Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 124 posts

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#101

Post by Ohtrahddis »

dgregd wrote: post #100

So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That information would gr…

Because this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure.

Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this?

For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why would they agree to cooperate with competitors? Of course there is the obvious benefit that this would help all the players, but why does that marginal benefit outweigh the risk of commoditizing a brand new market / product and eliminating the chance to establish a market share lead. I am partly raising these hypothetical questions because I think companies are trying to "tough it out" and do it without such changes to city infrastructure first and see how that turns out.

I appreciate your simple approach, but you might be disregarding the societal and business factors in favor of making the engineering challenge simpler.

Edit: grammar

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#102

Post by [deleted] »

Ohtrahddis wrote: post #101
dgregd wrote: post #100

So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That information would gr…

Because this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure. Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this? For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why w…

[deleted]

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#103

Post by tim333 »

Ohtrahddis wrote: post #101
dgregd wrote: post #100

So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That information would gr…

Because this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure. Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this? For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why w…

Also GPS tracking systems are only accurate to about 20m, not enough to avoid hitting stuff. And transmit over the cell network so don't work if you can't get signal.

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#104

Post by dgregd »

tim333 wrote: post #103
Ohtrahddis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure. Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this? For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why w…

Also GPS tracking systems are only accurate to about 20m, not enough to avoid hitting stuff. And transmit over the cell network so don't work if you can't get signal.

Let's say your car ROMB received info about the white truck, while your car cameras and vision recognition systems see just a cloud and any truck in 100 m range.

ROMB purpose is not to replace cameras or LIDARs, but to extend gathered info.

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#105

Post by coldtea »

swang wrote: post #34

> A source close to Uber’s operations says its engineers watched the intersection where Uber’s cars were said to have run the red light, and that this text refers to them recording a number of normal, human-operated vehicles also breaking the law. Uber has never officially admitted that its software was to blame. is the implication here that that intersection has a lot of red light runners? if so, are they so dense i…

>normal humans run red lights because they're either not paying attention or they're assholes. how is a machine safer or better if it can't pay attention (or even worse, is an asshole).

Obviously a machine can be safer if it doesn't pay attention (can't recognize the light being red) on a smaller rate than humans.

I.e. if humans cross red lights 2% of the time because they don't pay attention, and a machine 1%, then the machine is safer -- despite still crossing red lights.

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#106

Post by coldtea »

onion2k wrote: post #92
babesh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run that light myself by accident. It's a hard light for humans too. This light is in the middle of a block rather than at the end. The area is full of activity including people walking but also popular sights. That brick building to the right is SFMOMA. Its hard to notice the traffic lights amongst all this activity not to mention that you don't look for it. Also that middle lane can easily have its views obstr…

Its hard to notice the traffic lights amongst all this activity not to mention that you don't look for it. That makes it hard for a person, especially if they're new to that road, but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing?

>but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing?

Who said a self driving car is doing a "database lookup"?

If anything, a good self driving car should NOT do any kind of database lookup (of the location of traffic lights etc) and be able to recognize and respond to a moved, impromptu (e.g. because of road work), new, unfamiliar, etc. traffic light.

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#107

Post by onion2k »

coldtea wrote: post #106
onion2k wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hard to notice the traffic lights amongst all this activity not to mention that you don't look for it. That makes it hard for a person, especially if they're new to that road, but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing?

> but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing? Who said a self driving car is doing a "database lookup"? If anything, a good self driving car should NOT do any kind of database lookup (of the location of traffic lights etc) and be able to recognize and respond to a moved, impromptu (e.g. because of road work), new, unfamiliar, etc. traffic light.

Getting additional data from a predefined map is expected, even if it's just for something to test the data coming from the sensors. If the car knows there's a traffic light on the map but it isn't 'seeing' one then it should be handing control back to the human, not just carrying on regardless on the assumption that the map is wrong.

A level 5 self-driving car would work completely autonomously without any prior knowledge of the area it's driving in. We're not there yet.

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#108

Post by revelation »

aeontech wrote: post #78
revelation wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it obviously isn't either of that. Did you watch the video?

I watched the video. You asked "why would they be taping the intersection", I gave you a pretty obvious explanation, not sure why you are so vehement about it. In turn, why would any sane person run a two ton piece of gear through a moving intersection, endangering pedestrians and cross traffic through a red light where it is known to have failed once already, not once, not twice more, but six times in a day? Why wou…

You put quote marks around something that I didn't ever write. Sorry, I don't believe there is a basis here for discussion.

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#109

Post by makomk »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #81
ariwilson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to limit yourself to passive cameras and make your life harder? This is like limiting yourself to flapping bird wings to make airplanes.

No, it's like limiting yourself to using skis to move down a ski slope. He's right: the roads are design to be navigated using vision. Signage, regulations, paint, curbs, etc. There's no proof that you could safely navigate the roads with LIDAR, but we prove every time we drive that you can do it with vision. And sure, there might be a better way to get down a ski slope, but skis would be a pretty good starting point…

They're designed to be navigated using human vision, which has very different characteristics in terms of dynamic range, resolution, processing pipeline, inferring details about the scene based on past experiences, etc than machine vision.

Re: Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski

#110

Post by zimpenfish »

tim333 wrote: post #103
Ohtrahddis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this would likely require a large change in city infrastructure. Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this? For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why w…

Also GPS tracking systems are only accurate to about 20m, not enough to avoid hitting stuff. And transmit over the cell network so don't work if you can't get signal.

Although if you're going to be adding to infrastructure, you could just as well add differential GPS transmitters around the place and get the accuracy down to sub-1m[1] although that's still not really safe enough for cars...

[1] (and I believe you can get it down to ~3cm if you have enough data.)

Post reply on HN