
Daimler tests self-driving truck on German highway - spking
http://news.yahoo.com/daimler-tests-self-driving-truck-german-highway-214036272.html
======
sokoloff
I'd be curious to know what progress they've made since I worked on VITA-2 as
a Daimler intern as part of PROMETHEUS back in 1992. We also had self-driving
on highway with a driver sitting attentive next to a red E-stop button to
revert to manual control.

We couldn't get the bus to the highway autonomously, but once there, it could
self-drive. (I'm sure it's a lot better now, and the hardware much smaller (we
had 3 40U racks of equipment) but I'm curious.)

~~~
RealityVoid
Well, this sounds really interesting, I was just reading the wikipedia entry
on Erns Dickmans
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns)
this and the project was truly fascinating. What did you do there? What did
you end up doing afterwards?

~~~
sokoloff
It was amazingly interesting. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering, but I
taught myself programming at age 7 on an old TRS-80 and have basically only
worked in computing my whole life.

At Daimler, I worked on the computer vision system, doubling the throughput
(by adding more processing nodes primarily). IIRC, we went from ~12.5 Hz to
about 25Hz. That was fairly straightforward, but I also added a lot of inter-
frame aware filtering, created some graphical output changes to help us better
understand what the system was doing internally at any given time. That was
all in Occam on transputers. I think each card held two nodes and cost about
$25K. Each node was about a 486-25.

We had a couple mile stretch of abandoned Autobahn a few miles away from our
lab building that we would test on about once a week. (Other teams also needed
the vehicle to test their systems.) We also took it to an abandoned airfield
outside Munich for longer, higher-speed tests, and demos, and took it to Turin
a few times for tests and pan-PROMETHEUS demos and world record runs. On a few
of those test sessions, if our system was working well, I was also able to
pitch in with other teams on control system algorithms, a radar ranging
system, and lane/sign detection vision system work.

(This is all 23+ years old, so forgive some minor discrepancies.) It was a
great experience all around! (You also got me to send a LinkedIn invite to my
boss there, Dr Andreas Kuehnle, now at Bendix, so thanks for the followup Qs.)

When I came back and graduated, I interviewed at the US Big 3 (back when there
were 3, they were big, and US... :) ) and a Ford engineer urged me to "go
anyplace other than US auto". He said if I wanted to come back into
motorsports or high-perf/speciality street vehicles that I was better off
doing something else for 5 years and applying back directly into those units.
I wish I had that guy's name and address as it was great advice.

Went to a few startups that failed, went to a motorsports simulation game
company that was successful and bought by Sierra-Online, then went to a
satellite office of DEShaw (a hedge fund), bounced around in finance, and
finally ended up at Vistaprint a few years before we went public in 2005 and
I'm still there and crazy happy.

I welcome any followup questions (for HN sake, followups on your former
question are more interesting than the latter, but I'll answer either...)

~~~
RealityVoid
Heh, I graduated as a mechatronics engineer(so my education leans mostly
towards the mechanical Eng. side) and wound up as a firmware engineer for the
auto industry. These days I'm quite staggered, frankly, how inefficient the
auto industry is at writing good firmware and would love the chance to chip at
something more useful than what I'm doing right now.

I was asking what you wound up doing afterwards because I was personally
curious what career trajectory one can expect going from such cool
projects.(esp at that time)

It's really curious how this bit of history isn't that well known. I've only
just heard about it 3 days ago. Since they have been working at it since the
80's, I would have expected Daimler to have the lead in the sdc game. How
brilliant were the people working on it at the time? How come they didn't try
to hit the market with what they had? I guess it wasn't feasible in '92, but I
see the project running till' at least 2005, so I guess they could have tried
putting some commercial applications of it out.

~~~
sokoloff
Hardware cost (and size/power) was the big issue. VITA-2 was literally a 9m+
bus and was jammed full of equipment. It surely wasn't a limit of brilliance
(but like anything, hard and well-directed work is a crucial ingredient).

I believe that you could directly trace some of the lab work our group did to
Distronic (adaptive cruise control) and Parktronic (parking assist) in
Mercedes road cars over the years. I doubt any of my personal work can be
directly traced to a shipping feature in a production car, but I still learned
a ton (and I believe contributed a lot as well).

I'd love to learn more about auto firmware, especially as I've gotten into
hardware and electronics a bit more as a hobbyist, but my sense is that the
auto industry cares deeply about COGS and that probably drives a lot of their
seemingly inefficient decision-making. (Firmware writing is NRE, module and
ECU production is COGS and if you sell enough units, COGS dominates.)

I don't know you can extrapolate from anyone's career path, due to the insane
amount of randomness in outcomes and choices, but if you're "good with
computers", there's probably never been a better time to be in the field,
especially since I'd basically do it for free (given what I do for hobbies).

"The grass is always greener" is a very real thing, so don't be in a huge
hurry to jump fields/sub-fields/companies assuming that it's just your
particular company that has flaws. They all do. ;)

~~~
RealityVoid
The thing idn't that clear-cut in the COGS vs NRE area. From what I've seen,
the firmware for each car model is VERY customized and for each generation
they're solving the same problems all over again.

At one time I was writing some firmware and it was very fun, but it felt sort
of pointless, since I'm sure someone else should have already solved that
problem at least once in the past in the same company. So they keep
reinventing the wheel, with each product, with each car.

It was very educational for me, but I'd love that once something is good,
let's build on it... make it better, expand it. It could use from more
transparency or some (internal, in the least) transition to a kind of
opensource model within the company, where the good code survives and evolves
and the bad one gets left behind...

------
knight17
This is a comment made at Yahoo news page:

    
    
      Driving trucks has been a good paying job for lots of people
     in the past. Between robot trucks and robot burger flippers,
     everything might be cheaper, but still people won't be able
     to afford anything.
    

We are certainly moving to uncharted waters now.

After all the automation—both mechanical and software affecting service
(brain?) and labour (brawn?) industries—would there be need for humans to get
things done?

~~~
outside1234
Like all automation (the wheel, the combine, ...) it pushes humans up the
value chain. There is no market for coolies any more either, just like there
won't be for truck drivers in 15 years.

The thing that is different is this time is that we have run the course on
almost all unskilled labor now.

The implication of that is that people need to move up the value chain or
perish.

~~~
jacquesm
The very clear issue is that not everybody can or wants to be pushed up the
value chain and 'perishing' is not an option for large numbers of people in a
society without that society itself perishing.

------
Chefkoochooloo
That is excellent news for road safety! I remember working with companies on
lane departure detection systems back in 2007. We have come a long way... Next
steps will include to have vehicle convoys where vehicles sync together to
drive at same speed.

~~~
jacquesm
> That is excellent news for road safety!

For that to be a certainty we need a lot more data than what is available
today. This is very very early in the deployment of this kind of technology to
make such blanket statements. It _may_ be excellent news for road safety.

------
kaonashi
Same with many charities as well; they're created for PR & tax purposes, not
to serve any actual public good.

~~~
mschuster91
Not in this case. The "last mile" of freight distribution currently needs
trucks (just imagine a city full of freight train tracks), and if these trucks
could operate on their own, the likelihood of truck-bicyclist accidents alone
could drop massively - not to mention the massive reduction in freight costs
because the most expensive part (the human) is eliminated.

~~~
aianus
> because the most expensive part (the human) is eliminated.

I think the fuel (6 mpg!) and capital costs of the truck are considerably
larger than the wages of the man driving it.

~~~
hugh4
Perhaps once labour costs are eliminated you can also improve efficiency by
driving more slowly (in a truck-only lane on the freeway). You could also
draft just behind other trucks. Finally I suppose you could be whatever shape
is most efficient for slipping your cargo through the air without needing to
worry about accommodating a pesky human.

------
sdrothrock
With all of the advances in self-driving cars, I wonder why we don't have
research into self-driving trains.

~~~
thrownaway2424
It's a matter of scale. A single train operator hauls thousands of people or
thousands of tons of material. Getting rid of that one person hardly gains you
everything. On the other hand a truck driver hardly hauls anything, maybe ten
or twenty tons of cargo per driver.

