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College Senior Turns His Honda Civic Into a Self-Driving Car Using Free Hardware, Software (technologyreview.com)
holy_calamity writes: University of Nebraska student Brevan Jorgenson swapped the rear-view mirror in his 2016 Honda Civic for a home-built device called a Neo, which can steer the vehicle and follow traffic on the highway. Jorgenson used hardware designs and open-source software released by Comma, a self-driving car startup that decided to give away its technology for free last year after receiving a letter asking questions about its functionality from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Jorgenson is just one person in a new hacker community trying to upgrade their cars using Comma's technology. "A Neo is built from a OnePlus 3 smartphone equipped with Comma's now-free Openpilot software, a circuit board that connects the device to the car's electronics, and a 3-D-printed case," reports MIT Technology Review. The report notes that Neodriven, a startup based in Los Angeles, has recently started selling a pre-built Neo device that works with Comma's Openpilot software, but it costs $1,495.
I don't see why, if he drove the car. On the other hand, if he sat there while the computer drove, that's a different story.
I was thinking Clock-boy myself, but then I realized that he's not quite old enough to drive and his car would contain a bomb.
He should be arrested, immediately.
On what grounds?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Next headline: College Student Arrested For Building Autonomous Car That Hit Something
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Geohot, a renowned hacker decided to try making a self driving car. It kinda worked, but it is, well, a hack.
However, when regulators came over and asked him to prove that it was actually safe enough for public roads, he backed down and that's how we got Comma.ai free.
I've nothing against Geohot and Comma.ai, quite the opposite in fact, they are great hackers, in the positive sense. However, when lives are on the line, being clever is not enough, we also need the boring and expensive work to make sure it is safe.
I assume it's "'Free' as in speech, not 'Free' as in beer." He actually spent about $700 on the hardware.
This software just replaced LKAS and ACC in Hondas, both features you can get as standard anyway.
basically steering lane control in cruise mode, and adaptive cruise so you dont run in to the back of the car in front.
That is far FAR from a 'self driving car', not even similar. The system cannot even operate below 18mph/25mph depending on model.
Still, new media and all, who CARES if any facts are checked, its all about the HYPE!
Of course you can drive stoned. It will impair your reaction time a bit, but to be fair... It's probably still better than most older drivers can manage.
Young people today are impressive. When I was a senior in college, I was turning milk bottles into bongs.
They were sweet bongs, though.
When I got to grad school, that all changed because I was suddenly surrounded by people smarter than me and I had to actually work. But those first seven years of college were a lot of fun.
You are welcome on my lawn.
These guys did it years ago.
Works for boats too.
It is pleasantly surprising that Honda lets third parties connect to the vehicle control electronics. I would have expected fiercely guarded proprietary systems...
Of course you can drive stoned
Unless you're "one toke over the line" and suffer a panic attack. Well, even then a salty stoner can still get up and down the highway, but it is by no means pleasant.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Look at all those Tesla owners without a 3D printed case
In the 1960s, it was theorized that with a dedicated track, and some computer power, it would be possible for vehicles, holding a few people each, could reduce the need for cars. Various groups around the world never could get all the problems taken care of, including sudden bunching up of traffic.
Now that computing power has exploded, now might be the time to try dedicated PRT roads again. Basically half a ton, unpiloted vehicles, on overhead roads. I am aware it is considered an eyesore, but if robots use those overhead roads, it might be an acceptable tradeoff.
Why are you thinking about boys?
I had a friend that bragged about driving drunk. He did it all the time and he got away with it for years. He dodged the cops, payed them off a couple of times. Then he got in a bad accident and people nearly died. He was driving the wrong way on a 4 lane highway. I'm 57 now and I've known a lot of functional drunks. They all got progressively worse over the years as they aged. One went to work every day and drank himself to sleep every night for years. He occasionally took a week off and when he came back he was so screwed for a couple of days. Then he retired and died 18 months later. No reason to stop drinking since he wasn't working. Sure, people drive drunk all the time and it's not a problem, until it is.
It's not a problem offroad. On public streets I imagine the law might frown on it.
It's not a terribly difficult problem to get to work 99.5% of the time
I'd say any technology that is 20% better than humans should just be let out on the roads the way we do 80 year old drivers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course you can drive stoned
Unless you're "one toke over the line" and suffer a panic attack. Well, even then a salty stoner can still get up and down the highway, but it is by no means pleasant.
Dude! You just need to drive 5 miles an hour so you don't attract attention...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
While what this kid did is impressive, he's only done the easy part: getting a car to drive itself under a limited set of circumstances that he knows about.
The hard part is to get a car to drive itself under all sorts of weather and road conditions, and safely handle all kinds of expected and unexpected road hazards, such as potholes, people, bicycles, and crazy drivers.
Look, if it's ok for google and co to have their half-baked crap navigate on public roads...
The difference is that Google has applied for, and been given, a license to test their SDCs on public roads.
Money doesn't bring people back from the dead.
But money does pay for repairs and medical bills. Injuries are far more common than fatalities, and non-injury accidents causing vehicle damage are even more common.
Of course you can drive stoned. It will impair your reaction time a bit, but to be fair... It's probably still better than most older drivers can manage.
This is the cold hard truth the authorities will never admit. The eligibility for driving should be purely based on merit and that's it. If you can pass the test stoned, drunk or asleep then it's still a pass. If you don't like that then make the test tougher.
Of course you can drive stoned
Unless you're "one toke over the line" and suffer a panic attack.
Sweet (cellphone zombie) Jesus!
It's not a terribly difficult problem to get to work 99.5% of the time, but with lives at risk most people aren't too happy with that number.
Depends.
If the system works even 90% of time and there's a human backup that is alert and focused, then it's good already.
(like autopilots found in airplanes, boats, some modern high-speed train.
Autopilots help automating some minute detail of the driving/sailing/flying.
But autopilots are still under the supervision of a human in charge.
It just relieves the human of part of the stupid hard gruntwork.
That's also were Tesla's autopilot and Google's prototypes on highway fell in).
If the system works even 99.9% of time, and the human is asleep, that's an entirely different can of worm.
You need well established public awareness that the autonomous driver is better and cause far less accidents than the humans.
(The small scale slow driving google cars with no steering wheel fall in this category).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Two days ago I was at a launch party for the 2017 Honda Civic. There was a 1st generation Civic from 1978, my own 1991 4th generation Civic, and several subsequent generation Civics, all in the Honda showroom arrayed around the new model.
What worries me is that so much on the new model has gone automatic. It's got a radar set in the front bumper to measure distance to the vehicle in front. It can be set to automatically speed control itself to maintain safe distance from the vehicle in front. It's got blind spot warning devices. It's got an automatic parking brake. It's got a camera that it's claimed is able to read and interpret road signs for itself so that the car knows what the speed limit is, and can be set to automatically keep its speed down to the limit.
It worries me as a driver that so much safety related functionality is being integrated into new cars that drivers of cars are going to be dangerously de-skilled. If, for example, a student driver learned to drive and passed their driving test in a 2017 manual transmission Civic, even though qualified they would have little of the skills needed to drive a 1991 Civic or any other car produced over, say, the subsequent 20 years. Specifically would they for example be able to perform a hill start, which is part of the British driving test and as well as the usual observations before moving off requires the ability to operate a manual hand brake simultaneously with the clutch and gas pedal? I doubt it.
I do believe you are a college freshman. Your spelling of "college" is a dead giveaway. Put down the joint. It's beginning to rot your brain. :)
Agreed on the stoned part. Limited experiments on this suggest that what you lose in ability, you more than make up for in caution.
However, the part about older drivers is ignorant. Older drivers have lower insurance mostly because they have less accidents than young drivers. Older drivers are objectively better than young ones. Though of course there is an upper limit, where senility sets in.
Google did an awful lot of testing on an AI test facility and proved basic competence before they ventured on to the public roads. As have all the other legitimate autonomous driving developers.
So, they got a letter from big government, and decided to give up and go home? That must have been a seriously threatening letter. How dare they try to innovate and compete against the large corporate oligarchs like Google, Apple, and Tesla?
Older drivers have lower insurance mostly because they have less accidents than young drivers. Older drivers are objectively better than young ones. Though of course there is an upper limit, where senility sets in.
They might be safer than kids, but they're still on a bunch of medications on which they really shouldn't be driving. And in a crisis, their reflexes are typically awful, often for the same reason.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Also, drinking slows your reaction time and coordination, in addition to your perception. While a stoner might not be paying any damn attention, his reflexes and motor skills are not actually impaired at all.
Cannabis does affect reaction time, though it doesn't harm coordination. Informal studies with video games suggest that it may actually be a performance-enhancing drug, because it takes away twitchiness. :) But what it doesn't do that alcohol does is impair your ability to say no — notably, to yourself. Alcohol lowers inhibitions in a way that THC doesn't. That's why you find people going 100 in a 65 while drunk, and 65 in a 65 when high.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They might be safer than kids, but they're still on a bunch of medications on which they really shouldn't be driving. And in a crisis, their reflexes are typically awful, often for the same reason.
Crisis? What crisis?
That's a huge benefit of being an experienced driver - you smell trouble far before it happens. You know which drivers are going to do something stupid, and you stay out of their way. You leave others room to make mistakes and recover from it.
A good driver will avoid many situations where good reflexes would be needed, In addition, a good driver will make sure they have enough space to not act by blind reflex, but by thinking. Your "fast reflexes" will quite often just make the situation worse or will cause different problems.
It feels like if I had self driving car I could just lounge in the back doing desk work. The back could be like an office.
Crisis? What crisis?
I live on Clear Lake in California. We have a shitload of accidents here, often involving fatalities, which are head-on or t-bone collisions. When someone comes across the line, there may not physically be enough room to brake before they cream you — going full speed. And there are areas with essentially no shoulder.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From TFA:
federal and state laws probably don’t pose much of a barrier to those with a desire to upgrade their vehicle to share driving duties. NHTSA has authority over companies selling vehicles and systems used to modify them, but consumers have significant flexibility in making changes to their own vehicle, says Smith, who advises the U.S. Department of Transportation on law and automation.
Anyone using a home-built Neo will still have to comply with state rules requiring responsible driving, though. (Comma’s Openpilot software tries to help with that: it complains if the driver doesn’t touch the wheel every five minutes, and it asks for human intervention if it’s having trouble interpreting the road ahead.) And in the event of a crash, using a home-built driving aid might raise eyebrows. “Just because you can legally operate it doesn’t mean you are not civilly liable,” says Smith.
I'm surprised someone hasn't already mentioned that the 2016 civic with sensing package (not even that expensive) already follows the car in front of you and stays in the lanes.
Actually, that's why stoned drivers tend to be OK but drunk drivers are a problem. The drunk driver is over-confident in their abilities and tends to crash. Stoned drivers are generally more capable than they think they are and slow down more than enough to compensate for their poor reaction time.
Slashdot tells me that all people are happy allow self driving cars on the road and that the insurance companies are happy to pick up the tab. Why should he be given preferential treatment to big corporations? Our roads are now self driving testing grounds.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Wow. The 'you husband might be dead but you'll get money' argument. I'm guessing you're American?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
not all humans are capable of staying focused on the ride while not involved in it
Hence some strategies of asking to keep the hands ready on the wheel (and other similar micro-involvements)
(And there is experience, coming from the world of train automation, that suggest that this works (a bit).
e.g.: TGV train operators are required by the system to periodically hold the thrust control wheel)
Also in my personal experience, you still remain involved in the driving :
- even if the adaptive cruise control is taking care of keeping distance with the car in front, you need to periodically adjust target speed depending on the limitations of the local part of the highway. And in a city settings you still need to react to traffic lights, stop signs, yield, etc.
- even if your car has a lane keeping system, you still need to initiate overtakes (even Tesla's Autopilot 's lane change isn't good enough to be done without supervision. The car's sonars have a very short range and might miss a car coming fast from far away in the target line) and over all handle the whole highway entry/exists, and city crossing.
and what is the point of that anyway?
the same as having a friend in the passenger seat also watching the road :
additional checks.
Machine are never distracted : the LIDAR, cams and radar are always on, their input constantly processed. The car's computer will never lose focus.
Computer excel at boring repetitive tasks. The car will always be ready to execute an emergency braking if there's a risk of collision.
So, compared to just a lone diver steering the car, an autopilot ("Level 2" in official parlance) in addition to the human watching is always better (redundancy against possible accident), even better if driver AND passenger watch the road in addition to the AI.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
He should have no trouble scoring a sweet job...
No sig for you! Come back one year!