On August 1st, Comma.ai, an autonomous driving startup founded by renowned American hacker George Hotz in 2016, announced at its recent technology conference that it will add map-based navigation autonomous driving features to the latest open source autonomous driving software, Openpilot 0.9.4.
According to reports, Openpilot is mainly aimed at the field of modified cars. In just a few years, it has supported about 250 car models on the market, and it is said that “users are all over the world”. Ordinary cars only need to install compatible hardware to work with Openpilot to achieve “autonomous driving”, but this open source project is more for “experimental” purposes, and there are certain risks relying solely on this autonomous driving software.
In the latest released version 0.9.4 of the Openpilot autonomous driving software, users can directly select points on the map to let the car drive automatically to the destination, and users can further decide the driving route, and can change the car’s driving route immediately according to the traffic congestion situation.
▲video source YouTube
Comma.ai conducted a related technology demonstration last year, in which engineers used a Kia vehicle equipped with the Openpilot autonomous driving software and Comma 3 vehicle hardware for autonomous driving. It is reported that the Comma 3 vehicle hardware can input the images captured by the two cameras in the front of the vehicle and the navigation map into an AI model to predict the next driving route in real time.
To improve the accuracy of the AI model’s judgment, the official stated that in addition to inputting external image information and map navigation routes, the AI model will also calculate and predict based on the latitude and longitude information input by the GPS sensor to improve the accuracy of automatic driving navigation.
Regarding Openpilot training, the Comma.ai team stated that they use a large number of 60-second driving clips, combined with map data to establish a dedicated database, and have undergone multiple training sessions to enable the model to “learn how to drive like a human.”
Please note that this autonomous driving software is still for “experimental” purposes. In the event of an accident on the road, it can not only lead to tragedies but also the owner must bear all losses on their own.