🍊 The Juice: Cops & Cars
Zumo Labs presents The Juice, a weekly newsletter focused on computer vision problems (and sometimes just regular problems). Get it while it’s fresh.
Week of April 12–16, 2021
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“Anyone relying on Lidar is doomed,” Elon Musk once said, calling the technology a crutch. While Tesla’s vehicles currently ship with radar systems installed — hardware presently leveraged by their Autopilot features — Musk has always believed that full self-driving can be accomplished with “pure vision.”
It makes sense intuitively, when you consider the fact that many of us manage to drive using nothing but our own built-in stereo vision system. But we’re complex machines, and we have other senses (and sometimes, passengers) to rely on. Can an autonomous system really operate with RGB cameras alone? We’re about to find out.
Last week Musk announced on Twitter that the Full Self Driving Beta V9.0 software was nearly ready for release, and that it will no longer be using the vehicle’s radar, relying instead exclusively on the vehicle’s many cameras. Elsewhere on Twitter, a Facebook engineer shared some interesting insights into what software changes make this possible. If the beta test is successful, Tesla would be able to ship future vehicles without radar systems, achieving their goal of “pure vision.”
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#Pizza
After announcing their intent to partner on an autonomous delivery vehicle pilot program back in 2019, Domino’s and Nuro are officially kicking it off this week. Residents of a specific Houston neighborhood will have the option of having their pizza delivered by a Nuro R2 robot. It may not match the speed of Back to the Future II’s pizza rehydrator, but if things go well this certainly could be momentous for rapid pizza procurement technology.
Nuro’s self-driving robot will deliver Domino’s pizza orders to customers in Houston, via The Verge.
#Mobileye
Speaking of autonomous delivery, Intel subsidiary Mobileye has inked a deal with Udelv to supply its self-driving systems to a fleet of over 35,000 driverless delivery vehicles. Commercial operations will begin in 2023, with plans to ramp up to the full fleet by 2028. The partnership means Udelv gets to focus on the specific hardware and software required for autonomous deliveries, while Mobileye’s tech handles the self-driving component.
Intel’s Mobileye teams with Udelv to launch 35,000 driverless delivery vehicles by 2028, via TechCrunch.
#Robotaxi
Late last year GM’s Cruise started testing fully driverless cars in San Francisco. Now they’ve reached a deal with the city of Dubai to begin rollout of their self-driving taxis, the Cruise Origin (pictured below in its native SF), in 2023. Only a limited number of the autonomous shuttles will be available at first however, with plans to deploy up to 4,000 by 2030. That might feel like a long time to wait for a cab, but at least you won’t have to make awkward small talk with the driver.
GM’s Cruise will operate a robotaxi service in Dubai, via Engadget.
#FacialRecognition
Facial recognition technology is flawed and largely unregulated. Wide deployment of technology like that can be a dangerous combination, especially for people of color. A 2019 federal study of these algorithms showed they were “up to 100 times more likely to misidentify the face of a Black or Asian person, compared with a White person.” Now a Michigan man, who in 2018 was falsely identified and wrongly arrested based on that bad match, is suing the city of Detroit for damages and DPD policy changes.
Wrongfully arrested man sues Detroit police over false facial recognition match, via The Washington Post.
#NYP-D2
Spot, the robotic dog from Boston Dynamics, is almost cute when being forced to dance to Uptown Funk. It strikes a more menacing figure, however, when clad in blue and responding to a domestic dispute alongside cops in Manhattan. The NYPD continues to experiment with their “digidog” — which has some NYC residents and elected officials concerned. Perhaps it would be best if this sort of tech stayed in the hands of folks finding more creative ways to serve beer?
New NYPD ‘Digidog’ Robot Raising Questions Among New Yorkers, via CBS New York.
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📄 Paper of the Week
Quite the long title for this one, but it’s in pre-print so maybe the authors will come up with a cool acronym for the final version. This group out of Toronto uses GANs to create a new data augmentation technique for detection of pneumonia and COVID-19 in chest X-rays. Limited availability of datasets is a problem in the medical imaging space, and data augmentation is a tried and tested way to squeeze more mileage out of a dataset. This GAN-based augmentation outperformed other similar approaches as well as traditional augmentation methods such as rotations, zooms, or flips.
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