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Thread: Autonomous Vehicles (new job ?)

  1. #11
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    Sounds cool and hope the move out of London goes well.

  2. #12
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    2yrs of experience in that field should still be very valuable and things might turn out better! If wife is on board, might as well go for it!

    Anyway, not sure how autonomous driving will play out in the future..., besides tech, govt regulation can be a killer too... So it's good to have that connection...

    And using you mobile phone analogy, I'd say traditional carmakers would become like the carriers or maybe the phones too... And although there's no monopoly on the OS yet, but it's pretty much between apple and android, right? If it weren't for Google, Jobs could've cornered the entire market already... So I'd imagine Skynet will eventually become a monopoly! but of course ai cars will probably take a while to develope regionally and merge to form a more formidable streetnet first... Before Skynet...
    Last edited by Crazed_Insanity; August 5th, 2017 at 10:12 AM.

  3. #13
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    Congratulations mate! I'm sure it'll be an interesting challenge, and Cambridge might be a nice change of pace from London. I wish you all the best with it. Though if this ends up being skynet - I told you so!

  4. #14
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    Sounds like a brilliant move to me. Chances are they won't make it, well, not in their existing guise anyway but there's a chance that some variant of the company will and even if they don't you'll be getting experience on the cutting edge which will leave you in a very good place professionally. And, I suspect it will be an incredibly rewarding experience being at the pointy end of the next big thing. Awesome stuff, congrats.

  5. #15
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    Yep, can't argue with IMOA's advise.

  6. #16
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    Here's something I've not yet heard talked about:

    http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/marke...Zjn&ocid=ientp

    Some of today’s prototypes for fully autonomous systems consume two to four kilowatts of electricity.
    WOW.

  7. #17
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    Wow indeed. I don't ever recall Elon Musk hinting autonomous driving can significantly impact range significantly like that. I always thought those roof mounted sensor look ugly and create lots of drag..., but the power requirement for the whole system sucking up this much juice is really surprising. Tesla vehicles have no range extenders... wonder if they are having similar issues as claimed by the article.

  8. #18
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    I don't even pretend to understand the actual technology that goes into autonomous vehicles - and I wonder what the balance between hardware and software is. Maybe there is some magic missing algorithm or maybe there is some specialized chip missing from the equation. Still, I am blown away by those power requirements - just the computational power alone described by "several kilowatts" is off the charts even by, say, 2014 or 2015 standards.

  9. #19
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    A lot of continuous real time processing. Lot's of sensors and inputs.

    Question is can AI learn and start to drive without doing the language thing where they decide the rules don't matter, efficiency at all costs.

  10. #20
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    A couple of weeks ago this was being discussed in the office, and I asked which was going to use more battery power, the car's drive motor or the computers. Answer, the latter (!) Albeit this is on our prototype, not a productionised system. Part of the issue is that the drive motor is only used when you're moving, whereas the computers are running full tilt even while you sit at a red light, at least for now.

    Neural networks are kinda like lots of huge matrices, so there's lots of parallel computation going on. We have something like a rack of high-end NVidia graphics cards for this, which I think is where most of the power goes. Autonomous Vehicles turn out to have quite a bit in common with videogames.

    I'd be fairly confident this won't be a huge issue in the medium term, we'll see some fairly dramatic improvements in efficiency, both in software and in hardware - like how games consoles tend to use less power than a gaming PC with similar performance. It's still quite early days.

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