I’ve been developing software for self driving (both road and offroad) the past two years and what I’ve noticed is that there isn’t much innovation in the field. It seems like everyone follows the exact same design paradigm which is using something like Autoware. It’s pretty disheartening to see how much money has been poured into this field and what do we have out of it now? GM Supercruise came out in like 2013 [0] with similar performance to the level of autonomy we’re at in 2020. To clarify, this was in a production cadillac in 2013, so anyone who knows about automotive products knows how long this must have been in development before they were allowed to put it in production.
To the author, it’s interesting to read how quick you rose and fell, but it’s good you got out now instead of holding on for years and years.
What do you think is next?
I’m honestly tired of the lack of progress in self driving, and was wondering what anyone’s thoughts were on home robotics. I feel like that’s the next big thing that VC’s will pour billions into.
I think a big issue is where the average programmer begins his journey. If you start with visual studio and all you have to do is click “build” or “run” and all the magic occurs in the back, of course you’ll be lost later on. If you start with C and have to write Makefiles or compile simple programs on the command line, you’ll learn much more and probably won’t run into this later. It’s tough to understand what’s going on when so much is happening behind the scenes.
This is the board I used for two courses in college and I thought it was pretty good. I wasn't limited at all, but my designs weren't anything too complicated.
In my reconfigurable computing course we used the Xilinx Zybo board which has a SoC on it which includes two Arm processors and an fpga (I think the new xilinx boards also have a gpu). This was really cool but I wouldn't recommend starting with it since the dynamic reconfiguring has a big learning curve in itself.
I actually don't know what a good way to learn is since I just followed my professors notes which was helpful, but I'm sure there are sources online to help. What I can say is that fpga development isn't the same as software development. You have to think differently when implementing designs since you're literally describing the circuitry instead of designing code that runs on pre-determined hardware. I used Xilinx Vivado Webpack (it's free) throughout my fpga usage.
To the author, it’s interesting to read how quick you rose and fell, but it’s good you got out now instead of holding on for years and years.
What do you think is next?
I’m honestly tired of the lack of progress in self driving, and was wondering what anyone’s thoughts were on home robotics. I feel like that’s the next big thing that VC’s will pour billions into.
[0]https://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content...