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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

My main concern would be that the architecture of an OTS Android system does not offer any guarantees regarding real-time i.e. hard deadlines.

Ever had an android app or even the whole phone locking up? Even if it is only for a second or two, I don't want this to happen to a device that feeds live data into my car's controller.

Even if this is only level 2 driver assist. If a car would get a bogus "you are crossing a divider line" signal for e.g. 2 seconds, it would start to steer quite persistently (even if with limited force) in a certain direction and you would have to counter that action.

Nope, I wouldn't use this.

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I think thats the ultimate plan, but if you listen to GeoHotz talk about it, he really wants an economical self driving solution. E.g. waymo cars cost 100k+ and thus isn't economical.

It's also opensource so I think the end game is to have manufactures adopt this and go through the whole song and dance of getting it full validated on their vehicles.

Also likely selling access to the ml model and/or training data. Openpilot is accruing many trips/miles for their dataset, the model and data isn't open-source.

That appears to be where the gold is stashed to my eyes.

If the software is open source and works very well, comma will still have a long lead in developing a great self driving model for which the bricks are miles driven down the road in normal commutes and trips by real drivers in real world conditions.

AutoPilot disengages if you try to take over the wheel, it's one of the basic features that is available.

The only instance where you are steering is on the new lane switch (turn on blinker, check lane, depart from current lane)

Are you talking about Tesla AutoPilot?

This system is meant for cars without level 2 driver assist, so not for Teslas.

Further, the system has no control over what "disengages" in the car itself - it is sending bogus sensor inputs to elicit a reaction according to level 2 driver assistance. Thus, if it sends such bogus inputs and fails at doing this "reliably", it will result in misbehaving steering, breaking, etc. which it does not control itself.

Further, if it was in control, my argument would stay: If your controlling device has left the building (crashed), it can also not disengage anything any more reliably.

Openpilot uses an embedded controller that is connected to the phone via usb to control communication on the CAN busses. It is what enforces the disengagement, and the code on it follows the MISRA standard. The phone can send random commands and you should still be able to maintain control of the vehicle.

Check out the safety architecture section. https://medium.com/@comma_ai/how-to-write-a-car-port-for-ope...

The driving model runs on the modified android OS (NEOS), but the safety critical code runs separately real-time on a SIL2 STM32 microcontroler. Comma strives for ISO26262 compliance.

The next comma hardware will ditch android and phones though.

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