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How Google's Self-Driving Car Works

IEEE Spectrum

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson
  • May be out of date. The tools, versions or practices it shows have likely moved on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

647K views15 years ago2 recommendations

AI and machine learningComputer visionClassic machine learning

Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson explain the perception, mapping, and decision-making systems behind Google's early self-driving car.

This is part 2/3 of the keynote presentation by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on self-driving cars at IROS 2011. Part 1/3 is here youtube.com/watch?v=z7ub5Doyapk. Part 3/3 is here youtube.com/watch?v=rOWhu_aa9kM. Read more: spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence… (Recorded using a pocket camcorder; apologies for the poor audio quality.)

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a fascinating technical look at the early engineering and sensor systems of Google's autonomous vehicles.

magicaliston Hacker News • Recommends

On “Google's self driving cars can navigate drive-through restaurants.”

link to this video 9:00 has a good example, recognizing the state of a traffic light, other cars and pedestrians at an intersection, but lots of cool videos starting around 3:40. The whole talk is awesome and a presentation for an actual technical audience, too.
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iharrison Hacker News • Recommends

On “Google's self-driving car gathers almost 1 GB/sec”

There's a great presentation about Google's self-driving car here (check the second half for video of the real-time telemetry that it gathers): link to this video One of the things that I found really interesting is how the car inches forward at a stop sign in order to show the "driver's" intent to other drivers. Lots of actions that seem to be second-nature for human drivers have to be carefully emulated here.
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Samuel_Michonon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Google's self-driving car gathers almost 1 GB/sec”

The picture Gross shared is a frame from a 1.5 year old promo1, so he may also have misheard 1Gb for 1GB. 1 link – the bottom image is from this presentation: link to this video
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ohwpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Show HN: Random Street View”

What about "Haha, Well you're certainly not going to create a 3D point cloud of every street in the world"... Google's self driving cars are just doing that. EDIT: I can't find the post I once read, but this post also makes some clear: link EDIT 2: Here a video of the presentation: link to this video @ 3:30 you can see the generated (and stored) point cloud.
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Retricon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Elon Musk: human drivers are 'too dangerous'”

That's a load of FUD. Modern Self driving cars track people on sidewalks not just the street. As to driving in the rain, they can do it, but like poeple there less safe at highway speeds in the rain. link to this video (6:45, 9:00) Also, 3:52 demos stopping for someone in the road. They even read stop lights (8:00). PS: If you actually look at that left turn on @9:00 the car has a much better idea what's around it than people do.
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sorenjanon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Cancelled Comma One Would Have Embarrassed the Car Industry”

Isn't Google's approach dependent on expensive LIDARs and high resolution 3D maps 0, or have they changed that? I don't see that kind of system scale well. 0 link to this video
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amjaegeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Google’s self-driving car team prepares to spin out from Alphabet’s X”

If I'm not mistaken, this is the presentation that discusses mapping the roads before autonomous travel. They compare the maps to what the car sees as it drives. link to this video But there are a number of reasons the need pre-mapping are not a huge issue. A) When autonomous cars start to be introduced people will still know how to drive, and can pilot the car through unmapped areas. By the time everyone has an autonomous car, and no one knows how to drive the world will be mapped. B) Google has already shown with Streetview that they can create detailed, up-to-date maps of most roads. C) This problem will likely be solved in time.
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