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Autonomy 2.0: Why is self-driving always 5 years away? (arxiv.org)
1 point by belter on Jul 20, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A review of why self-driving cars keep stalling finds the usual approach is too hand-built, leans on costly road testing, and can't gather enough rare-event data. It proposes training the whole system on human driving, with cheap simulated practice and large-scale data collection.

Abstract

Despite the numerous successes of machine learning over the past decade (image recognition, decision-making, NLP, image synthesis), self-driving technology has not yet followed the same trend. In this paper, we study the history, composition, and development bottlenecks of the modern self-driving stack. We argue that the slow progress is caused by approaches that require too much hand-engineering, an over-reliance on road testing, and high fleet deployment costs. We observe that the classical stack has several bottlenecks that preclude the necessary scale needed to capture the long tail of rare events. To resolve these problems, we outline the principles of Autonomy 2.0, an ML-first approach to self-driving, as a viable alternative to the currently adopted state-of-the-art. This approach is based on (i) a fully differentiable AV stack trainable from human demonstrations, (ii) closed-loop data-driven reactive simulation, and (iii) large-scale, low-cost data collections as critical solutions towards scalability issues. We outline the general architecture, survey promising works in this direction and propose key challenges to be addressed by the community in the future.

Ashesh Jain, Luca Del Pero, Hugo Grimmett, Peter Ondruska
arXiv:2107.08142 · cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Jul 16, 2021 · updated Aug 9, 2021
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