How Tesla uses AI to its self driven cars for its intelligent operations
Tesla has become a household name as a leader and pioneer in the electric vehicle market, but it also manufactures and sells advanced battery and solar panel technology.
As a tech pioneer with a significant interest in the race to build and market autonomous vehicles, it makes sense that today they would be deeply interested in artificial intelligence. However, in January business’s billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk publicly announced it is working on its own AI hardware.
This is definitely interesting if not exactly surprising. Musk, after all, has been outspoken in his views about AI. As well as revolutionizing almost every aspect of society, he has warned that it will cause widespread job losses and possibly even start World War Three.
TESLA promise
Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc, the American electric-automobile manufacturing company has recently been the prey of a large degree of scrutiny and scepticism, in particular regarding its failure to bring to completion its promise of delivering “fully self-driving cars” by the end of 2019.
TESLA self driven cars are based on these :
Hardware
Build silicon chips that power our full self-driving software from the ground up, taking every small architectural and micro-architectural improvement into account while pushing hard to squeeze maximum silicon performance-per-watt. Perform floor-planning, timing and power analyses on the design. Write robust, randomized tests and scoreboards to verify functionality and performance. Implement compilers and drivers to program and communicate with the chip, with a strong focus on performance optimization and power savings. Finally, validate the silicon chip and bring it to mass production.
Neural Networks
Apply cutting-edge research to train deep neural networks on problems ranging from perception to control. Our per-camera networks analyze raw images to perform semantic segmentation, object detection and monocular depth estimation. Our birds-eye-view networks take video from all cameras to output the road layout, static infrastructure and 3D objects directly in the top-down view. Our networks learn from the most complicated and diverse scenarios in the world, iteratively sourced from our fleet of nearly 1M vehicles in real time. A full build of Autopilot neural networks involves 48 networks that take 70,000 GPU hours to train 🔥. Together, they output 1,000 distinct tensors (predictions) at each timestep.
Autonomy Algorithms
Develop the core algorithms that drive the car by creating a high-fidelity representation of the world and planning trajectories in that space. In order to train the neural networks to predict such representations, algorithmically create accurate and large-scale ground truth data by combining information from the car’s sensors across space and time. Use state-of-the-art techniques to build a robust planning and decision-making system that operates in complicated real-world situations under uncertainty. Evaluate your algorithms at the scale of the entire Tesla fleet.
Code Foundations
Throughput, latency, correctness and determinism are the main metrics we optimize our code for. Build the Autopilot software foundations up from the lowest levels of the stack, tightly integrating with our custom hardware. Implement super-reliable bootloaders with support for over-the-air updates and bring up customized Linux kernels. Write fast, memory-efficient low-level code to capture high-frequency, high-volume data from our sensors, and to share it with multiple consumer processes — without impacting central memory access latency or starving critical functional code from CPU cycles. Squeeze and pipeline compute across a variety of hardware processing units, distributed across multiple system-on-chips.
Evaluation Infrastructure
Build open- and closed-loop, hardware-in-the-loop evaluation tools and infrastructure at scale, to accelerate the pace of innovation, track performance improvements and prevent regressions. Leverage anonymized characteristic clips from our fleet and integrate them into large suites of test cases. Write code simulating our real-world environment, producing highly realistic graphics and other sensor data that feed our Autopilot software for live debugging or automated testing.
Environmental care
While producing automobiles like it’s fellow automobile manufacturing firms, Tesla has a much broader approach alongside carrying out its primary service. The firm boasts of aiming to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
