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Comment by residentraspber | Hacker News Reader

My 2019 Audi S5 was excellent at this. It would ping pong at most once then auto-correct itself to be perfectly centered in the lane.

It did some weird things like if the car in front of you was driving a bit too far to the left/right of a lane, it would copy them. Other than that it was nearly perfect, though. Never had it take an exit by accident, etc.

Their tuning on when to accelerate/brake and make it smooth needed a fair bit of work, but I found that switching the drive mode from Dynamic (Sport) to Comfort changed the eagerness of the system and smoothed things out.

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> It did some weird things like if the car in front of you was driving a bit too far to the left/right of a lane, it would copy them

Wouldn't that conceptually be the right thing for the software to do, copy the human in front of it (unless it has demonstrably better information)? OT1H, "lemmings," but OTOH unless the whole line of cars were all on openpilot my life experience has been that the person in front of me by definition has more visibility than I do since their car is not blocking their view as it is mine

I am totally talking out of school, because I'm not in that space and my poor BMW chose to do its own thing[1] so it doesn't work with openpilot[2] -- although they have a dedicated #flexray channel[3] so hope springs eternal

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexRay

2: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/44#issuecomment-...

3: https://discord.com/channels/469524606043160576/533838492443...

> Wouldn't that conceptually be the right thing for the software to do, copy the human in front of it (

I see people failing to follow the rules for bad reasons far more often than for any good reason. I don't want my car driving off to the side of the lane just because the car in front isn't centred. It should assume the right thing to do is to follow the rules, and hand off to me in cases that are more complicated.

Ugh. So I’m working on a fork of openpilot and the way the OP model is designed, it has its own rules that is not rooted in any legal driving framework for any state. The simple one is staying right. My state says your vehicle must stay on the right side of the road including roads without markings. OP will try to drive in the middle of the road. Another one is how OP does not distinguish people from parked cars or how oncoming cars are not tracked but simply an object the car should try to avoid (though it does not do this very well and experiences frequent disengagements due to it)

Obviously a model which manage these conditions would fair better but the comma hardware is fairly underpowered for any stronger use case.

I have added dedicated compute to my car to handle a lot of driving rules but now my solution is independent of comma. I tie into the LVDS display on the console so the integration is immersive, but it also means I don’t need comma for the hardware. My fork is also starting to diverge from OP so I may have a competing (but tangential) product!

I also notice this phenomenon in Audi. It’s as if the steering motor is applying inputs after the steering setting has been applied. So if your steering wheel is in sport mode then the motor requires additional force to turn.

I run my own forked copy of openpilot and the car cannot keep up with turns in dynamic mode. When set to comfort it can handle all turns with ease.

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