
Udacity plans to build its own open-source self-driving car - perseusprime11
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/udacity-plans-to-build-its-own-open-source-self-driving-car/
======
SwellJoe
Given how important self-driving vehicles are, on so many fronts, I think it's
fantastic that a company with resources is pushing forward an OSS
implementation. Safety alone is reason enough for there to be a good OSS
reference implementation. I'm surprised/disappointed that government hasn't
been more instrumental in pushing forward an agenda of promoting self-driving
cars (while expending resources on other types of work that will be far less
effective long-term).

So, this is super cool. I'm surprised it's Udacity doing it; on a couple of
fronts:

It seems, on the surface, outside of their core competency...but thinking
about it, it does make some sense, if they really have enough paying students
(and maybe sponsoring organizations) to make it work. I mean, schools that
teach auto repair don't work on fake cars. Why would a school teaching self-
driving limit themselves to simulated cars?

But, it's also surprising that Udacity has the funds to make it work. The cost
of building self-driving car technology must have come way down just in the
past few years. And/or Udacity must be making a lot more money than I would
have guessed based on how crowded their market is.

Regardless, it's super cool!

~~~
dcposch
> I'm surprised/disappointed that government hasn't been more instrumental in
> pushing forward an agenda of promoting self-driving cars

The DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and Urban Challenge in 2007 are what started
it all.

Now that Google, Uber and others are racing to commercialize, all the
government has to do is not overregulate. No need to "push forward an agenda".

(FWIW DARPA, then known as ARPA, did the same thing the internet a few decades
ago.)

~~~
cpeterso
There's a rule-of-thumb that academic research takes 10–15 years to be
commercialized, so we're right on schedule now 10 years after DARPA's 2005 and
2007 Challenges. :)

~~~
tnecniv
I can't wait for 10 years from now when I have a walking robot slave then from
the recent grand challenges

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olivercameron
Hello everyone! Former YC founder here (S11) who now works at Udacity on this
team. I'd love to answer any questions on this project or our autonomous
vehicles curriculum, and welcome you to our enthusiasts Slack team
([http://nd013.udacity.com](http://nd013.udacity.com)).

~~~
nxzero
Why do it if "it isn’t the core focus of Udacity’s business" as the founder,
Sebastian Thrun, said?

Seems like creating free and open source simulator would be of more value than
trying to get students to build hardware based vehicles?

DARPA, YC, and other have taken this approach for various reasons in some
projects - and it seems if the intent is to teach, learn, share, etc. - it'd
be a better investment.

~~~
olivercameron
Great question! My 2 cents: our core mission is to democratize education, and
although the car itself won't make or break Udacity, I think it can contribute
dramatically to our core mission.

How so? We have students all around the world (almost every country is
represented in our DAU) who will never have access to a car outfitted with
hardware and sensors (easy $125k), never mind the costs needed to get a permit
to get on the road ($50k!). Being able to contribute code and see the results
run in real environments (ask Sebastian what he thinks about simulation!)
could be a huge advantage to students around the world in their quest to jump
into this industry and get credibility.

Speaking of credibility, we want to prove to the world we really know what
we're doing, and that our curriculum is truly legit.

tl;dr: We hope that by open sourcing our car that we can give opportunities to
students around the world who otherwise wouldn't have it.

~~~
nxzero
>> "ask Sebastian what he thinks about simulation"

Thanks, appreciate you addressing the questions.

If you wanted to ping Sebastian and let him know about the AMA, I'm sure there
would be a lot of interest beyond just me getting an answer to my questions
from him; I truly am curious to hear his take, since as you say, the barrier
to rendering the software in hardware would likely be beyond the reach of an
individual student or even likely a group of students in closes proximity to
each other.

~~~
olivercameron
Let me work on that!

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abstractbill
To put this into perspective, it wasn't so long ago (2004) that _nobody_
managed to pass the DARPA Grand Challenge of having a car drive itself around
in the Mojave desert. We've come a long way very quickly!

~~~
amelius
What was the most important achievement since then? Was it the LIDAR system?
Or was it 3d vision? Or some other form of AI?

~~~
jowiar
I'm sure someone more qualified to than me is floating around here. From what
I heard at CMU then, the GPS data in '04 was a couple feet off, and everyone
was driving a few feet off the road as a result. I imagine the key takeaway
then was that one couldn't depend on GPS.

~~~
Animats
That caused us trouble in the 2005 Grand Challenge. It turns out that Novatel
and Garmin GPSs were about a meter apart. They're both applying corrections
for atmospheric distortion obtained from ground stations and distributed
through a geostationary satellite, which can give 15cm precision. We had
Novatel, and DARPA had measured the course with Garmin. I talked to the JPL
team, which also had Novatel, and they had a similar error.

We were strictly obeying the course boundaries, and had a terrible time
getting through narrow gates where DARPA's waypoint file had a narrow width
designed to guide us through the gates. If you look at videos of our runs, you
can see the vehicle backing up and trying to get through a narrow obstacle.
It's trying to get past a real-world obstacle on one side and a GPS limit on
the other, which has narrowed the allowed path to where it can't quite fit.

So for the second run, I put in a patch to add 1 meter to DARPA's lane width.
But I forgot to push it out to the vehicle, and we botched the second test
run. It was in place for the third test run, though.

~~~
tamana
DARPA gave you bad data and told you you had to use it? Why would your system
insist on staying within DARPA's boundaries in the first place -- did they
make "out of bounds" too narrow in a misguided attempt to be helpful?

~~~
IncRnd
Do you think that self-driving cars get clean correct data as input?

~~~
rs999gti
Don't Tesla's? They require a well defined road line otherwise they get
confused.

My friend owns a Model S and on the way to lunch it got confused on off ramps
and parts of the road that were not well defined by lines. It basically shut
off autopilot and required my friend to take the wheel.

~~~
jacquesm
It should take a lot more than a bit of paint on the road to upset a self
driving car.

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WhitneyLand
When will a degree from Udacity have enough credibility to get you hired as a:

    
    
      Consultant at Bain or McKinsey
    
      Developer at a Big 4 tech company
    
      Investment banker on Wall street
    
      Other highly competitive jobs
    

Has it happened a lot? Once? Never?

(in a situation where experience alone wouldn't have earned the position)

~~~
dhruvp
We have graduates at Big 4 Tech (Google, Microsoft etc.) and other competitive
tech focused companies. I'm not sure about Investment Bankers but we teach
software engineering primarily so I wouldn't expect many graduates go into I
Banking or Consulting.

~~~
WhitneyLand
Can you confirm you have Big 4 tech graduates who were hired fresh from
getting their Udacity degree without prior experience?

For example since I attended a mediocre state school these companies did not
come to interview at my school, and never granted interviews to those who
directly applied.

A few years later I ended up getting hired by these same companies based on
the merit of my actual experience.

However you see the big difference here? I couldn't fairly say that the big 4
hire from mediocre state schools (or from Udacity), just because someone ended
up getting a job there later.

~~~
dhruvp
Hey!

We do indeed have people who got jobs fresh out of graduating from our
program. Obviously it's hard for me to discount all their prior experience and
say it was entirely up to us. What I can confirm is that within months of
graduating from our program they were able to get these jobs. You can read
about some of these students here:
[https://www.udacity.com/success](https://www.udacity.com/success)

~~~
Kephael
Speaking of the prestige issue that WhitneyLand brought up, it seems that both
of the featured engineers who are working at a "Big 4" software company
attended top schools. One seems to have gone to Harvard and the other attended
Rice University.

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morgante
If it were possible to short Udacity, I'd be putting all my money into a short
position.

This is obviously so far outside of Udacity's core wheelhouse that I have to
assume it's simply an ego project for the founder. Unfortunately, before you
start pursuing unrelated ego projects, your company should have several
billion in cash in the bank.

I cannot possibly see how this ends up working out well for Udacity.
Developing self-driving cars is very expensive and not their core expertise at
all.

~~~
empath75
I think it's mostly meant as a class project, and that seems like something in
their wheelhouse.

~~~
carleverett
Also seems very smart of them to have partners like Mercedes. They're likely
offsetting a huge portion of the cost for the program, and it's all from
taking advantage of the climate where everyone is dying to get a head start in
self-driving.

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jwatte
The User/Volvo/whatever approach may deliver earlier value, but the Google
approach is what's needed to have safe cars in uncontrolled urban
environments.

I get quite frustrated with articles and headlines and even analysts who don't
understand the quite fundamental difference.

Uber, who lives almost entirely in that space, will be in for a rude awakening
IMO. Unless they already know they are ten years behind Google, and plan to
use instrumented human semi-operated vehicles for learning, and cynically
market it as "self driving" when it isn't. That'd work, too.

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georgeecollins
I think this is peak self driving car.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
I think it's a marketplace in its early infancy.

~~~
dhruvp
Agreed. Some of the biggest companies in the world are investing in the space:
Apple, Google, Ford, GM, Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Uber, NVidia, Baidu, Didi and
many more!

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ocdtrekkie
Wonder if part of Thrun's departure from Google is their closed focus? Open
source self-driving car is something Google would never allow under current
leadership.

~~~
agumonkey
With the recent commercial competition catching up, I wonder if Google won't
reconsider..

~~~
jwatte
I don't see any commercial company catching up with the really hard problems
like "pedestrian behind hedge" or "policeman's hand signals" or whatever. What
I see from the commercial companies is little more advanced than "automated
lane keeping and sometimes recognizing a red light, at least when cars in
front stop." (OK, in being a little uncharitable, but it's to illustrate the
problem.)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Bear in mind, when you're looking at making a commercial product, you look at
cost. Presumably, that's why most companies have ruled out Google's sensor
setup, which costs more than my house. As costs drop, sensors will probably be
added or improved, and you'll see more companies integrate those features.

Google's program is a tech demo for PR purposes. Everyone else is trying to
actually put systems in cars.

~~~
Fricken
Most of the projects gunning for L4 have sensor arrays comparable to Google's,
with the exception of Uber, who has 3× more: 20 cameras and 7 lidars amongst
all the rest. I'm pretty sure Uber's in it to develop a commercial product,
although the PR probably doesn't hurt either.

Thrun guesses that Lidar will ultimately be unnessecary, and I think that by
the time the hard AI problems are solved, he'll be proven right. Humans
navigate with a pair of eyeballs and not much else, after all. But while
extraneous sensors can always be removed, not having enough could hamper
progress.

~~~
sangnoir
> Humans navigate with a pair of eyeballs and not much else, after all

Only if by "not much else", you are referring to a ridiculously performant
image processor - the visual cortex does an amazing job! My guess is it will
be many decades before we can get similar performance in hardware/software.

~~~
Fricken
We have ridiculously performant image processors. The dynamic range and light
sensitivity of top shelf CMOS sensors continues to improve, and consumer tech
driven image processing software which can extract useful data from all sorts
of lighing conditions has made leaps and bounds.

Behind that is computer vision, revolutionized by deep learning. It can
identify street signs, makes and models of vehicles and other road objects, it
can keep a car centred in a lane when there's limited information such as
snowy conditions, or with chaotic visual information such as a sun dappled
country road covered in leaves.

Google has patented a method for interpreting the hand signals of police
officers. They can read cyclist signals, and interpret the body language of
pedestrians to interpret whether they intend to cross the road or not to avoid
false braking incidents.

And Nvidia has demoed a way to build 3d point cloud fields (like Lidar) using
off the shelf cameras. Robust computer vision is heavy on compute, but they're
doing it.

But behind all this is the higher level reasoning needed to deal with tens of
thousands of edge cases- this is the hard part.

Google made a special project out of programming their cars to effectively
assert themselves at four-way stop signs, which is one problem amongst many.

No single edge case is unsolveable, but taking them all on, and getting the
whole rube goldberg machine to six sigma reliability is an epic slog. This is
the part that's going to take another 10 or 20 years, though we'll probably
see L4 applied in a constrained capacity fairly soon.

~~~
sangnoir
> We have ridiculously performant image processors. The dynamic range and
> light sensitivity of top shelf CMOS sensors continues to improve, and
> consumer tech driven image processing software which can extract useful data
> from all sorts of lighing conditions has made leaps and bounds.

That may be true, but we are still ways from catching up to human performance
on things like "where is the edge of this dirt road"

------
bitL
Sweet! Imagine Udacity later licensing K1 Attack kit car with electric drive
from PLA, and open sourcing it for everyone! One can dream ;-)

------
denzell
What is the obsession with self driving cars?

There are so many other important problems in the world that need solving

~~~
toomuchtodo
Car accidents kill 1.3 million people a year. Sounds like a worthy obsession.

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networth
Curious what opensource stack they will use (like ros), or if they will write
their own.

~~~
flowless
There's even a ros project for that
[https://github.com/CPFL/Autoware](https://github.com/CPFL/Autoware)

~~~
networth
I am curious how ros plays with real time requirements? Does it have rtos
extensions?

I used ros a bit for drone simulations 5 or so years ago, things might have
changed these days.

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dschiptsov
As part of its new nanodegree?)

------
jonathankoren
This announcement raises all sorts of red flags, not just for Udacity in
particular, but for Silicon Valley as a whole.

This is the story:

Online correspondence school announces it's making a self-driving car, and
issuing "nanodegrees" of dubious reputability.

I'm sorry, but what does a correspondence school have to do with self-driving
cars? How does this promote the core business? How does even _relate_ to the
core business? Does Udacity have any technical talent that would even be
relevant to this? (I'm betting they don't have any computer vision experts.)

This strikes me as a company with too much money, and not enough supervision.

This is not going to end well, for anyone.

~~~
ericlavigne
"Does Udacity have any technical talent that would even be relevant to this?
(I'm betting they don't have any computer vision experts.)"

Sebastian Thrun is a cofounder of Udacity, and one of the world's top experts
in self-driving cars. Sebastian Thru won 1st place in the DARPA Grand
Challenge in which self-driving cars raced across the Mojave desert. He is
also a VP at Google, where he has worked on Google's self-driving car
technology. One of the first courses at Udacity was called "Artificial
Intelligence for Robotics."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun)

