
Show HN: Autodrome – Framework for Development of Self-Driving Cars - vojtamolda
https://github.com/vojtamolda/autodrome/
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syntaxing
This is super cool, especially how it is done as a side project. It's
resourceful using a game as the physics simulator. I wonder how it compares to
Microsoft's [1] and Udacity's [2] implementation.

[1][https://github.com/Microsoft/AirSim](https://github.com/Microsoft/AirSim)
[2] [https://github.com/udacity/self-driving-car-
sim](https://github.com/udacity/self-driving-car-sim)

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vojtamolda
I think a fair comparison would be to AirSim [1] and Carla [3]. These are much
more mature projects and are similar to Autodrome in a lot of ways. As far as
I know Udacity's simulator is done their class and it's not being actively
developed.

\+ Both [1] and [3] have much fewer assets (like 3D models of houses,
factories, bridges, cars, trucks, and so on) you'd have to buy them on the
Unreal/Unity model marketplace and it still wouldn't be enough. Autodrome can
take advantage of almost entire Europe and a third of USA at 1:20 scale.

\+ Autodrome has a sparse map representation that is really easy to randomly
fuzz. I.e. it's easy to shift a segment of the road a little bit and see how
the algorithm would react to the fuzzed scenario. I believe this is only way
how to achieve robust agents and effectively prevent testing on the training
set.

\- Biggest disadvantage of Autodrome is a lack of access to in-game dynamic
NPCs (like other trucks, cars or pedestrians). As far as I know there's no API
for this. Without help (or a lot of very fragile memory hacking) from the
developers of the game this feature is very hard to achieve and both [1] and
[3] already have it.

[3] [http://carla.org](http://carla.org)

PS: Keep in mind that I'm the developer of Autodrome so I my objectivity is
very questionable.

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syntaxing
Thank you for the detailed response! Is there any thoughts on ground truth
segmantic segmentation camera view? Simulated lidar data would be super
awesome too.

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vojtamolda
Both are also not easy like the dynamic NPCs. I think Carla [3] supports both
raytraced lidar and segmented rendering now so this is another minus “-“
point.

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olafduckmark
I love how this is based on a game. One might argue that software development
was really accelerated by games just as the hardware development was
accelerated by the military (by hardware I mean physical stuff, like materials
etc.).

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snrji
Hardware development was accelerated by games, too.

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kortilla
And software accelerated by the military (tcp/ip).

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singularity2001
With a pathetic ROI: Had these trillions been invested in academia or
startups, the world would surely be much further.

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syntaxing
Not sure if I entirely agree with this. A lot of the luxuries we have now were
enhanced for the military. For instance, airplanes (aileron and jet turbine
development), internet, semiconductor, and even PCBs (or mores specifically,
the predecessor Hybrids ICs). A good amount of grants actually come from the
Navy and Army for research grants in the academia. Though I did go to grad
school for Mech Eng so we probably saw more grants from the military because
of that.

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bluGill
That is a logical fallacy. Sure a lot of things happened because of the
military, but what didn't happen because we were busy on the military things.
There is no way to know.

If we had spent as much on genetic research as we did on the moon landing we
could have had fire breathing dragons. Think of all the spin offs from that
that we are just starting to see now, we could have had them sooner.

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msadowski
Nice project! I will keep following your progress.

Would you mind if at some point I share your project at
[https://weeklyrobotics.com](https://weeklyrobotics.com) ?

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vojtamolda
Not at all!

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CSL144
Nice! This looks really cool. Look forward to see how this develops.

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carapace
(Can we call them "auto-autos"? Please?)

