Absolutely exciting stuff. Imagine if you have 100, 1000 or 10000 cars each with deep learning software on board. Have them all upload data after each drive to central repository and download updates from other cars. You might start without stuff like 'react to that deer that just jumped on the road' but when you have 10 000 or 100 000 cars that learn and share their knowledge between them you'll quickly learn a lot of corner cases.
The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
371–380 of 462 posts
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is depressingly cynical. This is probably the single best definition of "hacking", as the community often refers to it, that I've seen in a very long time. One guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt, throws together a minimal prototype built on top of existing technology. Just look at the picture of it. Claims of commercial viability or beating Tesla are a bi…
I think it's a fair comment given his quote "I know everything there is to know" and the headline of the article claiming he's "building a self-driving car by himself". I've always thought the "hacker" community attributed value to sharing and building off other's work, but maybe times have changed.
Seems obvious to me that the journalist was manipulating what he said which was that he is deeply familiar with the state of the art of AI tech.
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the "cheap" relatively. The sensor he uses on the top of the car alone costs $8000. If you want to do it right, you'd also need a really nice IMU system to... I'm not sure what he's using but they can get very pricey.
Do you have a link for the best (commercial) IMUs around/how much they cost? I'm curious -- are they just clusters of MEMs like the ones on a phone or something more advanced, like interferometry based?
I haven't paid attention to IMUs in a while. Here is one that I had some experience with in grad school:
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Neural Nets, training the AI to handle emergencies will be all about exposing as many emergency situations as possible. What's better about an AI powered by neural nets is that you could train an AI to go offroading. Get enough data and you've got a model for dealing with a given situation. Google's biggest strides with OCR, Voice recognition, Spam filters and other AI tech early on came from its ability to gath…
The trouble with using neural nets for safety-critical real-time systems is that it's really hard to do the necessary level of validation. You can't accurately predict how the system might react in totally novel or unexpected situations. Which isn't to say that human drivers handle those situations well, but most of the time they don't do something totally bizarre or dangerous.
Human error when driving a vehicle is one of the top causes of premature death globally. That is what we should be measuring the technology against, not perfection.
It seems that the technology has already, or is very close to approaching human levels of proficiency on the road. If specific use cases (offroad, snowpacked road etc.) are problematic, they can be limited or prohibited in the mean time.
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 2007 for the DARPA Urban Challenge, the Benn Franklin Racing Team used Matlab for their car. The entire thing ran on 5000 lines of code compared to similar performing cars written in C/C++ which used over 100K lines of code. http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlpressroom/pdf/Articles/The...
Well that makes sense, given that basically all machine learning is transformations over matrices and that is Matlab's bread and butter. The equivalent C code might perform better when optimized, but it is going to be far longer and uglier. There's a reason a lot of ML work is prototyped out in Matlab first.
I would say basically all of robotics is transformations over matrices. As for Little Ben, there was actually no machine learning involved. Planning was sample-based on an occupancy grid. Localization was map-based.
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#376Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person. 1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals. 2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk. 3) Implement so…
A project like this is extremely impressive. The guy deserves a lot of credit (and maybe some investment?). That's hacking in the truest sense. The parent's checklist misses a bunch of things. For instance "1) Hookup a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car". That alone is not trivial. It is trivial if you want to read the car's odometer, but good luck doing more than that. For instance, people are still trying t…
It's only impressive to outsiders who aren't aware that this hasn't been new for a very long time and is reusing the work of others. There are tons of videos and documentation from amateurs and hobbyists hooking computers up to the canbus. In parallel to the tech community, the tuner/mod community have also been doing this on their own. It's been old news for years, led to many funny pranks and stunt hacks, culminating in charlie miller and chris valasek's media stunt last year.
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because this article reinforces our bizarre cultural notion that one person deserves all the credit for some innovation. Nevermind the ridiculous amount of engineering that was required to build all the tools he's using and the order of magnitude more engineering required to make this a safe, mass producible product. But nah, let's just praise the founder, allow him to get rich while we all do the dirty work.
This comment is depressingly cynical. This is probably the single best definition of "hacking", as the community often refers to it, that I've seen in a very long time. One guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt, throws together a minimal prototype built on top of existing technology. Just look at the picture of it. Claims of commercial viability or beating Tesla are a bi…
It's not "one guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt" though, it's something hundreds of people have been doing for years now. He's more of a media hacker than he is a car hacker.
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#378Prototypical case of the 80/20 rule. He has implemented the happy case. But that system is nothing people realistically would want to drive their cars. What he did is impressive. But the results are not that outlandish for a talented person. 1) Hook up a computer to the CAN-Bus network of the car [1] and attach a bunch of sensor peripherals. 2) Drive around for some time and record everything to disk. 3) Implement so…
With Neural Nets, training the AI to handle emergencies will be all about exposing as many emergency situations as possible. What's better about an AI powered by neural nets is that you could train an AI to go offroading. Get enough data and you've got a model for dealing with a given situation. Google's biggest strides with OCR, Voice recognition, Spam filters and other AI tech early on came from its ability to gath…
Using neural nets to deal with emergencies runs you into the Anna Karenina problem - "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
It's fairly easy to train, and verify a system for driving in well-behaved traffic. Unfortunately, the problem space of not-well-behaved traffic is far wider - and is very hard to gather enough data to train a system well.
What you're going to get is self-driving cars which handle 99% of driving just fine - and when they end up in emergencies, find the human 'driver' to have dozed off at the wheel. (All-in-all, their safety record might end up better then the status quo - but that's not a certainty.)
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because this article reinforces our bizarre cultural notion that one person deserves all the credit for some innovation. Nevermind the ridiculous amount of engineering that was required to build all the tools he's using and the order of magnitude more engineering required to make this a safe, mass producible product. But nah, let's just praise the founder, allow him to get rich while we all do the dirty work.
He didn't write the article, it's not his fault it comes off as cocky. He is tackling an impressive project on his own, and spitting in the face of corporations. He should be giving talks at DEFCON about this, teaching people how he did it. Your comment screams a superiority complex, but I bet that you are actually a nice person in real-life. Hotz is doing good work, and everyone in the technical field is relying on…
He should give talks at defcon teaching people how he did it?
You mean like this one, from Defcon in 2013?
http://hackaday.com/2013/07/26/defcon-presenters-preview-hac...
Or The Defcon 19 How To CanBus Hack Workshop, that taught classes about this in 2011?
http://www.canbushack.com/blog/index.php?title=learn-to-canb...
Unfortunately for him, defcon prefers original content, not someone claiming credit for what has been demonstrated repeatedly in previous years.
Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
what was your osx86 handle? I was also involved in the early times but don't recognize your name.
It was ixtli. I wrote iPHUC and still own the repo, i think: https://code.google.com/p/iphuc/source/browse/trunk/AUTHORS
ah the very early days then, nice. yeah I understand your take, George did get credited for things that were a team effort (including a lot of work by gray). but really a lot of that was the press who just based it off him being the one to publish the unlock demo video, he just probably got tired of correcting people.
as a counterpoint in which he was definitely a team player and not many knew about, he helped us get iOS 3 for S5L8900 devices pwned when we couldn't get the firmware files decrypted due to tricks that Apple put in iBoot (for only that version too - taken out after), which involved using a built in coprocessor and a payload in an assembly language that wasn't ARM and none of us could recognize. so to try to work it out he actually reverse engineered the structure of the assembly language to help figure out what it was doing, which was really cool. I don't think the whole payload got fully "reversed" as I believe one of us (it was either ius or myself) found a data sheet that pointed to it being some type of 16-bit RISC based thing, but was still pretty cool to see how he went about solving the problem. there was nothing directly incentivizing him to help other than a fun challenge.