

One Thing That Makes Google's Self-Driving Cars Work - nealabq
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/all-the-world-a-track-the-trick-that-makes-googles-self-driving-cars-work/370871/

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jwise0
If you're wondering what the One Trick is to decide whether it's worth reading
the article, it's that their maps of Mountain View are more detailed than
normal maps: they're full world-level models of all of the spaces and areas of
streets in the city. (The article also touches on general machine learning
strategies, rather than hard-wired functionality.)

If you wish a less irritating title, then, I'd put it at: "Google-scale
machine learning and data collection is the thing that makes Google's self-
driving cars work"

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ctdonath
TL;DR:

1\. They map the streets to _inches_ , right down to the height of the curb.

2\. They record prior trips in such detail, data-mine it appropriately, and
then hand-massage the results.

So far they've done this in little more than the Mountain View area. Having
done the hard work in that limited region to that much detail, they now can
derive how to automate the process. I imagine their recent high-detail-mapping
"phone" will be a key part of this, tracking minute aspects of how someone
travels from A to B, and merging that info with many other identical &
overlapping trips so the cars can make the trip darn near blind, with a little
help from monitoring immediacies (like actual position, pedestrian detection,
weather, etc).

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morganw
Odd that the article mentions Oakland as one of the places you couldn't use a
Google car because the New Yorker's article mentions Levandowski driving
Berkeley to Mtn. View through Oakland via 880.

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all)

They also hinted that the cars drive over the speed limit to match prevailing
traffic.

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aetherson
My understanding is that they need the ultra-specific maps for the (more
challenging) city-street driving, not the (less challenging) highway driving.

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mempko
HERE maps has been mapping the world at this precision for years. Look up HERE
HD map and our partnership with Mercedes. Disclaimer, I work for HERE and my
opinions are my own and I don't speak for the company. It is just frustrating
to read articles that make statements similar to, and i am paraphrasing here,
"there is possibly no other company other than google that can get this level
of detail".

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gfodor
i think the sentiment isn't that other companies can't gather that scale of
data, but that they probably are unable to tie the whole stack together and
apply state of the art algorithms to it. it seems that the self driving car
project is formulated as one giant online learning problem. google seems to
stand head and shoulders above pretty much anyone when it comes to running
production-quality, large scale, online learning algorithms.

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gfunk911
This also seems like a good place for some 80/20 value. Doing this for all
highways and major roads would be a small fraction of all roads, but likely
cover a very large percentage of miles driven. Car drives 90% of the way, and
you take over for the first and last couple minutes. Or trucks drive a known
route, and somebody meets them at the end.

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peeters
I was thinking the same thing. Sure it'd be cool to have your car park itself
and all, but I don't mind doing that myself. The value is in dealing with the
monotony of commuting or taking a road trip. If I could be doing something
else on middle 95% of that 150km trip I take every couple of weeks, that'd be
awesome.

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mchusma
The article made it seem Nissan's engineers couldn't fathom not using car-to-
car communication to enable autonomous driving.

I found it hard to believe anyone act that way. Relying on car-to-car
communication would create an enormous chicken and egg problem.

I suspect the author overstated the level of disbelief here.

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WalterBright
I wonder about things like:

1\. sudden road changes, like the appearance of potholes

2\. avoiding puddles which can cause one side of your car to hydroplane

3\. taking a 'rain line' when the road is wet. (Traffic tends to put slight
ruts in the road. They're enough to make slight puddles. If you drive slightly
off-center, your tires will be on the high spots and less likely to
hydroplane, that's that 'rain line'.)

4\. avoiding icy spots

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wffurr
That's why the car has a ton of sensors all over it. For modeling all the
dynamic behavior occurring on or around the previously-modeled road.

It's much easier for the on-board processing to start with a baseline and then
figure out how the world differs than to start from scratch from the sensors.

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WalterBright
Detecting puddles can be awfully tricky, they can be lighter than the road or
darker than the road, depending on the angle of the light.

There are other issues, too, such as I've been behind gravel trucks that were
constantly dropping gravel, and other vehicles with a clearly unstable load
that I get away from. I also give wide berth to cars that don't appear to be
driven in a stable manner.

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stormbrew
Really this is something that almost everyone who drives does subconsciously
every time they drive. Driving in a new environment is stressful and more
difficult because you haven't mapped out the terrain and so you're working
entirely from what you see and not from a virtual model in your own head.

Obviously the Google car's data collection is more extreme and precise than
that which happens in your head, but that seems like it's mostly just because
they don't yet entirely know what they need.

And this, in the long run, will be part of the advantage of these cars once
they get the process more automated. I expect that when you can finally buy
one of these cars they'll have a (perhaps opt-out) system where terrain data
is collected and merged into Google's own system to provide better data for
future drives for not just you, but everyone else as well.

And that'll be one of the reasons it'll be safer. If also a whole bunch more
creepy.

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delluminatus
Very interesting. I never knew that Google was collecting all this data for
their cars; I assumed they worked by assessing the scene in real-time. I guess
this means that, if Google's self-driving cars are ever widely legalized,
their users may have to stick to a set of "allowed roads", and not venture off
the beaten path without manual control.

Like the author says, the idea really does have a strong whiff of Googleyness.
Bind-bogglingly ambitious, technically extremely impressive, and fairly
creepy.

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trhway
> if Google's self-driving cars are ever widely legalized, their users may
> have to stick to a set of "allowed roads"

one can also imagine that to renew car registration one would have in addition
to evidence of insurance to also provide evidence of updated subscription to
the Google road database

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dave5104
I'm sure the end goal is to actually be able to plop down a car anywhere and
have it go, doing all of the data processing in real time. Even if Google
could map out all those details, the world just changes too darn often. Feels
like it'd be a liability to rely on potentially out of date Google
information.

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joosters
Doesn't this make the cars, in some sense, less 'autonomous'? Plonk a google
car down in some unknown street and it won't be able to drive there.

Or, more likely, if you haven't kept your google car data subscription up to
date (or can't agree with their latest privacy policy change), your self-
driving vehicle suddenly becomes useless?

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hyperion2010
Of course. We are still decades away from being able to replicate the human
visual system (and whole brain really) that is needed to unable autonomous
vehicles. Of course by then we may not need them anyway because anywhere not
covered by a sufficiently high bandwidth signal in 30 years is probably
somewhere you wouldn't take a self driving car to anyway.

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dang
We edited the linkbait title.

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wmf
They didn't even get the linkbait right; it's supposed to be "one weird
trick".

