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How Self-Driving Cars Work

nytimes.com

21–30 of 43 posts

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#21
post #10

I'd pass on reading this if you clicked through to the comments first. There's very little detail about how self driving cars work. This is a very basic survey of brands. Remember the Murray Gell-Man amnesia effect. Does anyone have real examples / links / videos of how self driving cars work?

Firstly, there are different approaches. Google and Uber seem to have a similar LIDAR + map approach. Tesla and Mobileeye have a camera focused approach. The CEO of Mobileeye (who is an ex-machine learning professor) gave a very good, mildly technical talk on their approach at CVPR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8T7A3wqH3Q

> The CEO of Mobileeye (who is an ex-machine learning professor)

The CEO of Mobileye is Ziv Aviram and he was never a professor. Amnon Shashua is the CTO, and he is still a machine learning professor at the Hebrew University.

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#22
post #2

This article misses a lot of things technology wise. OK, I understand that. This article also misses a lot air companies like Daimler who showed off self driving car captibilities publicly in the beginning 2000 and on the web 3 years ago. It misses the prototypes shown off by Audi and BMW. It misses also the prototypes shown by Japanese car manufacturers. From technology companies it misses Bosch who will show off at…

the nyt is always off the mark on topics i know something about, and nothing leads me to believe they are any better about topics i know nothing about.

[deleted]

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#23
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a look at the website of the Outlander. Its not mentioned anywhere that it has self driving capabilities. The sensors are used to warn the driver and intervene if a crash is imminent. So can I conclude there is a difference in the (state of) implementation between the hardware (sensors) and the software (self-driving intelligence) ? Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in the…

> Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in theory the number of sensors seems not the most important element ;-) I hear this comment a lot when defending Tesla's choices, and it's a red herring. The fact that humans only rely on two cameras means nothing. Repeating old comments of mine: You also don't "need" megawatts of power to play top-level Go: humans do it with 100 watts of energy.…

Even outside of the good points made by argonaut - our eyes are _amazing_ cameras. They are super high resolution, have many color bits, and work well in low light and bright situations.

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans only have one sensor: a rotatable stereo camera. So at least in theory the number of sensors seems not the most important element ;-) I hear this comment a lot when defending Tesla's choices, and it's a red herring. The fact that humans only rely on two cameras means nothing. Repeating old comments of mine: You also don't "need" megawatts of power to play top-level Go: humans do it with 100 watts of energy.…

Your point is generally valid, but it's worth noting that power =/= energy. It is conceivable that at 100 watts of power, a human could use on the order megawatt hours of energy while practicing to achieve top-level performance. 10000 hours of practice is not unreasonable to achieve mastery which would be 1MWh. It's also likely that AlphaGo is reasonably efficient, given that it used custom ASICs.

There is also a difference between learning and playing. During play, the human operated at ~20 watts on computation while the machine ran at a rate of anywhere from 26,000 watts to 260,000 watts, depending on how efficient the TPUs are (and assuming 10x as the ideal case). The human is also learning new things about Go as it plays, planning complex muscle firing programs, filtering audio and managing attention, working on subconscious goals, running complex vision tasks, all while running its autonomic subsystem.

Low power is also still important due to issues of heat and energy availability. Low power also implies high efficiency which is important for several reasons.

The human brain is estimated at 20 watts (when people talk about computing systems they tend to not include the power needed for all the auxiliary infrastructure needed to keep it networked and cooled); it's also estimated that beyond 4 hours a day, learning effectiveness drops precipitously.

If we take the case of Go, you can take a 4 year old human and have a professional player by 13. This is about 950 megajoules spent by the brain while learning Go. For the machine, if you look at the learning part (self play, value and policy on 50 GPUs for several weeks) the estimate on energy spend is about 30,000 megajoules. The policy network is itself ~20,000 MJ, while the full AlphaGo system playing on a single GPU and 48 CPUs is just a strong amateur.

But this is not even an apples to apples comparison since the brain is not spending all of its energy on learning Go. In fact, learning how to play Go is very far from the most difficult thing the brain is learning how to do.

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#25
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you add Nvidia to your list?

This year, a colleague made a seminar for the Nvidia people in the UK. I was not personally present. But from what I've been told, they had no glue about automotive. The only thing they have, is a high performance processor designed for embedded use, with which they want to be an automotive supplier. AFAIK, Tesla is the first going to use them. But I believe that currently they have no automotive experience in terms…

Nvidia is a large distributed organization so it's possible if not likely that the relative understanding of this particular UK team is not reflective of the total expertise at the company.

They definitely have more than "just a processor": http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-automotive-technology.htm...

I have a friend who works in the self driving team at Nvidia in Santa Clara (apologies for the login wall): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/full-stack-engineers-self-dri...

They've also got some demos up on YouTube: http://youtu.be/YuyT2SDcYrU

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is generally valid, but it's worth noting that power =/= energy. It is conceivable that at 100 watts of power, a human could use on the order megawatt hours of energy while practicing to achieve top-level performance. 10000 hours of practice is not unreasonable to achieve mastery which would be 1MWh. It's also likely that AlphaGo is reasonably efficient, given that it used custom ASICs.

There is also a difference between learning and playing. During play, the human operated at ~20 watts on computation while the machine ran at a rate of anywhere from 26,000 watts to 260,000 watts, depending on how efficient the TPUs are (and assuming 10x as the ideal case). The human is also learning new things about Go as it plays , planning complex muscle firing programs, filtering audio and managing attention, wor…

TPU defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#27
post #10

I'd pass on reading this if you clicked through to the comments first. There's very little detail about how self driving cars work. This is a very basic survey of brands. Remember the Murray Gell-Man amnesia effect. Does anyone have real examples / links / videos of how self driving cars work?

I found this article very informative. Perhaps I knew most of these tidbit before, but I did like the summary and laymen's explanations, even if not detailed or feature-complete. This is the kind of info I relay to my father when he asks me how this all works.

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#28
post #2

This article misses a lot of things technology wise. OK, I understand that. This article also misses a lot air companies like Daimler who showed off self driving car captibilities publicly in the beginning 2000 and on the web 3 years ago. It misses the prototypes shown off by Audi and BMW. It misses also the prototypes shown by Japanese car manufacturers. From technology companies it misses Bosch who will show off at…

the nyt is always off the mark on topics i know something about, and nothing leads me to believe they are any better about topics i know nothing about.

I've always noted that it is the publications targeted at people in the finance industry that are the most accurate in their reporting.

eg. Bloomberg, The Economist, The Wallstreet Journal, The Financial Times

Probably because it's the last industry where people are willing to fork over money for reliable news

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a difference between learning and playing. During play, the human operated at ~20 watts on computation while the machine ran at a rate of anywhere from 26,000 watts to 260,000 watts, depending on how efficient the TPUs are (and assuming 10x as the ideal case). The human is also learning new things about Go as it plays , planning complex muscle firing programs, filtering audio and managing attention, wor…

TPU defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_processing_unit

[deleted]

Re: How Self-Driving Cars Work

#30
Going by some of the recent antics of companies like comma.ai and Uber, it sounds self-driving cars mostly work via hype & publicity stunts. Any actual technology that is involved is purely coincidental.
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