Startup Idea: Robot Cars
blog.kirigin.com
blog.kirigin.com
I don't have any credentials to speak on the subject, but it seems that robotic cars is an area where traditional startup advices along the lines of "move fast" has to be taken very cautiously. I also believe that Google being paranoid about first robotic car killing someone is very much justified. Rightly so.
In any case, all of this will happen eventually. We will have robot cars on the road eventually, and eventually one of them will get into some sort of accident with big publicity potential. Any company involved in the industry probably ought to be managing what happens to them when that happens.
Especially if, Ford Pinto style, they've publicly stated that [for financial/reputational reasons] they shouldn't be as concerned about safety as another market participant, or that they should should aim to be "only just" better than fallible human drivers who frequently are held accountable for their fallibility.
I wouldn't want to be on the design team of a robotic car the first time it hits a child, even if the child acted in a reckless and unpredictable way that even a human mind would have been unlikely to anticipate and the software had demonstrated a far superior safety record to human drivers overall.
The model case is probably the ongoing Toyota "unintended acceleration" case, in which it appears that poor software engineering really did contribute to fatal accidents. It's likely to cost Toyota a lot but not reach through to the design team.
That is, if I get my roomba create to use slam, particle filters, etc, as an engaged spectator, would that be OK?
Even if it's not, I'm doing it anyways. :p
No hotel costs, food costs could be the same as eating at home, no air fare or air travel hassle.
I suppose you'd have to wake up in the middle of the night to re-fuel, but hey, grab a midnight snack while you're at it.
It'd be the cheapest and safest way to tour a large area.
This would be a dream - a railroad-esque type journey that is not at the wim of the location of pre-laid tracks
Not only that, but I could fulfill a life-long dream of solving a crime on a train. :D
Let's look at the recent MetroNorth railroad accident. Immediately afterwards, people were inevitably throwing around the idea of "why do we need train drivers at all?". The reason we need drivers is to satisfy a fundamental human misconception:
A while back, the DC Metro installed an automated train control system, with the intent of making the system independent of human operators. They flipped the trains onto automatic, and for a while everything ran fine. Then, one day, a sensor failed and one train plowed straight into the back of another at full speed while it was sitting in the station. That was the end of automatic train control in DC.[1]
Keep in mind that railroad traffic is a much more controlled environment than the open road.
Everyone knows that people make mistakes. We're (mostly) all engineers here, and we understand that technology is also flawed, like its creators. However, the public at large has this opinion that technology is magic; computers _don't_ make mistakes. The second that belief is proven wrong, people are immediately afraid of it.
Maybe one day a few robot cars will make it onto the road. But then someone is going to get killed by one. And despite these robotic cars having a stellar record up until their first accident, especially when compared to their human-operated counterparts, they will be taken off the road so fast your head will spin.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_trai...
It is this loss of control which creates skepticism, not magical thinking about the nature of technology. Most people are surrounded by examples of technology not working, they know it's fallible, they would be afraid of autonomous cars for the right reasons - because the intent of autonomous cars is to deny them the ability not to trust technology blindly.
The changes will be gradual and they have already happened to a degree. Automatic brakes have already been implemented, more expansive GPS is happening. Next I could see an expansion on cruise control.
Its a combo between marketing new features and iterating on current technology.
I think the invention of the automated car will be a gradient, not a sudden occurrence.
There is no doubt about that we'll have robotic cars. But when, thats a million dollar question.
When the time comes to debate it, everyone is going to make the argument that they are still safer than human drivers. That wasn't true for the train operators.
Are you offering 1000:1 odds, for example, on your "never" claim?
One of the ideas I have is a type of smart dashcam - take the footage of one or more cameras (ideally 360°), apply CV and give the driver essential real-time info like cyclists or cars coming into the blind spot, sudden changes, lane drifting etc.
The hardware is cheap and easy to work with so the project is small enough for a startup, yet it's also something you can build upon and eventually scale into a full self-driving vehicle.
A guy in my lab did something similar (not 360 degrees) - basically trying to do as much autonomy as possible via a single camera. His work is really great, however he must have spent at least 2 years on building a system to detect and remove rain drops and other distortions from the front window to get results that 'aren't terrible' for night and rainy conditions. All car manufacturers spend weeks out in the desert and up in the cold of alaska to get results against extreme conditions. CV will be no exception. There's a great paper (can't find it at the moment) that gives the problem of crash detection at a stop light. During the day..no problem, but at night, or rainy, or sunset (heavy glare), etc. CV just can't do the job, but what they used instead was a pairing microphone. The sound of a crash was distinct and easy enough to detect that it was a better solution to the problem in most conditions (not all, but more than CV could solve).
I'm a cv researcher, and I love to build and design algorithms with cameras. But saying your system will "eventually scale into a X" should never be uttered lightly, even if you have proof of concept on Y.
Having said that, I do think CV will create tons of novel products (if I only knew which ones)
This would be great in, say, an area of Vegas to shuttle people around between casinos.
Even the Google team, as much progress as they've made, is like 11-12 people working full time for the last few years to build something worth demonstrating. However, despite their resources and expertise, still have a lot to overcome. In talking with Jiajun Zhu (manager of the Google car team), it became readily apparent that they still encounter situations where they are not fully confident in their system (such as on streets with too much brush/foliage). Given the rocky start (in terms of security, features, and stability) that most start-ups have, i would never trust their finished product.
Sorry, but did you mean to say that they still encounter situations where they are _not_ fully confident in their system?
The problem to go after initially is best conditions highway driving. Additionally, low-speed (<=20MPH) is reasonable challenge. Where things get tricky is building out a model for medium speed (30 - 40MPH) where there's pedestrians.
The analysis I did was horribly incomplete, as I mentioned. The branding and marketing for the startup is going to matter a lot because of how emotional this whole robotic story can be.
There's an entirely different way to write safety critical code that also specifies a process (IEC61508, MISRA C, etc). It isn't a guarantee, but it is required to have any sort of certainty in your system. This is before testing and validation.
As much as I'd love robot cars to "move fast and break things", making an argument that "well, at least it doesn't kill as many people as teenage drivers" won't fly in court.
This is a dramatic over simplification. What will really matter is whether they work or not. From the performance I've seen, they will work.
It is also worth noting that the technology isn't in question, just the regulations. That means it is just a matter of when, not if.
It doesn't work, we still get sued, and money has to change hands.
I'd love to be laissez-faire about it, but it is a pretty critical issue.
Hemp. Superior is many ways, illegal for a century and counting.
You can buy hemp protein powder on Amazon, I've seen hemp blend shirts (horribly scratchy, for the record).
There is no reason that a fully autonomous fleet of cars is unsafe, only a matter of convincing stubborn old people to embrace advanced technologies.
If the car is unsure of what to do (road conditions change or map doesn't match road) then pull off to the side of the road and wait for a remote human to say "ok, you're clear, carry on".
I think you meant just 'stubborn people', who come in all ages.
Here's a quote from Warren Buffett (big investor in Geico): "If you end up with no accidents, we will end up with no insurance company"
http://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1vj99m/warr... (unfortunately the video has been removed)
I share your concern, but maybe just sort, uh, :) worry about that part later? It could prove to be fatal but it'll be neat to at least see?
I mean, at least quick enough to get a prototype together and then later-on the avionics level of code auditing would take place.
I've worked with former and current avionics engineers before, whom worked with Ada on fighter aircraft or civilian jets. It seems like a few lines of code per day is typical.
A few LOC/day rate is generally accepted to be the overall rate of development from Requirements through Final Verification/Validation. That is, you may write a product of 10kloc in just a few months of coding, but the entire software aspects of the project actually took about 2.5 years to complete.
I don't do avionics (though it sounds like more fun. Greener grass on that side, etc...), but this is the way we measure LOC in medical devices.
To your other point, well, that's easy to say until the people killed are your loved ones. No company that plans to stay in business (or its officers out of jail) can afford to be blase about killing its customers.
I probably should have mentioned that in my original post. :) Yes, they do lots of verification and auditing for any kind of code like that. This includes things like NASA TDRSS, space shuttle fuel flow regulators, etc. The sort of thing where people might die if an exception isn't caught.
They don't necessarily want super-creative worker types itching to break rules, even if the system they are working on is indeed new and perhaps revolutionary. Things like the F35 JSF, etc.
When you can pull out your smartphone and call your car to you from the back of a parking lot, then get in and have it drive you home, then you have a self-driving car.
The downside is that you might not be able to piggyback on existing car regulations. And that could be a big downside.
The other thing I'm hoping for is that people realize that once they hand over the control to a robot they might as well give up individual transportation altogether and board a local robot minibus or whatever system ends up being most efficient.
The key thing about the interstates are their regularity. Small street roads are much harder. There are more spurious obstacles, including foot traffic, and perception is harder.
Even things like the ease of viewing lane lines matters. This is why solving a sub problem is so essential. If you wait to launch to be able to take on cobblestone streets of old london, a product that only works on interstate 101 and 280 in the bay area is going to launch first. They'll accumulate more data, and they'll win.
Isn't this what many car companies already do? You have individual features, such as anti-lock braking (decades old), auto parking, lane departure warning and its improvement lane assist, brake assist, etc that get put into cars that aren't fully robotic yet.
Except for the PR angle, I still don't see what would make Google's approach a fundamentally better one. That may be because of lack of objective evaluations, though. Anybody know of any?
We are currently making 800-1000 lift kits per month. Lift kits are sold to people who spend a lot of money to have the coolest truck on the block. They would pay $5000 I am sure for self driving. We have manufacturing capacity and distribution.
I want to make the hardware, the actual retrofit kits. I have no skills at software, but my company is very good at making parts to fit truck suspensions.
Please put me in contact with anyone that you know interested in the same field.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/technology/when-start-ups-...
For self-driving cars, security and safety are features. For the others, for better or worse, they are afterthoughts.
I would hope that engineers working on a self-driving car will do better. I guess we'll see.
But yeah, long hauls were made for robots. iRobot's slogan was "dull dirty or dangerous". Dull counts for a lot to replace a human!
Scania and Volvo both come to mind: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130409-robot-truck-platoon...
Companies would embrace the technology because the cost of a driver is so high (100k+ per year to pay a driver, benefits, and insurance).