Submitted via IRC for chromas
Toyota, Carmera will create HD maps for self-driving cars using autobrake cameras
High-definition mapping is but one part of the very large equation being worked through as the auto industry prepares for autonomy. But creating those kinds of maps for every road in the world, as one might expect, takes a lot of work. Thankfully, Toyota and Carmera think they have a solution.
Toyota Research Institute and Carmera, a company focused on HD mapping, announced on Thursday that the two are developing a proof of concept of TRI's Automated Mapping Platform, which takes data from participating cars and turns that into HD maps that could be used to help autonomous vehicles navigate.
[...] The program will start in downtown Tokyo. TRI notes in its press release that HD mapping has covered less than 1 percent of worldwide roads to date, most of which are highways. Urban and local roads are likely to see large shares of AVs in the future, so both companies believe this can speed up the whole mapping process. Of course, even if the proof of concept proves viable, it would take a lot of effort to get automakers on board with the idea -- after all, even if the data is anonymized, drivers and OEMs alike may not enjoy the idea of a camera beaming what's in front of your car to some random server farm across the globe.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 04 2019, @11:06AM (10 children)
Yet Another Tracking Device.
This tracking device has more utility than most, I suppose. If, that is, we all agree that high definition mapping is utilitarian. Of course, it will ultimately encourage people to be looking at the screen of a GPS enabled device, instead of at the road. That, or surrender control of the vehicle to an AI.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @11:22AM
not just tracking, more pulsed microwaves, yeah!
here's solid people talking and showing what's happening at that intersection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYoOcaqCzxo [youtube.com] .. outside
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBsUWbUB6PE [youtube.com] .. inside
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @01:09PM (8 children)
What are you doing, going to your drug dealer's house? SUBMIT!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 04 2019, @01:39PM (7 children)
Nahhh - I'm just an asshole.
This year, at work, we've switched from a long-time health insurance provider to a different one. They mailed letters Jan 30 or Feb 1 that everyone had to provide proof that they were legally married to the beneficiaries named on documents. I didn't provide the proof they wanted. Instead, I contacted the Arkansas Insurance Commission, and told them "It is none of my insurance company's business whether I'm married or not. I pay for the service, they provide the service paid for - end of story." There is an investigation ongoing. All because I'm an asshole. I need no further justification to fuck with nosy sons of bitches.
In practical terms, put yourself in any of the following situations.
1. You're in a common-law marriage.
2. You were married in a foreign nation, suitable documents unavailable.
3. You're in a gay marriage, and the employer, insurer, or the state doesn't recognize gay marriage.
4. You're unmarried, and your dependent/beneficiary is a sibling.
5. You're unmarried, but you keep some crack whore around the house because you're lonely.
6. You're married to Rosie Palmer, but the county clerk won't give you a license to marry.
7. You just enjoy being an asshole.
And, none of those situations affects the premiums that insurance company demands from you. None of them should affect the services they provide.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @04:17PM (4 children)
Married people die sooner and incur higher costs for psychiatric medication and services.
What the insurer is doing is not much different from offering a premium discount for not smoking. It might potentially fall outside the letter of the law in your state, but it's hardly nosy.
(Score: 3, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 04 2019, @04:44PM (3 children)
You say that like there is nothing wrong with it. Legal or not, it is NOT the province of the insurance company to punish or to reward people for being profitable to the insurance company. They are indeed nosy bastards. And, they probably lead all the other corporations in the scope of their data collection. Just who are all these "partners" that the various data collectors share their data with? Google, for instance, probably owns at least some stock in one or more insurance companies, making them a "partner". If no stock, then some kind of business arrangement in which they just sell the data to the insurance companies.
It would be great if someone did a study, showing just how much influence insurance companies have exercised in the past ~100 years, passing laws, financial coercion, and other wise forcing US citizens to conduct themselves "profitably" for the insurance companies. We could start on the fact that insurance companies purchased and donated radar guns to pretty much every police force in the country. Some village in backwater nowhere employs one single constable, and they can't afford a radar gun - insurance companies donate it to that constable. Some other larger town has six patrol cars, and only two radar guns, insurance companies donate two or more.
It's not a question of whether speeding is right or wrong. This has nothing to do with what the speed zones may be, or whether they might be wrong. The issue is, insurance companies use their influence to force citizens to conduct themselves "properly" where "proper" means "profitably".
Ditto with seatbelts, carseats, a lot of zoning laws, on and on it goes.
The land of the free? Ultimately, the insurance companies exercise more power over you, than any subset of laws that you might care to discuss. The rules you follow at work? Most of them enforced scrupulously because your employer fears being penalized by an insurance company.
Have I ever mentioned that I hate insurance companies?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @08:40PM (2 children)
In this case "profitable conduct" means "in a manner less likely to incur death or bodily harm."
Fewer people dieing in car crashes is a good thing. Insurance companies are a clumsy, imperfect, but ultimately well-intentioned means of working towards this goal.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 04 2019, @08:48PM
Ben Franklin said something about those who would surrender liberties in exchange for safety - they deserve neither liberty nor safety.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:34AM
Well intentioned? !? Have you ever interacted with one?!?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @09:20PM
I did not enjoy finding documentation for all 11 of my kids. It's a pain in the ass. I have to fax birth certificates, which is supposedly a bad thing. My state prints that annoying EURion constellation on the birth certificate, which most modern scanners and fax machines will refuse to process. I had to track down an old black-and-white scanner.
At least UnitedHealthCare and probably most others would handle most of your complaints though:
1. for common-law, provide a huge pile of evidence
2. the same goes for a foreign nation (immigration documents, or just go the common-law route)
3. Due to a nonsensical supreme court decision (ignoring our common law) the company must allow homo stuff.
4. siblings are usually not part of the deal with employer-provided insurance
5. crack whores are usually not part of the deal with employer-provided insurance
6. don't know about Rosie Palmer
7. Good news! Health insurance will take care of an asshole, excluding cosmetic procedures.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @05:51AM
What law compels me to provide my marriage status?
Around here they love to require you to tell them how much you earn. Yes. That's right. Insurance companies ask because the government rebate is based on income.
How stupid. Telling a private company out to fleece the public for every cent how much you earn.
I tell them "I don't know. I haven't received my end of year statement"
They then ask about last year.
"Last year? That's gone. I don't exactly know what I will get this year"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by inertnet on Monday March 04 2019, @03:19PM (5 children)
I think that it would be better to develop AI that can deal with the world without the need for highly detailed maps. Self driving vehicles need to be able to deal with the unexpected, instead of a world where every detail is regulated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @03:31PM
They may not like the maps made from my driving...in the snow (when there are no other cars around) I slide all over for fun and car-control practice. Come to think of it, the cameras are probably covered with snow & ice in those conditions anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 04 2019, @04:14PM (2 children)
Agreed, though I'm less confident than many that this sort of AI is going to be perfected soon.
The danger with many machine learning algorithms used as a basis for AI these days is that it's hard to figure out what "rules" the algorithm is actually making decisions on. You have enormous sets of weighted numbers in some mutilayered neural network, but how do you know how that's going to react to a particular novel situation?
It reminds me of a story about ALVINN, an autonomous car first designed in the late 1980s and tested in the early 1990s. It incorporated neural network models just as a lot of AI does today.
It ran fine after being trained on lots of roads. Then one day the car went across a bridge and started going nuts, forcing the human inside to have to swerve and jerk it back on track to avoid getting killed.
Back then the much smaller amount off stored data in the AI model allowed analysis, and after some weeks they figured out what happened -- it turned out that through training, the car had learned to navigate by sensing where the grass was on the side of the road. It had been trained on road consistently with grass on the side, so when it encountered a bridge, it had no idea how to navigate.
That particular case seems like something that could be worked out today through better training. The problem with AI today though is that it's often difficult to know exactly how it will react to a novel situation, because it's difficult to know exactly how it's "understanding" the situation without a great deal of analysis.
Bottom line is that I think having detailed maps is perhaps one additional data point to give the AI so in case it is getting unusual input, it has some other data potentially to guide it. Of course, the age of the data must be taken into account, but short of things like major earthquakes or unexpected demolitions, the chance that a road is going to completely disappear or move significantly from old map data is likely small.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 04 2019, @05:06PM (1 child)
OTOH, it's often quite difficult to figure out what "rules" the non-automated drivers you encounter are using. So the real determinant needs to be quality of results. But trying to get unfudged numbers for that is ... difficult.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @06:26PM
So you advocate driving tests and licenses for automated cars? The precise "rules" aren't so much an issue as the resulting ability to drive safely.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:55AM
Our world is filled with things that should be able to deal with the unexpected, but very few things that can deal with the unexpected.
Take humans, for instance. Humans generally cannot deal with anything unexpected, they suffer acute stress and mentally shut down. Physical infrastructure cannot withstand forces they were not designed for (harmonic stresses causing catastrophic failure, unexpected earthquakes or floods, previously unknown phenomena, etc.). Having depraved sex on a chair not designed for such will break it and cause physical injury and embarrassment.
The history of human progress is a history of understanding and regulating the world, developing systems and models, building infrastructure and fixing "bugs" as they occur. Your stance is idealistic and naive and not at all practical. "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they are not." There will always be unexpected situations that you cannot deal with; if you ever think you handled all the unexpected situations, congratulations, that's because you didn't expect the unexpected situations. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @05:26PM (1 child)
sometimes I need to run over the criminals -- I don't want my car deciding that it doesn't want to squish the person that is about to shoot me
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:29AM
I have been in this situation. Some junkie went nuts because I was driving too slowly. He attacked my car. If the vehicle software prevented me from defending myself or escaping I would sue the manufacturer. My vehicle. If I choose to drive through then I drive through. There must be an override or off switch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @07:07PM
too bad people won't demand that the data and software that uses it be foss.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 04 2019, @07:34PM (2 children)
You couldn't ever go camping.
What would you do if you drove your car to a foreign country, where the professional association that licensed the maps was completely different?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:31AM (1 child)
Buy a paper map or book. Old tech I know. It will work even when the power is out. BYO illumination.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday March 05 2019, @09:38AM
Folding gas station maps won't fit in the currency acceptors one uses to re-start cars whose payments are late.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:54AM
Did "they" obtain permission from the owner of the vehicle to collect this data?