One side of me thinks this is really, really cool.
The other side is running away as fast as possible. If anything shouldn't be developed by committee, it's something that controls a few thousand pounds hurtling down the highway at 70MPH with at best an observant human watching over it.
Here's my reasoning:
Mistakes in Django? Bad things happen.
Mistakes in the Linux kernel? Potentially really bad things happen.
Mistakes in self-driving cars? Really bad things certainly happen.
Oh…and it looks like anyone can install it with just a few extra electronic parts?
To be fair, all self driving systems need to be fully open, to be inspected by the public. They are way too safety critical to be closed silos controlled by each car company.
But I agree, projects like this are also potentially dangerous. How extensive is the testing? Where is the liability? Is that unit running a read-time OS that will not deadlock or have thrashing which could result in a crash? I've written about these and other concerns a few months back:
Drivers do need to be held to having their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road (I think it's the Chryslers that actually track your eye movements and alert if your eyes aren't forward).
There is some early evidence to suggest these safety features could make people less attentive or more likely to let themselves be distracted.
Personally I'll stick to my 2006 5-speed car with no auto-cruise or lane assist. It forces me to stay fully aware, and I have to use all four of my appendages constantly. It's a very active, non-passive driving experience. I live in a city and don't drive often (I've fueled up once since December), so I prefer driving to be engaging.
Your car is 13 years old and you could stand to benefit from the safety advantages available in a modern "no auto-cruise or lane assist" vehicle. The safety tech has advanced a lot in that time. This is a quite good way to invest your scrip imo.
As long as it's statistically better than a human driver, it's all good. Human drivers fail all the time, resulting in mass casualties in every single country.
Well, they're often (always? can't say that as I haven't gone all the way into all of them, I suppose) built using actual real-time systems with latency guarantees rather than Python running on off-the-shelf Linux, to start...
ROS (Robot Operating System) is not a RTOS (Real Time Operating System). ROS itself is very very non deterministic and has no guarantees about scheduling.
Of course it's extremely cool. I wish this existed when I was in uni and we built self driving prototypes. I also remember how often we messed up completely and would have killed our self if it weren't for us driving at 10 km/h on closed off air strips.
The thing is how this project explicitly tells people to use it is way over the line.
"THIS IS ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. THIS IS NOT A PRODUCT. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR COMPLYING WITH LOCAL LAWS AND REGULATIONS. NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED."
This is not going to help Hortz or the other programmers in the project when the government is coming for them.
This would have been great for the DARPA team back in grad school. But yes, even back then our DARPA crew limited car speed to 10mph during a lot of the initial work, and it was either out in the old football field or the campus police would let us tape off the parking lot in the engineering building on weekends.
Even as far as the open source tech has come, videos fulling explaining how to use this in production on real roads is pretty irresponsible; especially since there are no warnings in the videos and no claims of liability.
The other side is running away as fast as possible. If anything shouldn't be developed by committee, it's something that controls a few thousand pounds hurtling down the highway at 70MPH with at best an observant human watching over it.
Here's my reasoning:
Oh…and it looks like anyone can install it with just a few extra electronic parts?