When GM bought us we were given three Milestones to reach. The first Milestone was supposed to be delivered this time last year. We failed to deliver. We didn't have the basis for a real self-driving car. Just a demo (enough to make GM buy us).
So the Milestones were divided up. A year after we should have delivered that first Milestone we have hand-coded enough special cases that GM believes we're about half way through that first Milestone. We're not.
I take GM's money but I know we're lying to them. As an engineer I'm embarrassed by the system we've built.
This is pretty fascinating. I've been mulling a change in careers bc I believe over the next 20 years this will become a massive industry. Do you see GM Cruise hitting their 2019 goals? How close are they to producing ~1k - 10k cars with this tech in multiple cities? I find the 2019 targets incredibly aggressive. 5-10 year timelines seem more practical. Also whats the alternative to ROS, why isn't it good for time critical operations?
See the ROS2 real-time proposal link above for a discussion of ROS's shortcomings. ROS is ok for school projects and loose systems but you can't use it to pilot a passenger aircraft or car.
I'll admit I was pretty surprised at the speed that Cruise seemed to come out of nowhere and start doing pretty impressive demos. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that corners were cut somewhere.
Can you give an example of the sort of special cases you're talking about so we can get a sense for what it's like?
Imagine predicting pedestrian behavior with if/else and numeric thresholds (distance to curb less than 1.25 meters?) instead of a principled model trained on data.
Waymo uses sophisticated predictive models trained on vast amounts of data. Cruise slaps together piles of guesses and (frankly) bullshit.
