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

Google Street View: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

holovaty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

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

#51

Post by joejohnson »

cypherpnks wrote: post #34

This is kind of a no-duh, sherlock non-story. Fact 1: Sebastian Thrun co-developed Google StreetView Fact 2: Sebastian Thrun is developing the driverless car. A lot more goes into a self-driving car than data from how drivers drive. That's maybe 3% of the problem. Nevertheless, assuming Sebastian is too dumb to make the connection would assume a fairly high level of stupidity on his part. That's a pretty bad assumpti…

Fact 1: Elon Musk helped found PayPal

Fact 2: Elon Musk is developing rockets, with hopes of one day sending people to Mars.

It is clear that Elon Musk is only trying to corner the mobile payments market on Mars. Don't assume Elon is too dumb to realize the market potential of an entirely new planet!

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

#52

Post by Arelius »

Ok, let's be serious. Usage of street view data may or may not be useful for the driverless cars. But the original, primary motivation for street view was the ability to build their own map data and remove their dependency on existing map providers like teleAtlas. Driverless cars were frankly too far out, and not close enough to their primary business model to be worth it at the time. And being able to remove their maps licensing requirements gave them infinitely more freedom at a time when their mapping product was especially important to them.

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

#54

Post by splatzone »

alainbryden wrote: post #53

I only just occurred to me - are these self-driving cars expected to pump their own gas? Surely Google's not prepared to build a complete network of fuelling stations that are compatible with unmanned cars?

What's stopping them from making deals with petrol stations to have the attendants pump the petrol for them?

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

#55

Post by packetslave »

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.

I believe (speaking from the Udacity material) it also uses a stereo camera setup for localization (e.g. where the car is within a lane). Sebastian mentioned something about how they could deal with rain, but not something like snow that covers the visible references.

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

#56

Post by tomelders »

jessriedel wrote: post #40
tomelders wrote: post #38

If I squint my eyes and ignore all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars, then I suppose this could be true. I sometimes enjoy these sorts of articles. They're the fan-fiction of the tech world and it's no different to the sort of conjecture people like to come up with for Apple, which can be shameless fun to read. But when there's already a ton of information out there about how Google'…

> all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars Are you referring here to fact that the driverless cars follow pre-determined paths rather than reading traffic signals? Or do you just mean that the proposed motivation doesn't really hold water? Because it seems pretty plausible to me that streetview data could be very useful to the drtiverless car, even if other data is more important and ev…

Google's driverless cars have had a lot of PR recently, with some pretty decent coverage of how they actually work.

The cars don't follow predetermined routes. At present they do learn routes, but not using Google Street View data. Actually, the opposite is true, the intention is for the diver-less cars to generate 3d data for street view.

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

#57

Post by shriphani »

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…

I know someone who used an arduino to pull in sensor data for their vehicle. I don't think the project is online but they got a very solid amount of data over a period of 3 months including, braking, acceleration and steering. all of this without any distinct modifications to the body.

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

#58

Post by jessriedel »

tomelders wrote: post #56
jessriedel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars Are you referring here to fact that the driverless cars follow pre-determined paths rather than reading traffic signals? Or do you just mean that the proposed motivation doesn't really hold water? Because it seems pretty plausible to me that streetview data could be very useful to the drtiverless car, even if other data is more important and ev…

Google's driverless cars have had a lot of PR recently, with some pretty decent coverage of how they actually work. The cars don't follow predetermined routes. At present they do learn routes, but not using Google Street View data. Actually, the opposite is true, the intention is for the diver-less cars to generate 3d data for street view.

According to this blog post, the map data is pretty important.

> Two things seem particularly interesting about Google's approach. First, [Google's driverless car] relies on very detailed maps of the roads and terrain, something that Urmson said is essential to determine accurately where the car is. Using GPS-based techniques alone, he said, the location could be off by several meters.

http://jalopnik.com/5851324/how-googles-self+driving-car-wor...

Do you know for sure that they don't use Google Street view data? If so, I think you're unusual in knowing that.

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

#59

Post by jessriedel »

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…

> 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.

Your logic doesn't go through. Driverless cars are potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. It could easily be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to make them 2% better.

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

#60

Post by mturmon »

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…

Thanks for this timeline. This matches my impression.

As further evidence that the driverless car concept was getting attention well before street view matured, remember that Sebastian Thrun led the Stanford team in the 2005 grand challenge. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005)

Post reply on HN