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The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

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Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#451
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think because the goal posts keep moving with technology. The number of people who have ever combined knowledge from multiple domains into a useful thing may be small relative to the general population, but it's been done. The first time it's impressive. Then others add different ideas and concepts. Then everyone can do it and it feels old. We've also seen all the news from Google about their efforts and the pain p…

>but that's just irresponsible It's not like it's unsupervised. Is it any more dangerous than taking a learner human diver out in a car?

yes. a bug in the programm and it takes insane measures (i.e. breaking and steering hard right), salvaging that situation is impossible at higher speeds. its doubtful that a beginner would do such a thing, and even the attempt would take longer, giving the supervisor more time to interfere.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#452
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he says phase 3 takes 99% of your driving task. So I guess it would be way more than that.

I think this number of "99%" is only valid for the large US suburbs which are way easier to navigate than a typical small town in Germany/Europe. Over here we have so many narrow streets, millions of pedestrians and bicycles, construction zones and so on. More often than not it is difficult for a human to figure out what is going on so it will be much harder for a car to do the same.

Yup, I thought about Marseille the other day and I don't see how a self-driving car could drive there.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#453

Earlier 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?

Define "best". We've used a quarter million dollar one at my current company, and at a previous job we spent far, far more than that for military airframes.

Groves "Principles of GNSS, Inertial, and Multisensor Navigation Systems" contains a good description of the various technologies used and their accuracy limits for navigation.

Consumer grade MEMS are fine for airbags, the pedometer in your phone, but are not sufficient for intertial navigation, even when aided with other sources. At around the $2K-30K you get systems that can provide accurate navigation for up to 2 minutes or so. They are used in things like missiles.

Aviation grade IMUs need to meet SNU 84 standard, which requires a maximum horizontal position drift of 1.5km in the first hour of operation. These will run 100K and up. Marine grade (subs, rockets, ICBMs) run $1 million and up, and have a maximum drift of 1.8km per day.

None of them are good enough for autonomous cars w/o sensor fusion.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in their twenties wrote those papers.

The math in any of the paper's he's most likely referring to aren't some theoretical pde maths or abstract algebraic geometry stuff... it's pretty understandable if you can grasp a "graduate level" linear algebra course.

That's true. My point was to respond to the breathless reporting about that this guy has achieved so young. He's replicating the work of other mostly young people. Doing it the first time is the trick.

(I'm very familiar with this literature - see my username)

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, culminati…

Everything that you have ever done in your life has been about reusing the work of others. When was the last time you mined your own copper ore and created your own wires, with a pickaxe you built yourself?

We have to draw the line somewhere.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, you drive in a simulator! (ie: backfeed/simulate LIDAR and camera data using a video game (GTA5 for example)). Then try to simulate lots of near-crashes, reactions to traffic lights, signs, etc. Hotz's code just reacts to inputs. Simulate the inputs and you can run any training case you want.

Exactly the plan for outlier cases. Though perhaps not GTA...

Maybe partner with the creator of the XXX simulator series, you could make some kind of "MMO" where each participants have to run errands the safest way possible while interacting with each other, and upload the training data. Some player could be randomly elected as "maverick" whose goal is to crash and cause accident, the other player would have to handle them.

And if driving in highway is a problem, why not use a test terrain complete with fog generator? With RC car representing pedestrian, other car, animal, ... feed the video first into an AR system and then give it to the neural net.

anyway good hack, I wish you well :)

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curious what myztic would recommend as well? ubuntu may not be 'ideal' but it works and installs a lot easier than arguably any other linux distro. i have no problem using debian/arch/etc but if you are just trying to get up and going ubuntu seems to always be the easiest.

I personally use xubuntu. What myztic meant was using "plain ubuntu" instead of alternatives like xubuntu, lubuntu or kubuntu. Xubuntu is medium light for me and is fast. Previously I had only fluxbox on Kubuntu for the KDE apps which was extremely fast but with bugs in fluxbox I switched.

Nope, I really meant Ubuntu compared to other Operating systems / Distributions.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#458
post #388

(This is completely Off-Topic but it's been bothering me for such a long time now and I never got sufficient answers) Why am I seeing Ubuntu on Screens of developers, experts, et cetera in Cover Stories such as these, most of the time with the 100% plain Ubuntu Desktop with all the craziness that comes with it? It feels like this is the case 90% of the time. Two more (recent) examples I can remember: 1) Fyodor (Guy b…

Most of these people have passed the stage of caring about the desktop itself. I would say they are simply interested in a bash shell that sits on a reliable, well maintained, stable distro with good community knowledge. When you spend all your time at a prompt you don't really care about unity vs cinnamon vs anything else. Debian is stable and has fantastic package management, and Ubuntu builds on that with a vibran…

I actually have thought about it some more and gave Ubuntu a spin and now I am 100% with you. Might seem a little weird, this "sudden" change of heart, but yes, you are right.

If I am honest, I spend 90% of my time in a terminal, browser or editor (which is also in a terminal), so give me a system that allows me to easily install my most beloved programs via command line and handy binary packages, a system that is reasonably stable, runs on most hardware, and that has a big community and a lot of documentation, sounds like a good deal actually.

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these people have passed the stage of caring about the desktop itself. I would say they are simply interested in a bash shell that sits on a reliable, well maintained, stable distro with good community knowledge. When you spend all your time at a prompt you don't really care about unity vs cinnamon vs anything else. Debian is stable and has fantastic package management, and Ubuntu builds on that with a vibran…

curious what myztic would recommend as well? ubuntu may not be 'ideal' but it works and installs a lot easier than arguably any other linux distro. i have no problem using debian/arch/etc but if you are just trying to get up and going ubuntu seems to always be the easiest.

See also my other comment, I changed my opinion on that.

What I originally thought about were systems like NixOS (for serious development), or something more minimalistic that offers greater control like Slackware, a *BSD (Jails, byhyve, dtrace(!)), or even just Debian (less flashy, more stable and robust).

Re: The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car

#460
post #37

Prototypical 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…

doing complicated stuff with closed hardware is very impressive. controlling hardware is - hard.
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