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A comment on Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast.

Re:Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast by jmaygarden on Friday February 08, 2013 @10:53AM (#5188404)
If anyone is interested in some of the algorithms behind this technology, then I highly recommend Sebastian Thrun's "Artificial Intelligence for Robotics" course on Udacity [1]. He makes unintuitive probabilistic methods easily understandable. I'm not aware of a better source for getting a basic understanding of complex methods like Kalman filters and particle filters [2][3]. I had never even heard of a "histogram filter" until recently reviewing this material, and it's a perfect solution for a problem that I currently have.

[1] https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_filter

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Re:Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast by mattbradley on Friday February 08, 2013 @11:28AM (#5188615)
I would also recommend anything by Sebastian Thrun on the topic of autonomous cars. His Udacity course is a great starting point, and it inspired me to do my graduate thesis on an autonomous car simulation.

If anyone is looking to get a little deeper, check out some of his literature during his time at Stanford:

http://robots.stanford.edu/papers/junior08.pdf

http://www.lcad.inf.ufes.br/wiki/images/7/7f/2010_-_Dolgov_e...

http://ai.stanford.edu/~ddolgov/papers/dolgov_gpp_stair08.pd...

Also, if anyone is interested, my thesis: https://github.com/mattbradley/AutonomousCar

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Re:Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast by mej10 on Friday February 08, 2013 @11:06AM (#5188471)
I was surprised by how understandable the concepts are behind this stuff. I second this recommendation. They are really cool algorithms.

For real life, there is obviously a huge engineering component, but you can definitely see how the ideas could come together to build something like the automated cars.

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Re:Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast by jmaygarden on Friday February 08, 2013 @11:32AM (#5188640)
Exactly! I linked to Wikipedia for contrast with how unintelligibly these topics are often presented for we mere laymen.
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