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

Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 434 posts

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#311

Post by ptero »

ams6110 wrote: post #281
ptero wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple often tries to re-engineer the thing they develop.from the ground up. Seems it started this way on Titan, too, then scaled back and decided to focus on the main problem: safely getting around. Nothing wrong with this I think. On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later, e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.

I can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less traction.

There are definitely major challenges, although maybe those could work in areas where the motion is slow but constrained (e.g., a cart to move cars in/out/around a dedicated parking lot). Maybe flatten the surface used for normal motion and use sides for infrequent, slow maneuvers. I do not know.

But those ideas are tangential (being generous) to self-driving, so better not steal cycles from it.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#312

Post by djb_hackernews »

iiiggglll wrote: post #182

> Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics, like how the autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working on an operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming language, or the industry standard, C++. Wow. Few things guarantee success like starting off a project with a good old-fashioned language…

My guess is it wasn't much of a debate and in actuality they used something like Simulink to model the control system and then had that generate the C++ code for the target hardware. I doubt any car control system software is written by hand these days.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#313

Post by athenot »

jacquesm wrote: post #240
tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lida…

This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession. Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The fir…

Yes and no. Part of doing a technology leap is getting people to dream. There are always rough edges associated with the new technology, and in those times, it's nice to be able to still enjoy the dream.

As an example, consider the transition from MacOS 9 -> Mac OS X (public beta days). The tough challenge was what's below the hood, the new UNIX foundation, the NeXTStep APIs, being able to mitigate the conversion pain, etc. Yet in the midst of all these challenges, they added Aqua: an ambitious, over-the-top UI. Was it overkill? Yes. Did it get scaled back? Yes. Did it impact performance? Heck yeah it did. But it did one thing very well: it got people to dream of a (literally) shiny new Operating System. In the moments when Mail.app would get stuck or when one felt the absence of many Classic features, seeing the shiny OS helped sugar-coat the transition and from a UX perspective, it helped people stick with it until the bugs got ironed out.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#314

Post by sillysaurus3 »

jacquesm wrote: post #286
ams6110 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less traction.

And then there is stronger braking to be considered, which almost always is some kind of disk brake which you can't do if there is no shaft to mount one on. Which means the spherical wheel system would have to be oversized to compensate for lack of such a shaft even if it would work to drive the car. Magnetic wheels have other interesting problems that would need to be solved such as when two cars get close to each o…

Could you just use standard wheels, but let all four of them turn 90 degrees? Then the car could move laterally.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#316

Post by coldtea »

Superleroy wrote: post #279
coldtea wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know, the have multiple teams, and they don't just want to put out a "self driving car" out, but a great self driving car that rethinks what a car should be like -- on top of "self-driving".

But does that even make sense? That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet. Wouldn't it make more sense to just go for the self driving car first and then, after you are sure that you can build that, creating teams which make it better?

>That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet.

At Apple don't do basic research and leave it at that.

They are trying to build a commercial product.

In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving).

So that, if the self-driving research pans out, they have a complete product, not just some run-of-the-mill car design that basically sells for its self driving capability.

And even if their self-driving thing doesn't pan out, they can always enter the car market licensing some other self-driving technology (like they license/buy batteries, ssd, cpus, etc) but with their own spin on the general product.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#317

Post by amelius »

athenot wrote: post #313
jacquesm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession. Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The fir…

Yes and no. Part of doing a technology leap is getting people to dream. There are always rough edges associated with the new technology, and in those times, it's nice to be able to still enjoy the dream. As an example, consider the transition from MacOS 9 -> Mac OS X (public beta days). The tough challenge was what's below the hood, the new UNIX foundation, the NeXTStep APIs, being able to mitigate the conversion pai…

True, but in this case it's a sugar coating without any cake below it.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#318

Post by coldtea »

jacquesm wrote: post #278
coldtea wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're missing my point. It may not be stupid to reinvent the wheel at all. But that's not a project that you should mix with inventing a self driving car That's only true if the team that reinvents the wheels and the team that does the self-driving tech is the same, and you're stealing members from the latter to the former. Obviously those are not the same teams, nor they need to be. And when you get out with your…

The degree to which globular wheels would complicate such a design is such that it would leave you being passed by your competitors right out of the gate, on top of that it would complicate all kinds of things such as certification and potentially reliability and safety as well as supply chain issues after delivery. Solving too much is a fantastic way to crash a project.

>The degree to which globular wheels would complicate such a design is such that it would leave you being passed by your competitors right out of the gate

We don't know that. We just know that we're not familiar with them. If anything, globular wheels could make some kind of automated steering easier.

And of course, it's obviously not like Apple only tried that design: they tried globular wheels, fat wheels, thinner wheels, wooden wheels, and what have you to see what works better -- like they did when they designed the iPhone, etc.

https://www.cultofmac.com/181782/every-iphone-prototype-appl...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/6/14188624/apple-prototype-i...

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#320

Post by Retric »

hungerstrike wrote: post #319

That's too bad. I was really hoping for Apple to spend all of their resources trying to build a car and then go out of business because IMO they ruined computing for everybody by popularizing walled gardens, anemic UIs and super limited software.

Phones where a walled garden long before the iPhone. J2ME apps sucked, but there where a lot of them.

Calling the iPhone the first smartphone is mostly just marketing and form factor. They got the interface right and built a better browser, but you could use the web, email, apps, take pictures etc on phones long before the iPhone.

Post reply on HN