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Autopilot: an open source driving agent

github.com

111–120 of 129 posts

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#111
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers don't run an RTOS and a deterministic bus system either. In fact, I would argue that very rarely do human drivers fail because of jitter or nondeterminism.

This is a weird argument. Human drivers don't deadlock or crash either. Are you sure you understand the criticism being made here? Hard realtime systems make guarantees about the frequency with which code will run on a shared system.

I agree that this is not production ready tech, but still parent does make a good point. I think those two similar comments are downvoted just because people here don't agree with them.

Suppose you make an autopilot in JS running on Electron on WinXP, running on VM on top of Puppy Linux Live CD. And you still manage to prove that your system is 100x more reliable than human driver. Should it be dismissed just because we don't agree with technology stack? The latency of this monstrosity would still be lower than human driver and maybe they would stay lower throughout the operation.

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#112

Not everything seems to be open source. I can't seem to find the vision part, only the binary, see: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/v...

visiond appears to be linked against libgsl.so. To my understanding, distributing a binary blob using the GNU Scientific Library is against the license of this library. That written there does not seem to be any symbol used from libgsl.so.

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#113
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird argument. Human drivers don't deadlock or crash either. Are you sure you understand the criticism being made here? Hard realtime systems make guarantees about the frequency with which code will run on a shared system.

I agree that this is not production ready tech, but still parent does make a good point. I think those two similar comments are downvoted just because people here don't agree with them. Suppose you make an autopilot in JS running on Electron on WinXP, running on VM on top of Puppy Linux Live CD. And you still manage to prove that your system is 100x more reliable than human driver. Should it be dismissed just because…

This doesn't have anything to do with latency really. It's about predictability. Given the system you described, there are so many edge cases that can potentially compound, that it is impossible to make any predictability guarantees about the system.

As an example, I worked on an embedded system that controlled electrical motors that was hard real time. The fast task time interval was once per millisecond. No matter what, that got called by the RTOS exactly 1000 times per second. When it didn't finish it's job in time, the result could easily wreck real world items or cause harm to people. Nobody even considered using interpreted languages in that project. The fast tasks all had provably run in much less than a millisecond. That means no loops that could be unbounded, no memory allocations, no recursion, no writing to flash, anything that was even slightly unpredictable was out.

So, even if you could prove that your system caused less accidents than a human driver when it was running well, it would be impossible to do an analysis that defined under what circumstances the system would be running well. Given that, it would not be allowed in a well-engineered real time or safety critical system.

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#115
post #57

Is there a closed-simulation-environment to test this? By that I mean that the sensor inputs (images of the road, etcetera) are generated by the simulation environment with which the driving agent interacts.

Have you seen their Dash / chffr phone apps?

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dash-train-self-driving-cars...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.comma.chffr

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#116
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird argument. Human drivers don't deadlock or crash either. Are you sure you understand the criticism being made here? Hard realtime systems make guarantees about the frequency with which code will run on a shared system.

I agree that this is not production ready tech, but still parent does make a good point. I think those two similar comments are downvoted just because people here don't agree with them. Suppose you make an autopilot in JS running on Electron on WinXP, running on VM on top of Puppy Linux Live CD. And you still manage to prove that your system is 100x more reliable than human driver. Should it be dismissed just because…

"And you still manage to prove that your system is 100x more reliable than human driver."

That's the rub: how do you prove that? If your software stack is 30 million lines of code that was written by god knows who, I would argue it's nigh impossible without releasing it and seeing what happens, which seems morally irresponsible and legally negligent. If you follow strict rules in coding conventions and algorithms, it's easier to statically verify code is probably correct.

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because by "works" you mean "I tried it out a bunch of times and nothing bad happened, so must be production ready", because that's what you do when you build websites and desktop CRUD apps and nobody ever died cause the web server choked under load or the web page rendered a bit funny or the request took a full quarter second because the GC kicked off as a wave of requests came in. And then one day a one-in-ten-mill…

You are really going to freak out when you learn how deep neural networks work.

I know how DNNs work -- I've even designed my own.

The existence of a component that is difficult to analyze for safety doesn't justify ignoring well-established safety engineering techniques throughout the rest of the system. That attitude would have us throw out seat belts and snow tires just because the ACC system might be buggy sometimes.

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is not production ready tech, but still parent does make a good point. I think those two similar comments are downvoted just because people here don't agree with them. Suppose you make an autopilot in JS running on Electron on WinXP, running on VM on top of Puppy Linux Live CD. And you still manage to prove that your system is 100x more reliable than human driver. Should it be dismissed just because…

"And you still manage to prove that your system is 100x more reliable than human driver." That's the rub: how do you prove that? If your software stack is 30 million lines of code that was written by god knows who, I would argue it's nigh impossible without releasing it and seeing what happens, which seems morally irresponsible and legally negligent. If you follow strict rules in coding conventions and algorithms, it…

[deleted]

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#119
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is not production ready tech, but still parent does make a good point. I think those two similar comments are downvoted just because people here don't agree with them. Suppose you make an autopilot in JS running on Electron on WinXP, running on VM on top of Puppy Linux Live CD. And you still manage to prove that your system is 100x more reliable than human driver. Should it be dismissed just because…

This doesn't have anything to do with latency really. It's about predictability. Given the system you described, there are so many edge cases that can potentially compound, that it is impossible to make any predictability guarantees about the system. As an example, I worked on an embedded system that controlled electrical motors that was hard real time. The fast task time interval was once per millisecond. No matter…

[deleted]

Re: Autopilot: an open source driving agent

#120
post #112

Not everything seems to be open source. I can't seem to find the vision part, only the binary, see: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/v...

visiond appears to be linked against libgsl.so. To my understanding, distributing a binary blob using the GNU Scientific Library is against the license of this library. That written there does not seem to be any symbol used from libgsl.so.

It links agains the Adreno-GSL, part of the GPU driver, not the GNU Scientific library.
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