Self-driving Cars: Current state and importance of data

Slides from a presentation given by Riccardo Biasini, ex-CEO and now Chief System Architect at comma.ai, during Big Data & AI Conference, held in Dallas, Texas, from June 27 - 29, 2019.

Transcript

1. Riccardo Biasini, Chief Systems Architect Self-Driving Cars: Current State and Importance of Data
2. 2 Levels of Self Driving LEVEL 1 Human driving, with assistance features LEVEL 3 Limited environments, required to take over within few seconds LEVEL 4 Limited environments, human behind the wheel not required LEVEL 5 All environments, human behind the wheel not required LEVEL 2 Automated driving, required human assistance
3. 3 Levels by Numbers in US 278M registered passenger Vehicles total 0.2% 12.6% 87.2% Level 0 Level 1 Level 2 Level 3+
4. 4 What About Level 3? " Guaranteeing few seconds of automated driving before a human takes over is (almost) as hard as solving for Level 4 " Too expensive for owned vehicles " Audi A8 allegedly shipped with Level 3, but: " The vehicle must be on a multi-lane road, " with barrier between oncoming lanes, " with a structure along the edge, " speed is < 37mph, no pedestrians in the scene, " speed of surrounding vehicles is also low " Does not scale to situations requiring faster reaction time
5. 5 What About Level 4? " Going from A to B without having to drive: it already exists (Taxi, Uber, Lyft, public transportation) " Waymo, Uber, Lyft, Zoox etc. are trying to create a lower cost version of a taxi by removing the driver " Level 4, by definition, cannot drive anywhere/anytime: does not compete with car ownership " Unclear how long it will take to surpass human driving, considering costs and practicality
6. 6 What About Level 5? " “In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY” – Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla, 2016 " “My oldest son is 12, and that means in three and a half years, he's going to be able to get his driver's license. My team and I are committed to making sure that doesn't happen.” – Chris Urmson, Chief Selfdriving Program, Google, 2015 " “Ford will have fully autonomous cars by 2021” - Ford Website, 2019 " “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with full self-driving, software... everything.”- Elon Musk, 2019 " “With the BMW iNext, you will soon see, we will offer safe, autonomous driving for our customers, by 2021. And our vision is clear, we want to be a leader.” - BMW’s CDO, 2018
7. 7 Why Level 2 " People spend 5% of their “awake time” driving. " 37k fatal accidents in US (+15% since minimum in 2014) " All Level 1 cars sold today have the Level 2 HW capability, but are constrained by software and processing power: " Long development process, no OTA " Computing Hardware and SW soon become outdated: the average life of a car is 15 years!
8. 8 Openpilot in Action ADD VIDEO
9. 9 How self-driving cars work Sensors Sensor Fusion and Perception Planning Localization Controls Super human Super human Good
 enough Sub human Sub
 human
10. 10 Why data are important • To train neural networks • To build (HD) maps • To simulate/debug • To offer a service to users
11. 11 How much data CAN companies collect? Cost per mile [$] -0.75 0 0.75 1.5 2.25 3 Miles potentially collected per day 1E+03 1E+04 1E+05 1E+06 Tesla Comma Level 4 self-driving company
12. 12 Costs in Data Collection and Use • Car/devices • Driver • Connectivity • Labeling • Processing/training/data transfer • Maintenance of legacy data • Storage Monthly Storage Cost Users
13. 13 Tips • Early on, deploy a sustainable business model for data collection • Is the cloud service worth it? • Select and upload only the data you need • Discard data you don’t use Comma EON Dashcam app:
 Chffr CAN reader:
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