OpenRacing

Is this a video game, or an AI research platform?

Cars driving themselves (Note: this code already

exists)

About me

Keith Curtis, keithcu@gmail.com Programmer at Microsoft for 11 years on

Windows, Office, MSN, Research and mobility

Randomly discovered Linux after I left Wrote a book describing why it is

superior, and remaining steps for World Domination

My book gives fuller contextNEW YORK TIMES:

Keith Curtis, an 11-year veteran of Microsoft, believes deeply that open source is the future of software.

He takes a programmer’s approach in Software Wars, attempting to systematically build a case that software can help pave the way for a 21st-century renaissance in many fields ranging from artificial intelligence (cars that drive themselves) to the human journey into space (space elevators). For Mr. Curtis, free software is all about leveraging our collective intelligence.

Book in 1 slide

After thinking about it for 10 years And seeing the code inside and outside

Microsoft

Free software wins in the end The lessons of Wikipedia, Linux et al can

be applied to many places FOSS movement should change how you

think about R&D in the 21st century

The payoff is AI, cancer research

Free software

If the code isn't out there, a community of scientists can't work together on it

As subtle a concept as free market Science is about making results available

Better for the free market Cheaper hardware, richer services business

Many problems too big for one company Coming goldrush of free software

Google's Knol will lose to Wikipedia

Book explains this

Just add water

Create the conditions Create a vision that inspires Create a process that doesn't suck Codebase -> community -> success

It isn't that hard Lots of things succeed by accident in the

Internet era

Free software quietly taking an increasing part

Cheaper: share dev costs with others

State of free software

Successful in many areas Esp. Servers, web and embedded Apple uses free software (Kernel, Safari,

Printing) Linux on the desktop is coming (Google

Chrome, Ubuntu on Dell) The desktop is the center of the IT universe Lucene is a free search engine used in many

enterprises

Much left remaining, like AI

Driverless Cars

Cars are the most widely used robot today Billions of $$ from industry and government

Optionally having a chaffeur is the coolest feature ever

Once we have cars that can see, we can have personal butlers as well

Has several Green applications Route around traffic to save gas

Why don't we have driverless cars today? Airplanes land themselves Cars drive around in video games and

shoot and swear at you Video game cars aren't super smart yet

because crashing is part of the fun Code is custom and proprietary anyway

The software doesn't exist Because there is no community

This is a social, not a technical problem

Darpa Grand Challenge

Entrants were all proprietary A few produced papers, but no source The code is just being tinkered with or

abandoned Anyone who wants to work on this problem

today must mostly start from scratch Therefore, the contest was a failure

Importance of a simulator

A driving simulator allows you to simulate full loop

Create sensors in the video game, and feed them to vision engine

Can compare results to what video game says

Create test scenarios and monitor it all You can cameras up to RC cars, but we

need to focus on the software now!

Importance of a simulator

In an hour you can run 1,000s of incredibly complicated tests

A simulator is required to build confidence in a system The idea of cars driving themselves down the

road at 150mph can involve death

Researchers can test and improve this code without access to a car

You need the real world mostly to learn how to make the simulator tests better

Rigs of Rods is best free sim

●Internally, simulator will generate virtual sensor input like Lidar

Rigs of Rods

Created by just 3 people, but leverages a lot of free software

Community of 10 developers But young, codebase made free in early-2009

Extensible with new cars and maps Can simulate dynamic objects like stoplights

Soft-body physics engine Engine simulation needs work

C++, with some Lua scripts We are trying to get Python

Driving is the Killer App of vision Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 are the apps that built

the PC

E-mail is what built the Internet Lots of specialized uses of computer vision

today such as in NFL TV's first down marker & Project Natal.

Researchers have been working for decades but don't know why their code is still in academia

No other reason to dramatically improve

No point building robot butlers w/o vision

Community needs kickstart

Putting vision and driving researchers together in one codebase can generate lots of excitement Vision and driving logic can be built and

tested separately PhDs around the world can get to work on a

real problem

Each new advancement will put new requirements on the other subsystem When the vision system can recognize soft

curbs, the driving system must also treat them as such

Vision code

Vision sounds hard, but is the same number of lines of code as a web browser

Many vision PhDs write proprietary code Adopted Microsoft model Head of Oxford Vision lab told me all his

code is proprietary

What free code out there is very fragmented (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cil/v-source.html) 204 codebases Everyone rolls their own

Vision code

1000s of PhDs worldwide are working Image processing portion well understood Detecting shapes and motion becoming

mature Need to build an internal 3-d model, no

consensus on these details

We have more than enough people, but they are not working together yet

OpenCV

Most popular free computer vision codebase is OpenCV, created by Intel Intel created and abandoned, now sponsored

by Willow Garage

But only a few full-time people working on it E-mail traffic is low

Codebase is C++ and big Intel cares more about perf than ease of use Hard to use bits and pieces of Vast majority of researchers don't use

OpenCV (2)

Can't easily work with larger scientific community Has lots of code that is not really vision

specific including machine learning, low-level graphics code

Should really move to Python and join SciPy community Estimated < 1 man-year of work

Much vision research uses random images found on Internet or webcam

Driving

In principle, not a hard problem Parking a car is easy Pathfinding is discussed in every AI

textbook, but not much progress in last decades Simple proprietary code in industrial

scenarios Free code is fragmented and immature Without real scenarios, no reason to improve

Driving (2)

Safety is the big challenge I'll bet a parallel parking car would run

over a foot today which is not acceptable The dynamic world is tricky Will require a number of different kinds

of AI But less than 1M lines of Python

Google's OCR 100k lines of C++

The code isn't big, but it has to be clever in spots

Driving Logic

Primitive automatic driving code in RoR today, but several people working on it

There is other free code out there to leverage as well Torcs/SpeedDreams OpenSteer

Strategy 1: VDGC

The Darpa Grand Challenge failed Efforts died out after contest over Code is locked up so may as well not exist Contestants didn't work together on any

code Lots of time spent writing device drivers for

all of the custom hardware before even getting to the vision / driving code

Create a smarter contest

One way to spend $100,000

Goal of a contest should be to get the maximum number of people working as efficiently as possible.

A contest around a simulator will create a community and assets long after the contest is over.

We'd like to create a Virtual Darpa Grand Challenge

Raise money from investors or sponsors

Contest details

Free software should be encouraged If you want the assets to live on.

We sidestep driver junk But you can easily simulate hardware We have other ideas to have the

contestants work together for efficiency

Contests are complicated

Many details to consider What are the test cases? They have to be

created What are the legal rules? How to hand out money in little chunks

based on quality of contributions (code, art, test cases, infrastructure work)

Timeline

What do we want?

$300,000? $100,000 for a contest plus infrastructure Assume $100K is enough to generate

excitement If we get 100 people working together we

can claim a breakthrough The time is right

Team today is just me + one part-time programmer, plus FOSS people out there

I want someone else to lead this

Future

It could get on the cover of Wired magazine!

Can turn this into an engineering services company

There are enough people today working on these problems They are not working together They need a codebase and a task to organize

them