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Google Self-Driving Car Project | SXSW Interactive 2016

SXSW · 144.1K views · 2016-03-12 · 52:22

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Overview

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.

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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.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 7 months · HN mentions 2016–2018

Topics

Self-driving & autonomous vehiclesTech pioneers & interviews
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waymogoogle self-driving carlidarautonomous drivingsensor data

What people said

Animats · 2018-07 · Strong recommendation

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] [VIDEO]

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Animats · 2016-07 · Strong recommendation

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 again is mentioned. Most of the talk is about the hard cases. In the beginning, Google developed a highway driving system, but that was years ago. Now they're working hard on dealing with everything that can happen on a road, including someone in an electric wheelchair chasing ducks with a broom. [1] [VIDEO]

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Animats · 2017-07 · Recommendation

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] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by SXSW, played through YouTube.

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