Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

   8. Limitation of Liability. In no event and under no legal theory,
      whether in tort (including negligence), contract, or otherwise,
      unless required by applicable law (such as deliberate and grossly
      negligent acts) or agreed to in writing, shall any Contributor be
      liable to You for damages, including any direct, indirect, special,
      incidental, or consequential damages of any character arising as a
      result of this License or out of the use or inability to use the
      Work (including but not limited to damages for loss of goodwill,
      work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all
      other commercial damages or losses), even if such Contributor
      has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

nsxwolf5• 9 years ago

Count me out on ever contributing to a project like this. I really don't want to be a test case.

yzmtf2008• 9 years ago

Most open source projects have a disclaimer like this. You don't want to be responsible for the usage of whichever random programmer either.

mwfunk2• 9 years ago

This isn't because it's unreliable or because you (the developer) would be a test case. I mean, I don't know anything about this project so I can't vouch for it, but pretty much every open source project in this area is obligated to have this kind of verbiage and it has nothing to do with the quality of the project.

This is so you can contribute to an open source project without worrying about some random person suing you. This is to protect the contributors, which includes anyone who submits changes, which would include you. If you see an autonomous driving project that doesn't have language like this, that's the project you want to stay away from, not this one.

stupidcar• 9 years ago

I notice the website contains a separate disclaimer that begins:

"The Apollo Open Platform (“Platform”) data, software and code provided or developed on the Platform (collectively, “Platform Code”), may be licensed to you strictly for testing purposes."

http://apollo.auto/docs/disclaimer.html

IANAL, but is it permissible to say that Apache licensed code is only licensed for the purposes of "testing"? Wouldn't that conflict with clause 2 of the Apache license?

boomboomsubban• 9 years ago

The Apollo Open Platform seems to be something separate not licensed under the Apache License. It appears to be the actual data used to design a robot, and the Apollo software is just the UI.

usaphp• 9 years ago

Otherwise nobody would want to work on open source projects if they were to be always liable for the damage their software causes its users...

Animats• 9 years ago

Autonomous driving based purely on machine learning from vision is scary. Machine learning is, after all, a statistical method. It's going to do really great most of the time, and really badly once in a while.

pd0wm• 9 years ago

The exact same can be said about human drivers. Why do we demand that autonomous driving is 100% safe? I would be completely fine with autonomous cars that sometimes crash, but are still less likely to do so than with human drivers.

nsxwolf5• 9 years ago

We accept that human drivers kill thousands upon thousands of people. We won't tolerate deaths from automation even in the single digits.

That may not be rational but it's also unlikely to change.

dogecoinbase• 9 years ago

Liability for an accident not related to equipment malfunction generally stops with the human driver. Liability for accidents related to autonomous systems will not to be so limited.

inertial2• 9 years ago

The exact same can be said about human drivers

Maybe not. There are cautious drivers and there are rash drivers. The probability of accident is wildly different for both of them. However the probability of an accident due to a a bug/miscalculation in autonomous driving is same for everyone.

thallukrish• 9 years ago

To err is human. We can punish erring drivers by law. But we cannot punish a robot. Unless there is law that applies to the owner of the autonomous vehicle companies on erring automatons unleashed by them :-) and they are implementable.

gbugniot• 9 years ago

Will you find acceptable a plane crash because of technical failure?

Determinism rules for aeronautical engineers (software and hardware), and thus, today, flying is the safest transportation mode.

chaos0• 9 years ago

let's assume that neither humans or machines are perfect drivers. but there is a non-zero probability that the machine can do something nonsensical that a sane human would never do (due to some unknown edge case). who do you trust more to be your driver?

mhue• 9 years ago

There are results showing that machine learning can be completely fooled by images that are slightly modified, so little that the human eye can not perceive any difference. Have a look at the images in this paper on "adversarial examples": https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572

MrQuincle• 9 years ago

Humans also use statistics of course. You'll have to elaborate on other differences to be able to convey how scary machine learning really is.

beachbum8029• 9 years ago

Awesome. Now to just get a couple LIDAR cameras...

donpdonp• 9 years ago

$500 lidar toy platform https://www.seeedstudio.com/SDP-Mini-RPlidar-Experimental-Pl...

using the "RPLidar A2" https://www.slamtec.com/en/Lidar

looks interesting.

dbcurtis2• 9 years ago

Cheapest Lidar I know of with reasonable quality is a Neato vacuum cleaner. Go to Target, get a vacuum, give it a lidar-ectomy, throw away the sucky parts, and you still have the cheapest LIDAR in town. 350 pionts, 5HZ scan rate. Indoor range about 5m, outdoor 2+m with a sun shade, accuracy at 5m about +/- 2cm. Great for hobby robots. Totally not sufficient to drive a car at highway speeds.

vswar• 9 years ago

An open autonomous driving platform - seems great.

ingenieroariel• 9 years ago

The list of partners looks quite interesting, including Ford, Bosch and Delphi.

It is apparently based on ROS like Autoware.

sbarre• 9 years ago

And so many Chinese automotive companies I'd never heard of!

acover• 9 years ago

Would this work on an electric bicycle?

Edit: or more stable tri-cycle/quad-cycle

sbierwagen• 9 years ago

There have been various autonomous 2-wheeled vehicles, though riding an autonomous vehicle that uses lean steering, like a bike, would seem to entail a little bit more excitement than I'd want to have.

sharpercoder• 9 years ago

Imagine a driverless bicycle driving back to its base after being used byw the renter. A flywheel keeps its balance while stopped before traffic (lights), the electromotor thrusts it.

arthursw• 9 years ago

A team at the University of Washington Bothell (UWB) is already working on such thing :

https://readwrite.com/2016/10/19/autonomous-tricycle-tl4/

http://newatlas.com/uwb-autonomous-trikes/45946/

alexhornbake3• 9 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, is this is a platform strictly for developing ML techniques? Or is it intended to actual run in a vehicle... on ubuntu, in a docker container?

I'm no expert, but I would think you'd want a realtime OS for this. Right?

sgillen• 9 years ago

More likely is that the car would have a Linux box running this software that connects to one or more micro controllers. The micro controllers handle any sensors/actuators with real time requirements, and may be running an RTOS or just bare metal.

alexhornbake3• 9 years ago

Hmmm, thanks for the additional info. Still seems like a bad idea. Based on your assertion, what happens when the RTOS/microcontroller does not receive a "decision" before the scheduling deadline? Many things can hang a Linux box... the reason why RTOS exists is because nothing can stop the scheduler. I would be very curious to hear from the Apollo developers. What is the intended platform and developer audience? Is this intended to actually run in a vehicle?

the_common_man• 9 years ago

This is by the Baidu AI team.

rottyguy• 9 years ago

I'd imagine this could work on a small fleet of miniature cars (rc size?). A model town/city could be built with various obstacles for training a large amount of the ai, I would think.

cr0sh• 9 years ago

Why do that, when you could train in a computer simulation?

thealexbaron• 9 years ago

Cooler, cuter, funner.

dbcurtis2• 9 years ago

The autonomous racing league that meets in Oakland is doing exactly that. Typically the R/C car uses wifi to connect back to an AWS instance for the heavy lifting.

jnbiche• 9 years ago

Typically the R/C car uses wifi to connect back to an AWS instance for the heavy lifting.

Wow, and the latency is manageable for the task?

chplushsieh• 9 years ago

Related: http://duckietown.mit.edu/

nnm• 9 years ago

Is it functional as of today? The perception directory is almost empty (only skeleton).

siliconc0w• 9 years ago

It'd be cool to have some sort of independent 'weissman score' style benchmark for these systems. Maybe just RMSE or similar against ground truth steering/throttle over a battery of different environments/weather/terrain. It looks like it uses LIDAR and Baidu has a pretty impressive AI team so it'd be really interesting to see how they stack up against, say, Comma AI's openpilot or Tesla's autopilot.

Apollo – An open autonomous driving platform

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