Nvidia taught a self-driving car to drive like a human without telling it how
We’re inching closer to a reality where our cars drive themselves and we just relax in the back as they ferry us to our destinations. But we’re not quite there yet: Many of the automakers and Silicon Valley companies striving to get self-driving cars onto the road have said the technology is still likely at least a half-decade away from feasibility. Even public tests like Uber’s autonomous taxis in Pittsburgh can only travel on certain roads that the company’s engineers have meticulously mapped out.
Uber and most others are working on solving essentially the same problem: how to map out roads and the various obstacles (turns, people) and rules (stop lights, speed limits), and then teach self-driving cars to accurately apply all of that information as they maneuver city streets and highways. But it seems that chip manufacturer Nvidia has a better idea: Why not just have the car learn to drive like a human? In other words, let the car figure out how to react to each new situation as we did when we were teens behind the wheel.
Nvidia released a video Sept. 28 showing a person riding in the front seat of a car, hands stuck out the window, as the car drives itself around traffic cones and other obstacles with ease. But in a blog post earlier this year, the company explained that it didn’t program the car to be able to interpret lane markings, road signs, or specific obstacles. Instead, the company trained a neural network (running on Nvidia hardware, of course) to drive, using video footage recorded from a camera strapped to a car driven by regular humans around California.
The computer was then dropped into a Lincoln sedan strapped with laser sensors. The self-driving Lincoln was able to navigate around real New Jersey streets (which, in itself is no easy feat), extrapolating from the knowledge it had gained from the sample videos. The car was also able to drive in the rain and the dark with apparent facility.
