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Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

electrek.co

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Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#31

Post by trashtoss »

60654 wrote: post #15
ghaff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people. And I still don't expect to see general-purpose (secondary roads/cities, range of weather conditions) for decades.

This exactly. I did robotics in the late 90's and it's interesting to see how many fundamental problems still remain unsolved. And the trajectory of tech advancement is positive for sure, but not _nearly_ as fast as popsci and marketing articles suggest.

It happens a lot.

Hard problems are rarely just one hard problem, but until you solve the first hard sub-problem you won't even know what the other hard sub-problems are, let alone what proportion of difficulty each contributes.

It's like climbing a mountain in the fog: you've found the way forward and if it holds out you can extrapolate when you will reach the top, only to find you dead end at the face of a sheer cliff...it will be awhile before you find the next way forward.

It's progress but the destination remains further than it seems.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#32

Post by LeifCarrotson »

maxerickson wrote: post #24
varelse wrote: post #21

NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 has too high power consumption and too low perf/W for the moment. They're winning this space because they are there more than that they are the best possible solution. And they may continue to win because successful execution of an 80% product is worth far more than a 90+% powerpoint processor cough TenSilica et al. cough , or because this is such a huge potential market, it might actually go to a…

Is 10 watts the correct figure? The powertrain uses 300+ Watts, so it seems like a manageable number if it is correct.

That's a big "+" on your figure - it's about 300 Watt-hours per mile, or 3600W constantly, if you're going 60 mph. For comparison, one horsepower is about 750 watts - a Tesla is a very low-drag car.

Anandtech reported [1] that the TDP of the whole board is around 250W. The Tegra SoCs are probably around 10W, but that doesn't get you much in the way of GPU horsepower.

1: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9903/nvidia-announces-drive-px...

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#33

Post by ghaff »

revelation wrote: post #30
60654 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. I did robotics in the late 90's and it's interesting to see how many fundamental problems still remain unsolved. And the trajectory of tech advancement is positive for sure, but not _nearly_ as fast as popsci and marketing articles suggest.

Not to mention that, since you did robotics in the 90s, there might just be another point where the entire field of AI falls off a cliff, again.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to think not. Having said that, I do wonder if the rapid improvements (and sometimes impressive results) in certain narrow domains are misleading a lot of people to assume that all that's needed is continued incremental improvement.

As a case in point, while voice recognition has indeed gotten quite good with the right kind of microphones (e.g. Amazon Echo), the natural language processing and other "smarts" to use that as a basis for even a subpar by human admin standards digital assistant seems to still be reasonably far away. And that doesn't even require interfacing with the physical world.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#34

Post by ilaksh »

kchoudhu wrote: post #27
dolzenko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So its not just 2 cameras? Fun, do you have a (entry level) link ?

Stereo adds just another layer of data to merge, yeah. I should add a disclaimer: I'm waaaaay out of date. The last time I worked on this stuff was back in 2005 during the DARPA Grand Challenge. And while I'm fairly confident that the basics are still the same (the fact that we're still discussing monocular vs. stereo vs. LIDAR is testament to that...), I'm going to defer to someone more up-to-date to provide more re…

They are using deep learning and also other sensors may contribute to the depth map (assuming they have one).

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#35

Post by ilaksh »

bcantrill wrote: post #23

Could someone who understands this space weigh in on how technically interesting this is? (Or isn't?) In particular, their research paper on "End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars"[1] seems to yield a system that requires an unacceptable amount of manual intervention: in their test drive, they achieve autonomous driving only 98% of the time. But I have no real expertise in this space; perhaps this result is impre…

It's incredibly freaking amazing if they are using deep learning to drive via mainly cameras only 98 percent of the time. No one else can do that. 98 percent is obviously a lot.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#36

Post by varelse »

maxerickson wrote: post #24
varelse wrote: post #21

NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 has too high power consumption and too low perf/W for the moment. They're winning this space because they are there more than that they are the best possible solution. And they may continue to win because successful execution of an 80% product is worth far more than a 90+% powerpoint processor cough TenSilica et al. cough , or because this is such a huge potential market, it might actually go to a…

Is 10 watts the correct figure? The powertrain uses 300+ Watts, so it seems like a manageable number if it is correct.

Seems indeed, and in fact an A/C will eat a kilowatt or more, but...

The components of this system need to generate next to zero heat and they need to be placed in all sorts of inconvenient locations. That's causing automakers to desire extremely low-power dedicated circuitry over GPUs.

Consider as an example the C7 Corvette: despite its enormous blindspot, it still doesn't have blindspot indicators because they can't find any way to cram existing sensors into the thing. There are more examples, that's just the one with which I'm most familiar because I balked on purchasing one over this despite an insanely great deal on it at the time.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#37

Post by ilaksh »

tener wrote: post #19
Retric wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 9years I have been on HN I have up voted 3 really good jokes and downvoted thousands of so so ones. Before you post a joke think is it that good. Because, jokes are like spam on message boards they add clutter without aiding the discussion.

Wow, really? I just don't see how this is a spam. They definitely add some value, unlike some other stuff out there.

I thought it was kind of funny but to be honest I couldn't tell you were joking. It's hard not to assume people are just dumb.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#38

Post by varelse »

revelation wrote: post #29
varelse wrote: post #21

NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 has too high power consumption and too low perf/W for the moment. They're winning this space because they are there more than that they are the best possible solution. And they may continue to win because successful execution of an 80% product is worth far more than a 90+% powerpoint processor cough TenSilica et al. cough , or because this is such a huge potential market, it might actually go to a…

Wait, who cares about the power consumption in a car? perf/W is a useful number if you are trying to stack a data center full of these things and electricity (incl for cooling) is essentially your only cost. But if a car is using 300Wh/mile or, in an ICE, generating 100kW in excess heat it is an entirely pointless metric. (Just for clarification: no one is using the Drive PX2 in a data center. Just look at these conn…

Informal anecdotal knowledge: GM wants 10-20 watts for the entire self-driving system, sensors and all.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#39

Post by Animats »

kchoudhu wrote: post #27
dolzenko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So its not just 2 cameras? Fun, do you have a (entry level) link ?

Stereo adds just another layer of data to merge, yeah. I should add a disclaimer: I'm waaaaay out of date. The last time I worked on this stuff was back in 2005 during the DARPA Grand Challenge. And while I'm fairly confident that the basics are still the same (the fact that we're still discussing monocular vs. stereo vs. LIDAR is testament to that...), I'm going to defer to someone more up-to-date to provide more re…

Yeah, me too; I was in the 2005 Grand Challenge. Vision processing has made enormous progress since then. Here's Mobileye's guy explaining what they do and what needs to be done.[1] Here's the NVidia guy.[2] Here's Chris Urmson from Google.[3] All three use their vision system to draw boxes around things that look like obstacles. Then the planner uses those boxes to construct a path. The vision system just gives you a rectangular box in image space; the LIDAR based systems turn point clouds into simple 3D solids.

These vision systems do OK on things that look like typical road obstacles - cars and people. Other stuff, not so much. Only Urmson from Google talks about that much. The videos from the vision systems don't seem to be doing much with road edge clutter. They're not marking every post, fireplug, and low-hanging branch. Train a deep learning system on cars, trucks, pedestrians, and bicycles, and your system sees only cars, trucks, pedestrians, and bicycles.

These vision systems do a lot less than many people think they do. Watch the videos.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZa9SlMHhQc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NGnvGS0AtQ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#40

Post by greglindahl »

Razengan wrote: post #18
tener wrote: post #10

Very cool: with capable CUDA device in a car, one should be able to mine some crypto coins with it! With some luck the car should be able to pay for itself! Alternatively, having in mind Elon's creative approach to finances, Tesla could get some significant hashing power with its fleet! Edit: looking at the downvote I suppose the joke wasn't obvious?

The idea of ubiquitous and powerful computers in eveyrone's possession contributing to some global processing while they're idle, is actually fascinating.

It was, until most of those computers got a power-saving mode -- electricity is not free. Also, note that some things (like bitcoin mining) are so specialized that they run poorly on general-purpose cpus and gpus.

Still, there is a thriving set of "do this computation at home" projects: Folding@Home, SETI@Home, ...

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