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Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

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Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#41

Post by ton4eg »

djsumdog wrote: post #5
old-gregg wrote: post #3

Does anyone else think the steering wheel movements are unrealistically aggressive? The car is barely turning, yet the wheel is doing 60+ degree turns. Has it been calibrated to be this way, or Prius steering ratio is that relaxed?

Yea that did seem weird. Also as far as collision avoidance, shouldn't the car come to a complete stop if a van pulls out in front of it instead of just trying to move around it? What would happen if the van kept going? I hope this is an early prototype.

It's an early prototype, stay tuned!

Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#42

Post by 5165ff7e11ab »

ex3ndr wrote: post #27
salimmadjd wrote: post #15

Yandex has some of the best programmers in the world. This was a surprise to me, but in the past 5 years, I've been spending few months a year in Belarus with various engineering team and have been learning a lot about this region. Yandex has it's own school within the universities where they recruit the best minds early on and train them. I've heard from programmers who now work at FB. That they could pass google's…

Most of the Yandex developers are not that good or not loyal to a company. This classes in universities is a scam: instead of teaching people of real world things, they teach how to work with yandex tech stack. Yandex lost almost all good developers and it is continue even further. Companies rent offices near yandex and find yandex developers in the restaurants around this buildings and convince them to leave. This i…

Ugh, so much hate... It is okay to criticize the company and its products (nobody is perfect). But calling yandex data analysis school (I assume that is what you mean by "classes in universities") a "scam" is just disingenuous.

It is not a scam, it is basically a charity. First, it is free, no strings attached. You are even under no obligation to work for them afterwards (not even a moral one). The only price the students pay is that yandex becomes kind of an obvious place for internship, so many of the students apply (only then will they learn how to work with the "yandex tech stack", but that's the point of internship, no?) Allowing students to work with the yandex tech stack would be a hassle anyway - students would need to get access to the intranet, sign the nda etc... So these evil scammers teach them fundamental CS and machine learning concepts instead.

I guess the rest of the comment is similarly disingenuous and inaccurate.

Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#43

Post by Animats »

georgecmu wrote: post #12
Animats wrote: post #11

That takes me back. That's about the level of performance we had with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 1985. Driving around barrels is a basic test; we did that too. Ours worked OK at 15MPH, but faster than that we'd out-drive the LIDAR range. It's much easier now to get to that level - good multibeam LIDAR is available, GPS/INS integration is common and cheap, and powerful computers that will survive in the auto…

> DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 1985 I think that date is off by two decades ;)

Oops, sorry.

Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#44

Post by Animats »

ansgri wrote: post #37
Animats wrote: post #11

That takes me back. That's about the level of performance we had with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 1985. Driving around barrels is a basic test; we did that too. Ours worked OK at 15MPH, but faster than that we'd out-drive the LIDAR range. It's much easier now to get to that level - good multibeam LIDAR is available, GPS/INS integration is common and cheap, and powerful computers that will survive in the auto…

Well, I'm a driverless car developer (albeit for a very special use case, and definitely not in Yandex), please show me a decent "GPS/INS integration" which would be cheaper than, say, $1500 and would be of any use on the road and will be readily documented. With many sensors, the likes of Bosch make many good parts, but if you're not a giant auto maker, you won't be getting any documentation. And AFAIK even if you a…

We had a $5000 Novatel GPS. It didn't have INS integration, and required a subscription to a sat-based correction service. For the 2004 Grand Challenge, CMU had a unit which required 4U of rack space and air conditioning. There's been progress.

Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#45

Post by ansgri »

Animats wrote: post #44
ansgri wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm a driverless car developer (albeit for a very special use case, and definitely not in Yandex), please show me a decent "GPS/INS integration" which would be cheaper than, say, $1500 and would be of any use on the road and will be readily documented. With many sensors, the likes of Bosch make many good parts, but if you're not a giant auto maker, you won't be getting any documentation. And AFAIK even if you a…

We had a $5000 Novatel GPS. It didn't have INS integration, and required a subscription to a sat-based correction service. For the 2004 Grand Challenge, CMU had a unit which required 4U of rack space and air conditioning. There's been progress.

Of course there's been progress, or we wouldn't be able to even start working on this project with such limited resources as we have now — that's like $5000 for total hardware (still 4u rack though, +INS, +cameras, no corrected GPS), the main problem being the inability to buy something like tBOX [0] with a more powerful CPU. Though we are counting on both our system getting optimized and industrial PCs catching up in a year or two.

What I meant to say, though things are a lot simpler now, they are not that simple to discount the Yet Another™ lidar-based self-driving car.

[0] http://www.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&Functio...

Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#48

Post by konart »

Grue3 wrote: post #23
wsinks wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the first most popular Taxi service? I haven't seen anyone using something different than Yandex.

Uber. You don't see it because most of the cars are unmarked.

Uber is definitely less popular than either Gett or Yandex.Taxi.

Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#49

Post by konart »

Grue3 wrote: post #25
vbezhenar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tech won't be used in small cities, it makes no sense, and big cities usually have good roads.

I live in Russia, and none of the roads outside of Moscow Ring Road have any markings at all. Yes, even big cities. At best the markings are painted in spring and disappear within a few months. Getting autonomous cars to work in these conditions is a huge challenge. There's a famous saying that Russia has two problems: fools and roads, and it's just as true as when it was first coined.

Well, that's not true for at least two cities I lived in. St.Petersburg and Cheboksary. Cheboksary always had pretty good roads, even outside the city.

But - yeah, this kind of vehicles won't be a thing outside of Moscow for a quite a while.

Re: Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project

#50

Post by cr0sh »

georgecmu wrote: post #20
muthdra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they did have self driving cars in the 60's. I knew it!

Right. Jokes aside, though, they did have self-driving cars in the 80s: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/ If you scroll down to the PhD theses names, there are some pretty well-known names that defended their dissertations as a part of the NavLab development. (The Second) Grand Challenge, of course, was 2005. If I remember right, vehicles didn't have to deal with other road users until 2007 (Urban Challen…

They actually had "self driving cars" in the 60s, and earlier - for given values of "self driving":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars

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