Comma.ai has been in news every now and then because of the promises it gave us for the future of driverless cars. Founder George Hotz started the company in a bid to prove a point, that existing vehicles and off the shelf components can be used to make driverless vehicles at low cost. Now Comma.ai has made 7.25 hours of driverless highway driving data available openly. This is a particularly interesting move considering the fact that while Google and Tesla have been pretty open about their developments, most of the startups in this space weren’t.
Sharing data with other innovators in this space will help the entire industry collectively move forward. Being open helps in improving machine learning. George Hotz has invited people to use the data to replicate the results and build further with the data. He shared that there were missteps along the way and no one needs to repeat them to learn the same lessons. He has also asked Zoox, Tesla, Google and Cruise to share their data.
Most of the companies working towards autonomous vehicles are looking at urban conditions first, with the exception of Tesla maybe, however the data shared by Comma.ai is for highway driving conditions. It could also be of help to the hobbyists that are working on these technologies as their backyard projects. This would also open up the gates to the company for right kind of people and attract them with the message. You can contribute towards a driverless world by using their chffr app that turns your mobile phone into a cloud based dashboard camera and feeds data to comma.ai to help develop their system.
Source: TechCrunch
Pingback: Interested in a driverless future? 7 startups that you should be watching - TravHQ()