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Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

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Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#41

Post by tung92 »

hinting wrote: post #21

Is there any evidence for this? About 15 seconds of looking around suggests it's probably not true. - 2007: Street View released - 2007: DARPA Urban Challenge - After 2007: Google hires several of the teams that won. This is where they got most of their expertise in self driving cars. - Also note that the Urban Challenge winners didn't rely on "lots of data" but instead "lots of sensors" Not really a fan of this type…

Prof. Thrun was part of the team that used laser range-finders to assist the image stitching in StreetView. Since both sensors (rangefinders and cameras) were mounted on a mobile vehicle, wheel odometry and GPS "ground truth" must have been available at each waypoint as well. The author of the post suggested that Google might have used the GPS data (and possibly rangefinders) to create a simulated world to teach the self-driving car (useful for testing new tweaks?). This is a good idea and probably did not take them a lot of effort given the available log of data from StreetView.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#43

Post by jc4p »

pilgrim689 wrote: post #42

Google's self-driving car's main sensors are a 360 degree rotating laser and a radar, NOT a camera... unless Sebastian Thrun has been lying in his Udacity CS 373 course.

Seeing how Sebastian is the head of the team working on it, I think it's safe to believe him on this one.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#44

Post by DennisP »

koide wrote: post #17

Everyone who took Sebastian Thrun's Udacity "Building a self driving car" course (or everybody that has had training in robotics) will see that there's a whole lot more than mere training data to build a self driving car. It could be helpful in certain scenarios, but it's for sure not enough for the data for the cars to be the main reason behind street view. As the author himself notices, the map business is huge, an…

I took most of Thrun's course. There was a lot about robot localization based on pre-existing map data...exactly what StreetView is collecting.

If the StreetView cars are using LIDAR, they have a lot of high-quality 3D maps, perfect for robot localization. Even if they're just taking photos, various groups have demonstrated building 3D models from collections of photos.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#45

Post by adrianh »

melvinram wrote: post #2

Decent thought experiment but the whole "wolf in sheep's clothing" part is just link bait title or a really bad analogy. A more appropriate analogy would be "a head fake" as the late Randy Pausch so aptly put it.

Yeah, you're totally right -- that was a lame analogy. I've changed it. My only excuse is that I posted it late at night. :-)

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#47

Post by koide »

DennisP wrote: post #44
koide wrote: post #17

Everyone who took Sebastian Thrun's Udacity "Building a self driving car" course (or everybody that has had training in robotics) will see that there's a whole lot more than mere training data to build a self driving car. It could be helpful in certain scenarios, but it's for sure not enough for the data for the cars to be the main reason behind street view. As the author himself notices, the map business is huge, an…

I took most of Thrun's course. There was a lot about robot localization based on pre-existing map data...exactly what StreetView is collecting. If the StreetView cars are using LIDAR, they have a lot of high-quality 3D maps, perfect for robot localization. Even if they're just taking photos, various groups have demonstrated building 3D models from collections of photos.

Yes, that's right. What I find hard to believe is that the main reason behind the project is the self driving car. I can easily believe it's one of a set of objectives.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#48

Post by Jun8 »

"You put a camera on the front of your car, and you set it to capture frequent images of the road ahead of you while you drive. At the same time, you capture all the data about your driving -- steering-wheel movement, acceleration and braking, speed"

I'm curious: How does one capture the car data? In the self driver car, the ML and camera part of it seems to be easier than the interface with the car mechanics, yet there's generally little mention of that part.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#49

Post by harichinnan »

Jun8 wrote: post #48

"You put a camera on the front of your car, and you set it to capture frequent images of the road ahead of you while you drive. At the same time, you capture all the data about your driving -- steering-wheel movement, acceleration and braking, speed" I'm curious: How does one capture the car data? In the self driver car, the ML and camera part of it seems to be easier than the interface with the car mechanics, yet th…

May be they swap the on-board computer with some custom firmware that has hooks for the self-drive module.

Re: Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

#50

Post by th »

Jun8 wrote: post #48

"You put a camera on the front of your car, and you set it to capture frequent images of the road ahead of you while you drive. At the same time, you capture all the data about your driving -- steering-wheel movement, acceleration and braking, speed" I'm curious: How does one capture the car data? In the self driver car, the ML and camera part of it seems to be easier than the interface with the car mechanics, yet th…

There are diagnostic devices for most modern automobiles, some of which can be bought by consumers. For example the VAG-COM Diagnostic System for Volkswagens: http://vag-com.de/
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