Friday, May 31, 2024

Indian Startups are tackling the challenge of Self-Driving vehicles on Unruly Indian Roads

Good news! I toast to that! Go for it! 

It looks like Indian entrepreneurs and engineers have chosen a different approach to Western companies.

"Few makers of self-driving cars have braved the streets of India. Native startups are filling the gap.

What’s new: Indian developers are testing autonomous vehicles on their nation’s disorderly local roads. To cope with turbulent traffic, their systems use different technology from their Western and East Asian counterparts, IEEE Spectrum reported. ...
Where typical self-driving cars combine visible-light cameras, radar, lidar, and GPS, vehicles built by Swaayatt Robots view the world solely through off-the-shelf cameras. The company’s software creates a probabilistic representation of their environment. Although this is normally computationally intensive, Swaayatt claims to have found a low-cost way to do it. Trained via multi-agent reinforcement learning, its systems use game theory to model road interactions and computer vision to fill in missing lane markings. ..."

"... A recent video from Bhopal-based startup Swaayatt Robots suggests they’re making progress. In the 6-minute long clip, a sensor-laden SUV weaves through narrow unmarked streets, dodging pedestrians, dogs, cows, slow-moving tractors, and a constant stream of scooters overtaking, cutting across, and even driving on the wrong side of the road. ...
While self-driving cars developed by Western technology companies have already begun commercial operations, this rollout has been made possible only by training on millions of miles of driving data painstakingly gathered over many years. And despite all that training, these companies are still bedeviled by the “long tail problem”—the idea that no matter how many scenarios you train on, you will always encounter rare but unique “corner cases” that will flummox your vehicle.  ...
“The kind of traffic and environment we’re negotiating, the entire navigation course can be labeled as a corner case,” ...
Rather than using standard deep learning to blindly search for patterns in large amounts of driving data, ... Minus Zero has created physics-aware algorithms that can more readily pick out the most salient information, even when trained on smaller datasets. The company also relies on multiagent learning approaches that better capture the complex interactions between different road users. ..."

Heart-Risk Model Saves Lives, Self-Driving on Unruly Roads, Knowledge Workers Embrace AI, Richer Context for RAG


An autonomous vehicle from Swaayatt Robotics has been road-tested on India's chaotic streets.


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