camera sensor? or too low of light levels for he camera sensor to pick up
quickly? I imagine that was the reason a $70,000 dollar 3d radar was even used
in the first place.

~~~
vlasev
What if one uses cameras set at different sensitivity, kind of like how one
makes HDR photos?

~~~
short_circut
This would reduce the frame rate, and even HDR has its limitations. But who
knows. Maybe.

------
venomsnake
By the time the regulatory hurdles are solved (5-10 years in my opinion) the
expensive tech will be 300$.

With so entrenched industry and distrusting public it will be uphill battle.

~~~
ericd
Insurance companies will charge a good bit less for insuring self driving
cars, since they're already statistically safer than most human drivers. I
imagine that that will help out adoption.

~~~
linker3000
I admire your optimism

(not sure if serious)

~~~
ericd
I am serious, they've already gone over a quarter million miles without any
accidents that weren't someone else's fault. I'm not sure if that's better
than average yet, but it seems like it's close if it's not already better.

------
stickydink
Is this really a feasible solution though? Surely there is a _huge_ limitation
of just using object recognition and a web cam ...

What happens at night?

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ck2
I sure hope self-driving cars have dual redundant systems.

Segfaults are going to have a really bad result.

~~~
timthorn
It's a shame that the world of IT has got us to the point of assuming system
crashes are normal for computer systems. We can build highly reliable
platforms - they do cost more, but reliability is an understood challenge.

~~~
ck2
Even the space shuttle (well, _especially_ the space shuttle) had four
redundant computers.

------
janlukacs
Felicitari Ionut!

------
cremnob
I wonder how cheap every other car manufacturer that has been working on self-
driving technology can make it. I also wonder if tech geeks even realize they
have been, especially when Google's "self-driving cars" is cited as a reason
for Google's continued growth.

