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Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Chris Urmson, Director of Self-Driving Cars at Google
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 11 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

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885K views11 years ago2 recommendations

AI and machine learningGraphics and audioComputer visionNeural networks and deep learningAlgorithms

Chris Urmson explains how autonomous vehicles use sensors and computer vision to perceive complex road situations and make driving decisions.

Statistically, the least reliable part of the car is ... the driver. Chris Urmson heads up Google's driverless car program, one of several efforts to remove humans from the driver's seat. He talks about where his program is right now, and shares fascinating footage that shows how the car sees the road and makes autonomous decisions about what to do next. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more. Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at ted.com/translate Follow TED news on Twitter: twitter.com/tednews Like TED on Facebook: facebook.com/TED Subscribe to our channel: youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent demonstration of how self-driving cars perceive and navigate real-world edge cases.

drewnickon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ford Promises Fleets of Driverless Cars Within Five Years”

This is why Google is training their cars now in the real world to handle all of these kinds of things. Here's a Ted Talk 0 from 2015 where the head of their self driving unit makes the case for full autonomy vs. semi-autonomous because the semi-autonomous is good enough where people trust it, but not good enough to be trusted. Kind of like what happened where the Tesla driver went underneath the truck that wasn't properly detected. 0 link to this video edit: Around the 8min mark you can see some interesting interactions of the lidar and the world.
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habermanon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door”

> I realise it's not apples to apples and that Google's cars may be more autonomous for now. I think that is an understatement. This video shows why staying in your lane on a highway (what Tesla autopilot does) and dealing with city streets are two just completely different things: link to this video I think Tesla has a ton of catching up to do to compete with where Google is right now.
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MattHeardon Hacker News • Mentions

On “How fixed-gear bikes can confuse Google’s self-driving cars”

The TED talk that Chris Urmson gave shows an example of the Google cars detecting a police officer giving signals.1 1 link to this video
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magicaliston Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ford says it conducted successful tests of driverless cars in snowy conditions”

…A Slate article from 2014 stated that Google's cars wouldn't know a stoplight existed, and would simply run it, if it wasn't in Google Maps That muse be old. In their TED talk from last year, they had it spotting and reacting to cyclist hand signals, school bus mechanical stop signs, and even a police officer directing traffic at an intersection. link to this video edit: I see you mention this below. Weird article, though. The author says: > In fact, when I first wrote about the car for MIT Technology Review, Google admitted to me that the process it currently uses to make the maps are too inefficient to work in the country as a whole. but his previous article he links to says > Maps have so far been…
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jkldotioon Hacker News • Mentions

On “End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars [pdf]”

…sers into the eyes of airline pilots, but the kids need a PhD in deep learning and specialised equipment to be able to do it. A hacker doing some update to the software via a network sounds much more plausible than attacking the system through its vision while it's traveling. 3. This is the real point in the end I guess, this Google presentation ( link to this video ) shows that the first autonomous cars to be sold will be very sophisticated with multiple systems and a lot of traditional software engineering. Hopefully LIDAR costs will come down.…
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habermanon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Waymo: Google's self-driving car company”

> Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November. That video, for reference, is: link I'm not super convinced by that video. That drive had almost no challenges/obstacles. No bicycles, no construction, basically no pedestrians, no other vehicles behaving erratically. Google has cars that can respond to everything from a cyclist making hand signals, to a school bus (which must not be passed), to a police car pulling it over, to a woman chasing a duck across the road: link to this video I'm also not sure this is a simple case of "throw data and hardware at the problem." If it were that easy, it wouldn't have taken Google so long to get to where they are today.
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vntokon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock”

…tanding what a police officer looks like in abstract is not the main issue of self driving. > Humans are just a lot better at gauging intention and even simple stuff like parsing the word "police" at an oblique angle Google seems to understand these intentions well enough, and at a much higher level than mere word parsing. This video is from 2015: link to this video You got the car understanding all that happens at a complex intersection at 9'05, understanding what a police car looks like at 9'35, then detecting and reacting to a schoolbus and then parsing a police officer gestures right at the 10' mark. I'd say chances are these are pretty solved situations 3 years later. You can even see some creatur…
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stevep98on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality”

Driverless cars have advantages over humans too. Faster reaction speed, constant 360 degree surveillance, lack of distraction, (theoretically) better control of brakes and steering to handle skids. Waymo has demonstrated solutions for many of the edge cases you mention. This video is from 3 years ago: link to this video Regarding snow, it maybe a difficult problem, but if cars can't see road markings, neither can humans, so how do they do it? Sometimes by following a car in front. Though far from real autonomy, my Tesla doesn't need to see road markings for autopilot to work, it will fall back to following the car in front. And.. Why does Waymo have to solve this inclement weather problem now? Surely i…
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jvolkmanon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Waymo's collision avoidance testing”

Here's Chris Urmson talking about this 7 years ago when he was still working on (what is now) Waymo: link to this video
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