Google Self-Driving Car Project | SXSW Interactive 2016
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN returns to it repeatedly as one of the best candid talks on how a real self-driving system sees the road and where it struggles.
What it is
Chris Urmson's SXSW 2016 talk on Google's self-driving car project, covering 1.3 million self-driven miles and the gap between hype and reality. It shows sensor visualizations and playbacks of hard situations the cars met, and discusses failures such as the low-speed bus collision.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 7 different months, 2016 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec Animats · 2016-07 · on “Tesla Model S Autopilot Reliability – Why Americans Should Love Tesla”
On a related note, here's Chris Urmson's long talk at SXSW on how Google does automatic driving.[1] This is worth watching. He shows what Google cars sense and gives an overview of how they analyze the data. This is the first time Google has released this level of detail. If you're going to comment on automatic driving, you need to see this. Urmson goes into great detail on Google's 2mph collision with a bus. The sensor data from the Google car is shown. The video from the bus (it had cameras, too) is shown. Exactly what the software was trying to do is discussed. The assumptions the software made about what the bus driver would do are discussed. What they did to prevent this from happening
Strong rec Animats · 2018-07 · on “Former Apple Employee Charged with Theft of Autonomous Car Project Trade Secrets”
That's Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW in 2016 [1], which has been widely viewed. It's one of the best talks on the subject. He said "How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both." Then he showed video of Google cars dealing with various challenging conditions. This included the famous scene where a Google self driving car encountered a woman in a powered wheelchair using a broom to chase a turkey. The software recognized this as something to avoid, even though it didn't classify it further. [1] [this video]
Recommends kyrra · 2016-05 · on “Four hundred miles with Tesla’s autopilot forced me to trust the machine”
This was a good presentation by the Google team: [this video] I believe they say in there that they got highway driving down really early on. They have been focusing on urban driving for the last few years.
Recommends Animats · 2016-12 · on “How Self-Driving Cars Work”
This article seems to be a summary of Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW.[1] That's worth a watch. It gives a good overview of how Google does it. [1] [this video]
Recommends Animats · 2017-01 · on “Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars”
Except that Google was able to handle construction sites, traffic cones, and people directing traffic last year. Watch Urmson's video from SXSW.[1] Google has put a lot of effort into handling unusual situations. Those cars driving on residential streets in Mountain View and Austin have accumulated data on the hard cases. The California DMV continues to publish autonomous vehicle crash reports. The last one was in October.[2] A Google vehicle was rear-ended at 3mph when it was entering an intersection with poor visibility, detected cross-traffic, and stopped. I'm looking forward to the 2016 self-driving disengagement reports appearing on on the California DMV site.[3] Those were due January
Recommends Animats · 2017-06 · on “Tesla Autopilot”
Compare Chris Urmson's SXSW talk from 2016 about Google's system.[1] Look carefully at the graphics which show what the sensors are detecting, and compare with Tesla's. Watch Urmson discuss hard cases, problems, and failures. Not seeing that with Tesla. Or Uber. Or Cruise. Or Otto. [1] [this video]
Recommends Animats · 2017-07 · on “Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda”
Watch Chris Urmson's self-driving car talk at SXSW 2016.[1] Especially the part where the Google car encounters someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom. Google can handle that. [1] [this video]
Cites agildehaus · 2016-03 · on “Uber seeking to buy self-driving cars: source”
They do well in rain but snow remains a problem, not due to icy roads (at SXSW Chris Urmson said they do well on slick roads) but that the "better than GPS" LIDAR-based location tracking stops working when snow is on the ground. The car simply cannot figure out where it is when there's a significant layer of snow on the ground because the reference maps stop looking like what the car is seeing. [this video]