35 karma · joined November 29, 2018
Plus it is nice to use a non-Google product these days. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia we are lucky to have a company (Seznam.cz) that is able to come up with competitive products and sustain ~50% market share against Google.
I'm still scratching my head while trying to figure out what's the mechanism that prevents the solution blowing up to infinity by setting the radius to zero and therefore achieving huge accelerations from a constant torque.
For instance, it's possible to write a differentiable rigid body simulator like MuJoCo or Bullet. This has a potential to unlock a new class of reinforcement learning algorithms that can take advantage of the gradients passing directly through in place of very inefficient sampling.
Differentiable simulations in general are the holy grail of optimization and system identification. These ideas have been around since the 70s or so. The bottle neck up until now has been the implementation.
+ Both [1] and [3] have much fewer assets (like 3D models of houses, factories, bridges, cars, trucks, and so on) you'd have to buy them on the Unreal/Unity model marketplace and it still wouldn't be enough. Autodrome can take advantage of almost entire Europe and a third of USA at 1:20 scale.
+ Autodrome has a sparse map representation that is really easy to randomly fuzz. I.e. it's easy to shift a segment of the road a little bit and see how the algorithm would react to the fuzzed scenario. I believe this is only way how to achieve robust agents and effectively prevent testing on the training set.
- Biggest disadvantage of Autodrome is a lack of access to in-game dynamic NPCs (like other trucks, cars or pedestrians). As far as I know there's no API for this. Without help (or a lot of very fragile memory hacking) from the developers of the game this feature is very hard to achieve and both [1] and [3] already have it.
[3] http://carla.org
PS: Keep in mind that I'm the developer of Autodrome so I my objectivity is very questionable.