Autonomous Vehicles (new job ?)

[stephenb]

Good to hear things are going well. Fingers crossed for the investment you need to carry on.

[stephenb]

Should help boost the company's profile.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45706509

[Crazed_Insanity]

Such a scary and exciting industry!

Anyway, yeah, in order to help the public not fear it's taxi service, I still think it'd be nice to be able to see them in action on race tracks... to have all these competing AI driving the same vehicles... to not only 'line follow', but to be able to take proper evasive actions and adapt to different weather conditions.

Formula AI would be an awesome series! Or some sort of NAISCAR series...

[samoht]

Yeah, we certainly seem to have a good PR department if nothing else!

[JoshInKC]

Out of curiosity, if you're allowed to say - what company's LiDAR sensors do you guys use? Or is it a built in-house thing?

[samoht]

Velodyne. I know it's ok to answer, because we had this photo on the title slide of a talk a colleague and I gave recently:

(I'm on the left)

We buy all the sensors, the computers and NVidia graphics cards etc, and buy the cars. What we do in-house is a) assemble all the parts into our platform, and b) everything downstream of the sensors, i.e. interpreting the data, sensor fusion (integrating readings from the different sensors), stereo depth, perception (machine learning), planning, prediction and control. In due course we'll also need to make an app and a platform for dispatching the taxis, unsure if we'll contract that out or make it ourselves.

[JoshInKC]

I was wondering if it was them- I know Velodyne makes real good stuff, and I've heard they do a lot of car-based sensors.
I know them mostly from their UAV-based units, which are really nice.

[Crazed_Insanity]

Tesla's autonomous system has no LiDars..., would you feel safe riding in Teslas in autonomous mode, samoht?

[samoht]

As I understand it Lidar is in some ways a short-cut; it gives you accurate distances to objects within about 50m, so you don't need to rely on the AI to judge the distances of those objects visually; and of course rate of change of distance tells you about closing speeds. Obviously, humans can drive ok without Lidar, so in principle there's nothing impossible about a safe autonomous car without Lidar.

Why are we using Lidar? Because going for full autonomy in a taxi, where there is no driver, only a passenger, is hard, and anything we can do to make it safer / easier is beneficial; and because, unlike Tesla, we're not trying to sell cars but taxi journeys, it's much easier to accommodate the cost. Better a slightly more expensive system that hits the road a year earlier, than a camera-only one that is cheaper but is later to market.

I have no problem with Tesla Autopilot, but it's not truly 'autonomous', rather a driver aid. I imagine if they keep developing they would eventually arrive at a safe cameras-and-radar-only system that is fully autonomous, but it's hard to say how long that will take.

[Crazed_Insanity]

That modelX which crashed into the center divider probably could easily avoid that with a lidar..., but I suppose you’re right that it should be possible to eventually developed the software better...

BTW, does your company’s system behave truly like AI and capable of self learning?

Sorry for being so nosey..., just curious. Please don’t answer anything proprietary!