The story of Homer: Voyage’s first self-driving taxi | Hacker News Reader

The story of Homer: Voyage’s first self-driving taxi

news.voyage.auto

41 pointskn0thing12 comments

Hello all! Oliver, the CEO of Voyage here. I'm here to answer any questions about Homer I can (sat next to him right now actually: https://www.dropbox.com/s/avznvqa01hftoe2/IMG_1642.jpg?dl=0).

Just let me know!

So you're a company with 10 engineers ... and you're building self driving technology from scratch? I thought it requires large teams and billion dollar investments.

Not from scratch! We use lots and lots of open source (<3 ROS), in addition to secret sauce we've developed over the past year.

How many miles has Homer logged? What kind of streets / conditions / etc? Have you run it at night? I see the build, but no demonstration of capability. Do you have an app? How do you summon a car? Are you expanding to new cities?

Hello. What's the next major milestone that you and your team is presently focused on and why?

It seems like it's early days for Voyage. How do you see your service eventually getting to market?

cool project! some of the conditions on the road are fairly predictable -- highway signs, lane markers, people, other cars, etc -- but what are some of the edge cases that you've had to account for? e.g. a mattress falls off a car in front of you. for lack of a better word, "weird" driving situations like that still seem to greatly favor human drivers, and I'm curious how you solve the problem.

As long as human-driven vehicles are a significant fraction of the vehicles surrounding an autonomous vehicle's miles driven metric, I'm not sure a technically-driven approach to edge cases is gating mass adoption. Humans likely don't have a very good track record with those edge cases, but the ones who deal with the aftermath of all those edge cases on an actionable basis are the legal and insurance industries. Luckily, they have copious documentation of those edge cases; unluckily, that documentation is not in a readily-utilizable format for computers.

Autonomous software development might finish 90% of the technical challenge, only to discover 90% remains to encode legal and insurance precepts before mass adoption is allowed because the safety outcomes bar to clear for autonomous driving will be higher than manual driving. Once you reach edge cases where the only physically-available options are all bad outcomes (where either riders get hurt, or people outside the riders get hurt), until sensor and simulation technology get good enough to evaluate the degree of how much each party gets hurt to discover the minimal injury option, we might be forced to make do with developing software that chooses an option that presents the least risk exposure to legal and insurance liabilities according to the governing jurisdiction. If so, then that would be a real mess to wrangle.

Hopefully, legal, insurance and regulatory frameworks around the world will recognize in autonomous vehicles with LIDAR+radar+sonar+vision+sound sensors, with the kind of testing the big players are performing, mortality per million miles driven are bound to be lower than human drivers, and not engage in a perfect-enemy-of-good position.

If politically-influential stakeholders put up barriers to entry in the form of demanding better-than-human perfection in outcomes, then we could wait a long time as players switch to alternative go-to-market plans. One possibility might be embed the sensor and software technology into manually-controlled cars as accident mitigation features, but simultaneously collect massive amounts of data to refine the edge case handling characteristics, and gradually ease into self-driving.

Fun project, but the addition of Radar units to the bumpers means the car is no longer street legal. How are you planning to test in an environment that will give you useful results? Emulating a real-world environment seems like a bigger challenge than the DIY retrofit!

Are you planning to sell these as kits for hobbyists to retrofit into their cars? That would be way more accessible than having to buy a Tesla.

We aren't. But you can always summon one of our Voyage taxis and get the same experience for much cheaper!

Retrofitting is such a tough industry to be in. Every car is ridiculously different.

I just mounted my new Yakima bike rack on the world's first flying car. Anybody wants to see pictures?

This is so amazing! Good stuff guys!!!

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