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Ex-Uber Engineer Claims a Self-Driving Car Drove Him Coast-To-Coast (theguardian.com)
"Anthony Levandowski, the controversial engineer at the heart of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, claims to have built an automated car that drove from San Francisco to New York without any human intervention," reports the Guardian. Levandowski told the Guardian that he completed the 3,099-mile journey on October 30th using a modified Toyota Prius, which "used only video cameras, computers and basic digital maps." From the report: Levandowski told the Guardian that, although he was sitting in the driver's seat the entire time, he did not touch the steering wheels or pedals, aside from planned stops to rest and refuel. "If there was nobody in the car, it would have worked," he said. If true, this would be the longest recorded road journey of an autonomous vehicle without a human having to take control. Elon Musk has repeatedly promised, and repeatedly delayed, one of his Tesla cars making a similar journey. A time-lapse video of the drive, released to coincide with the launch of Levandowski's latest startup, Pronto.AI, did not immediately reveal anything to contradict his claim. But Levandowski has little store of trust on which to draw.
I still want my flying car!
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
This guy is mostly famous for being a big liar and a thief. Not buying it. Also not sure why anyone would care about this.
What liars wonâ(TM)t do for cheap publicity?
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - tech magnate Marc Zuckerberg was found dead in his Manhattan home this morning. .
There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
"Nothing went wrong this time so nothing can go wrong"
This so-called 'engineer' is a danger to himself and others and having admitted what he's done they should find something to prosecute him for.
It is super safe and everyone should do it. Musk is a pussy.
Just because Uber's car had some software disabled that would have prevented collusion with a pedestrian, how does the mean this guy lacks trust?
Uber's cars were working generally OK - on city streets mind you - until they were pulled, because of one accident.
I actually don't find it very hard to believe this could be done myself, because you are talking about almost all city, or near highway driving which is generally straightforward. Pretty much no obstacles, maybe some construction zones which are usually pretty well marked on highways.
I don't even find it hard to believe an individual with a lot of skill and programming/AI/electronics knowledge could have pulled this off.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And no, I don't have any documentation, though yes, I am also a notoriously disingenuous person. But I did, I rode across the country in a robot car. /s
Bull and shit.
...as any "self driving" claim. Give it up people, it doesn't work. People 5 years from now will laugh at all these companies and wonder how they got funded in the first place.
One assumes that human intervention was still necessary to refuel.
Self-driving works the vast majority of the time. How many attempts were made (by him and/or others) that we're not hearing about because they had to be aborted? Just doing it once is not exactly Lewis & Clark territory here.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
He doesn't lack a store of trust because of the accident, he lacks the store of trust because he's a thief.
So a guy who is highly desired by TWO companies for his autonomous driving knowledge cannot be "trusted" to have managed to drive cross country in one?
I wouldn't trust him very much in terms of a contract, but he obviously has the TECHNICAL skills to do what he claims. And there is video of course.
Like I said, what he did was not even that TECHNICALLY challenging, so it's more likely than not he did what he claims - despite how he may have treated employers he worked for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm more impressed that the Prius could drive that far on only 5 refuels. My vehicle would need at least 10 refueling stops for that range.
Levandowski told the Guardian that, although he was sitting in the driver's seat the entire time, he did not touch the steering wheels or pedals, aside from planned stops to rest and refuel.
So not any different from driving with cruise control and lane assist, then.
Then it didn't drive you the whole way you FUCKING LIAR.
I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that running coast to coast through highway is easier than running in residential areas, where pedestrians can pop up at any time.
Let's assume that this actually happened.
How many things didn't happen that would have thrown his software off if they had? Wildlife running in front of the vehicle. Pedestrians walking out in front of the vehicle. Flooded roads. Icy roads. Unrepaired road surface damage. Diversions. Police/ambulance in attendance at an accident. And so on, and so on.
It's relatively trivial to build a self-driving car that can go from point A to point B without human intervention if you can guarantee that none of the above things will happen. But that's an impossible guarantee. So even assuming that he's being honest and that all of what he claims the car did, the car actually did... we're still a very long way off fully autonomous vehicles. Which makes the claims disingenuous, at best.
I can tell you that this isn't really a test, even if he did do it.
That is exactly what I am saying, it's not really that much of a test of todays autonomous driving cars because pretty much all highway driving is easy.
I do think the car probably drove itself to the gas stations and hotels used - that's a bit more impressive, but also like I said, roads near highways tend to be pretty wide, and clearly marked.
Pure city driving or really bad weather is more where things get interesting I think.
Even though you and I know this is easy though, it should be a real wake-up call for lots of self-driving car naysayers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I seem to recall that CMU had a self-driving van in the 80s that autonomously drove cross country. Anyone have a similar recollection or details?
All it takes is one minor failure to totally shit on your super duper high-tech auto-driving AI.
Whether it is something as trivial as black tape over stop signs or a landscape the original algorithm has had zero experience with and doesn't know how to react to it.
Humans and almost every animal come across this every day - optical illusions. These come about due to fundamental limits of our visual systems - they evolved to only care for things that keep them alive.
We regularly come across visual oddities that make us second-guess stuff, or misread because of a font clashing with your vision (not all vision is the same, it is mostly genetic), or a person wearing clothes with various stripes that can throw you off, whether intentionally or just because it clashes with how you see specifically.
Cars algorithms haven't had this pressure on them. They aren't even remotely comparable to such a system, they are a mere emulation of the simplest of visual systems.
Until they have been put through such rigorous evolution, they should never be allowed near public roads.
It doesn't and won't need to take a billion years, evolution was limited by needless biology and energy limits, computers don't have those issues as much.
The current approaches used are very hacky brute-force methods at best. All these GANs and similar systems are nowhere near close to how a simple visual system works or evolved.
It needs a complete rethink. Most of these methodologies have been shit on by researchers in various ways over the years.
I would hardly be surprised if many of these companies repeating "totally next year guys! Self-driving is the future!" are suffering the very same problems. Or ignoring them. I sure hope not, it'll be very costly.
It's essentially trying to stop an iceberg sized leak in the Titanic with the dining halls plates. It's fruitless.
You don't even need to be a neurologist to see this. Pun intended.
it's hardly surprising many of the companies pushing for this are also behind or working with others to create machine-learning processors and similar products. Going to make a killing off others failures.
Insert precious mineral mining vs selling the tools analogy.
It didn't use lasers? Sometimes a big "spot" in the road is merely discoloration, spilled paint, or a reflection. Such could easily fool camera-driven AI to slam on the breaks, risking a rear-end collision. Lasers can verify such a spot is "flat" in a more direct manner.
I've had close calls myself over mistaken identity because reflections etc. confused (human) stereo vision, being one eye may catch a reflection that the other eye doesn't, and the brain thus misaligns the pair of images, or at least gets an ambiguous result, which should result in breaking until "solved".
It's possible that "camera-only" AI is good enough 99.9% of the time, but I'd prefer lasers to double-check, because 99.9% is not good enough with cars.
It's kind of comparable to, "I eat bacon 3 times day, and don't have health problems; therefore bacon is safe."
Table-ized A.I.
What happened to cause the first two attempts to fail? THAT is more interesting!!!
So now that he has posted a video, is that evidence of violating the law in at least state that does not allow non-human driving?
So if it only used video camera's it was not driving at night.
Nor was it being placed in situations were there were indecipherable objects in the roadway.
Video can't judge object size or reliably get distance to an object unless it has some references.
For example, a hefty bad in the middle of the road. Now if the road is straight and the lines are dashed or even spaced so that the system can estimate paralav then it could figure out the extent of the hefty bag partially. It will not be able to separate distance along the road and height. If the hefty bag is stationary then as the car approaches it "might" be able to sort those two out. But hefty bags usually are moving and are dark.
Consider a semi truck crossing the intersection in front of you. Now here things get tougher. The road is visible under the truck on the other side of the truck. So that provides false infonrmation making it seem like the bottom of the truck starts at a position much farther away. And it also block the horizon view of the road so you lose the size and plavement information that holds.
thus you get to crash into the truck.
If the side of the truck is also painted to look like say a jungle or a road or a person or dazzle camoflage things might get even crazier.
In short what he did was rigged and reckless even if it was happily Wreckless.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's basically first-gen Tesla auto-pilot.
There's no footage of it doing anything but staying in one lane.
Nothing of it pulling in to a gas station, nothing of it navigating an interchange.
It seems to not even be able to change lanes.
Carnegie Mellon did this, in 1995
https://jalopnik.com/they-drove-cross-country-in-an-autonomous-minivan-witho-1696330141
What if it had 2 cameras in the same direction?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I'm a developer in a bona fide project. I use nVidia's Jetson inside a modified Audi for self driving research & development.
Under no circumstances would we hire an asshat like Levandowski at our company. As far as I'm concerned he's disqualified himself from this industry. He ought to change gears and move into defense contracts where the goal is to kill people, because he'd be great at that.
it doesn't help much for distant objects.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I would love to do this.
Is the distinction important to make for that distant objects?
Seems like the argument have left the territory technology and entered that of technicalities.
Have you seen the video? It has night segments.
Google has done a very thorough job destroying the guy after he left them, but this is one case where the record shows that he was the principal major creative force behind the success at Waymo. You might argue he is greedy and has ethical issues with respect to IP but in terms of implementing working autonomous vehicles nobody has more credibility than Levandowski.
It would not be difficult to build an autonomous vehicle that could drive coast-to-coast on I-80. The autonomous systems company I worked for in the oughts could have built such a vehicle in the 1970s. Except of course for those tricky bits at the endpoints, San Francisco and New York City, I'd suggest it not trying to go through the Chicago metro area at rush hour either even though I-80 is fairly far south. So yeah, possible, easy even - except for the hard part.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tjochem/nhaa/nhaa_home_page.html
Coast to coast is all highway driving. Still impressive, but I would think that getting around in a congested city would be more challenging.
On the highway you have no bicyclists, or dogs, jumping in front of you. No traffic lights, no stop signs. Nobody running stop signs or traffic lights.
Video can't judge object size or reliably get distance to an object unless it has some references.
It should provide at least the same possibility to judge those as a human does with only visual input, which seems to be enough to drive a car from coast to coast.
However, I find it rather unlikely that this guy has *algorithms* that can make those judgements to the same level as a human.
Or he should be prosecuted for reckless endangerment.
What if it had 2 cameras in the same direction?
it doesn't help much for distant objects.
So your objection is that it can't do something that humans can't do, and that somehow renders it unable to drive? With greater stereo separation, you get greater depth perception. Our eyes are just a few inches apart. In a car, you can place the cameras feet apart. An AV's ability to determine depth from cameras alone can be superior to ours, and ours is good enough for driving. QED, this is not a real limitation.
I'm not saying he has done it, mind you. I'm saying it's conceivable.
I can drive with one eye closed with almost zero degradation in driving quality, because of the time I've spent playing driving video games where you get no depth information anyway, and have to infer it all from the apparently changing sizes of objects. But even if multiple cameras were necessary to estimate distance, we don't need to know precisely how close distant objects are, specifically because they are distant. Range to them is irrelevant until they are nearby.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In 1995 Carnegie Melon drove cross country no-hands in a automated Pontiac minivan. Not quite as automated, as it was one camera facing front, a gps (for speed only, no good enough maps available), and a 486 computer. They claim in the journal (ahh, the days before blogs) that the car drove 2800 of 2850 miles across country.
Original quote: "Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle? -- Alan Shepherd, the first man into space, Gemini program"
Actual quote: Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle? -- Alan Shepherd, the first U.S. man (not first man - Yuri Gagarin was first) into space, Mercury program"
Who the hell writes these quotes?