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Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

Amazing story! I have been involved in openpilot development for the past 5 years, and I am always interested in the user stories of this project.

I drove my car 2500 miles on Openpilot this holiday and it was wonderful. I took over maybe 10% of the trip and let automation handle the rest. That said, there are many many many areas of improvement and I have devoted this year to creating an openpilot fork to bring it's ADAS functionality closer to modern vehicles (read: tesla).

I will Show HN the first release!

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"I would like to subscribe to your newsletter"

But, in seriousness, if you don't mind pointing to your GH fork that'd be awesome, in case I miss the show hn

My wishlist, as soon as I work up the nerve to build and flash my own image, is:

- recognize lane change blinkers and decelerate (since currently it only decelerates once the car has intruded into the lane). I am aware of the innumerable edge cases about this, but it still seems like it should be a pretty safe (and polite!) change to make

- recognize multiple brakelights and lay off the accelerator; I believe it currently uses the radar from the car immediately ahead but if 75% of the other cars have their brakelights on and the car in front is just lazy or driving aggressively, there's no reason for the Comma to cause me to further that chain

really nice to haves:

- have it recognize speed limit signs and adjust the cruise accordingly

this change is related to my desire for it to decelerate on exit ramps versus screaming into them at 65mph and then whining because the curve is too sharp for its speed. If it recognized the "recommended speed limit" sign on the exit ramp then we'd all get what we wanted, and if the exit ramp was going into a new highway no driver action would be required (versus exiting into a stop sign intersection)

- have it recognize stop signs (and yellow or red lights would be awesome). I don't need it to detect traffic or whatever, but I also don't enjoy it screaming at stop signs and red lights at full velocity causing me to have to take further action

- I need to investigate whether the Comma is bright enough to know I have an electric car and to merely let off on the accelerator versus applying the brake. My car also has multiple levels of regenerative braking, so I'd be open to it taking that into consideration but for me personally I always run in the highest level of regen because that's how my BMW i3 drove and I got used to it

So a lot of this is already solved in open pilot forks. Take a look at sunnypilot as it uses open map data to provide speed limit control. SLC will automatically adjust your speed based on the speed limit (I do not use this on auto mode because of false positives). Sunny pilot also includes vision and map based curve speed control which will use map data (curvature of the road) to predict safe speeds and can backup that prediction with vision based estimate of the turn speed. In experimental mode, open pilot can detect stop signs and certain models will stop for stoplights (duck amigo).

If you take your fork to the next level, look at frogpilot. It uncovers all of the tweakable inputs to the driver model. This enables you to customize your driver model to your preferences including less aggressive braking and faster acceleration.

Open pilot at its core (and thus all forks) supports one pedal driving as far as it needs to maintain 1) speed, 2) distance, 3) acceleration velocity. The car will accelerate when it deems the desired speed is below the target speed. It does this as long as there is space and will do so at a certain acceleration profile. It does the same in reverse, except it will apply brakes if safe distance is violated. As such, it will reduce the amount of gas to maintain distance or stop applying gas entirely prior to brake application. This would be your one pedal driving.

That said, there are a few underlying problems that need some major revisions to fix. Like the model was trained with a majority of drivers coming from California. Thus open pilot models tend to prefer the California stop, which will slow to 5mph and continue through the stop.

While OP can handle curves with ease, it excludes certain inputs. such as the angle of the road and thus will approach and predict a slower speed than the car can actually take. It does not predict actions from cars in other lanes. And while the blinker is a good indicator of head fakes, the model could very well be extended to observe the direction and speed of adjacent cars and adjust itself accordingly. On that same topic OP models do not care about pedestrians and will happily pass them with 6” of clearance.

This and a few more things are on my feature list that the software needs, like the ability to avoid potholes and slow over speed bumps. Full disclosure: I do not think this is possible with the current generation of comma hardware but that’s why we clicked the fork button!

How aggressive is the driver monitoring with Openpilot? I don't personally see a lot of purpose to driver assistance systems that won't let you, for example, eat with both hands while it keeps the car centered in the lane.

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