Beginning of July. It’s time to look back at the first half of the year. Reviews of previous years were here: 2016 and 2017. Writing Year to date, I wrote ten blog posts, it’s three more than for the first half of 2017. …

I used to think that the maps are solved. We have great maps, primarily Google Maps, where roads, buildings, bridges and all other interesting physical objects are mapped. I thought about the future of maps is a series of incremental improvements and ongoing maintenance. Until I learned about HD maps. …

There are plenty of books about management. Rarely you can find a book that’s worth reading. “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win” by Jocko Willinck and Leif Babin is an exception. It is written well and describes simple actionable principles of management with examples. Jocko and Leif…

Kalman filter is an algorithm that combines information about the state of a system using predictions based on a physical model and noisy measurements. It is called a “filter” because it is filtering out measurement noise. Kalman filter has many applications in robotics. For example, it can be used for…

Let’s talk about transferring ideas. From robotics. To software development management. Should be fun, right? Some time ago I was in a team meeting where the team was discussing and estimating User Stories. User Story in agile software development processes is an atomic independently deliverable feature. Something that is small…

We use the phrase “rocket science” to denote a system or activity that is extremely complex. As history shows, it is very hard to design and build a vehicle that accelerates to 7.8 km/s (orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit) and have precise control on its…

German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark dataset is probably the most popular image classification related to self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles need to detect and classify traffic signs to understand traffic rules applied to a segment of the road. Perhaps, this dataset is too small and incomplete to use it for real…

Self-driving cars with remote human operators could be tested in California starting from April, VentureBeat reports. It’s not certain. The new regulations need to be approved by California’s legal compliance agency. Then the DMV will open a 30-day public notice starting from March 1. A few companies, such as Nissan…

Learning opportunities are endless these days. This month I visited “Age of AI,” a small conference in San Francisco. The conference explored the current state and the future of AI on different levels. On a micro level, there were a few talks about recent breakthroughs in reinforcement learning and generative…