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Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

TED · 885.8K views · 2015-06-26 · 15:30

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Overview

Chris Urmson, head of Google's self-driving car program, shows footage of how the car perceives the road and decides what to do. Examples include cyclist hand signals, school buses, police officers and complex intersections.

On Hacker News

Used repeatedly in self-driving threads as a demonstration of how many real-world edge cases the Google/Waymo system already handled.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2015–2022

Topics

Self-driving & autonomous vehicles
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google self-driving carwaymoted talkautonomous vehiclesperception

What people said

drewnick · 2016-08 · Recommendation

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] [VIDEO] edit: Around the 8min mark you can see some interesting interactions of the lidar and the world.

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haberman · 2016-08 · Recommendation

> 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: [VIDEO] I think Tesla has a ton of catching up to do to compete with where Google is right now.

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jvolkman · 2022-12 · Reference

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

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Sources

Video by TED, played through YouTube.

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