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tmpnam1234567on GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019

See the ROS2 real-time proposal link above for a discussion of ROS's shortcomings. ROS is ok for school projects and loose systems but you can't use it to pilot a passenger aircraft or car.

tmpnam1234567on GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019

Imagine predicting pedestrian behavior with if/else and numeric thresholds (distance to curb less than 1.25 meters?) instead of a principled model trained on data.

Waymo uses sophisticated predictive models trained on vast amounts of data. Cruise slaps together piles of guesses and (frankly) bullshit.

tmpnam1234567on GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019

Waymo: Code written by professionals. A system using models trained on vast amounts of data. Written slowly, meticulously, exhaustively, heavily reviewed, and intended to be reliable.

Cruise: Amateur hour, written FAST. Better yet, let's just use this code we found on the net! Can we make it look like it works most of the time?

tmpnam1234567on GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019

There is always an expert safety driver ready to take over.

You can operate an unreliable system (randomly reacting late 0.1% of the time because of a hiccup in C++'s standard library memory allocator, say, or encountering an unhandled scenario 0.1% of the time) as long as there's a guy to take over immediately.

But you can't ship that in the real world.

tmpnam1234567on GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019

I am one of those early employees.

When GM bought us we were given three Milestones to reach. The first Milestone was supposed to be delivered this time last year. We failed to deliver. We didn't have the basis for a real self-driving car. Just a demo (enough to make GM buy us).

So the Milestones were divided up. A year after we should have delivered that first Milestone we have hand-coded enough special cases that GM believes we're about half way through that first Milestone. We're not.

I take GM's money but I know we're lying to them. As an engineer I'm embarrassed by the system we've built.

What else do you want to know? Ask me.

tmpnam1234567on GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019

It's not a shitpost. I've been suffering in Cruise's trashy codebase for years now.

I know a little about Waymo. They seem ok. Everyone else, I have no idea.

tmpnam1234567on GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019

Cruise Automation's software is a sloppy collection of special cases, coded by hand. We write ad-hoc rules to handle each situation we observe.

We don't really develop any neural networks ourselves. We use what we can get off GitHub: freely available research and school projects that we paste together, often without understanding them.

We use ROS (http://www.ros.org). ROS is not reliable for a timing-critical automotive system. That's why our cars drive so slowly/cautiously and stop so abruptly/frequently. It's because we're always on the verge of reacting late and hitting something.

Our technology is not "real" in the way that Waymo's technology is real. We build demos and promote them in the media. That's the truth.

Am I proud of this? No. But GM is paying for my house in San Francisco, so...