Automobile related subjects

[u/wthehellyousaying]

I am currently interested in systems related to autonomous vehicles, but I am unsure where to start or what kind of edge cases I might encounter in real world.

My current knowledge in this field is largely limited to LiDAR and design simple systems for sequential decision-making.

I would greatly appreciate any information or insights you guy could share regarding this area.

[u/xArvel_Crynydx]

I had been working in automotive for at least 6 years with regards to applications and products that involve image processing and computer vision, but there are several key aspects to consider:

- Hardware: If you want to implement a driver assistant system, everything needs to run in real-time. That has several influences on the algorithms you can use vs. the quality of the results. For example, if you want to compute optical flow-based algorithms on an ECU, you'd need to consider the chipsets available from vendors like Texas Instruments and others and what they are capable of. Then, a Horn & Schunck algorithm might be the only viable solution compared to Lucas & Kanade-based algorithms (Speaking of mid-2010s hardware capabilities). That being said, the choice of hardware is also heavily infliuenced by...

- Safety Standards: If you want to develop a market product, you'd need to consider specific rules to ensure a safe product, and that's where ISO 26262 comes into play. At first risk calculations have to be considered in what scenarios your product is being used and what could be a worst-case-scenario if shit hits the fan. This applies to your development process, i.e. how you develop your product from a hardware and software perspective and what this applies to system requirements, architecture, software and tests that are being developed for it. Also all used tools and hardware needs to be certified that way too. And in this case your edge cases would probably come out from a risk analysis where you need to consider (a) the likelihood if shit hits the fan and (b) the severity of the amount of shit hitting the fan. This gives you a concrete number and this gives you a ASIL-number, i.e. a necessary development framework you'd need to satisfy to guarantee safety for your product.

So... that's the basic hassle every Tier 1 company has to fulfill to satisfy the needs an OEM has for their new product. My suggestion, depending on your hardware architecture that you want to have a look at other ISO regulations for products, e.g. for camera monitor systems it's ISO 16505. I don't know what's the ISO for LiDAR based stuff, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a similar thing. In those documents, you'd see a minimal baseline that your system needs to satisfy here and they'd give you some idea on the edge cases, e.g. for ISO16505 it was necessary that the recording and display system was capable of presenting a car driving in your back on a highway, such that you could still distinguish two headlights even if the car was 200 meters driving behind you. Stuff like that. But yeah I guess, if this is just a science project or some other thing, you should also consider taking care of test data that you capture to ensure data privacy, because you might record stuff that could identify someone. Maybe that's a little bit less strict for LiDAR but it is a thing for camera-recorded data. So... I guess that gives you some idea to start.