![]() comma three running the openpilot software | |
Developer(s) | comma.ai |
---|---|
Initial release | 30 November 2016 |
Stable release | 0.9.6 (27 February 2024 ) |
Repository | github.com/commaai/openpilot |
Written in | Python, C++ and C |
Type | Computer vision |
License | MIT License |
Website | comma.ai |
openpilot is an open-source, semi-automated driving system by comma.ai, Inc. When paired with comma hardware, it replaces advanced driver-assistance systems in various cars, improving over the original system. [1] [2] As of 2023, openpilot supports 250+ car models and has 6000+ users, having covered over 90 million miles (140,000,000 km). [2] [3] [4] [5]
openpilot runs on comma 2/3/X hardware, developed by comma.ai. Functioning as an aftermarket retrofit, it allows users to enhance their existing cars with upgraded computing power, enhanced sensors, and continuously updated software that improves over time.
comma.ai Inc was founded in September 2015 by George Hotz. [6] The first version of openpilot was revealed a few months later in a Bloomberg article, showing functionality on a 2016 Acura ILX. [7] The video and article instigated a cease and desist letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, claiming comma.ai was testing a self-driving car without a license.
openpilot was packaged into a small, shippable device called the "comma one", announced at TechCrunch Disrupt. [8] On October 27, 2016, NHTSA issued a Special Order to comma.ai demanding detailed information about the comma one, to determine if the device complies with legally required Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. [9] comma.ai responded in a tweet from Shenzhen, China, announcing the cancellation of the comma one. [10]
comma.ai open-sourced openpilot a month later, on November 30, 2016, emphasizing its intended use for research, without any warranty. [11] [12]
On January 7, 2020, comma.ai introduced the $999 "comma two" device at CES in Las Vegas. [13] [14] [15] In November 2020, Consumer Reports ranked openpilot above all other advanced driver-assistance systems on the market, including Tesla's Autopilot, Cadillac's Super Cruise and Ford's Co-pilot 360. [1]
At comma's 2021 comma_con convention, the company released the "comma three devkit". [16] This model uses two fish eye cameras oriented to the front and a long distance camera oriented to the rear to analyze the car's surroundings. [17]
In January 2023, The Verge found openpilot-based driving-assist technology to be better than that from legacy car manufacturers, and stated that 5000 units of openpilot-supported Comma 3 devices were already distributed. [2]
At comma's 2023 COMMA_CON convention, the "comma 3X" was announced as a successor to the comma three devkit at a lower price of $1249. [18] In 2023, the total distance driven by openpilot's 6000+ users was said to have exceeded 90 million miles, [4] [5] an improvement over the 25 million miles figure reported in 2020. [19]
In contrast to traditional autonomous driving solutions where the perception, prediction, and planning units are separate "modules", openpilot adopts a system-level end-to-end design to predict the car's trajectory directly from the camera images. openpilot's end-to-end design is a neural network that is trained by comma.ai using real-world driving data uploaded by openpilot users. [20]
openpilot 0.9.4 and onwards include "navigate on openpilot", a feature akin to "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) from Tesla, Inc. [21]
openpilot uses machine learning, trained with real-world driving data, to determine the safest path on the road. This improves perception on roads without lane markings vs. lane-centering by tracking current lane lines.
openpilot maintains a safe following distance from the vehicle ahead. It is capable of driving in stop-and-go traffic with no user intervention. It uses OpenStreetMap's road curvature and speed limit data to allow slowing on sharp turns and setting the vehicle's desired speed to the current speed limit on certain community-maintained forks of the main repository.
openpilot recognizes the driver's face; if the driver is distracted, openpilot warns the driver. If the driver is distracted for more than six seconds, openpilot decelerates the vehicle to a stop, and audibly alerts the user.
openpilot uses the model to change lanes when the user engages the turn signal: a nudge is optional on the steering wheel to confirm the lane change. openpilot also interacts with the blind spot monitor on certain makes and models to block the lane change in the event a car is detected by the blind spot monitor.
openpilot receives over-the-air software updates via WiFi or a cellular phone network, (OTA updates).
At launch, openpilot supported the Honda Civic and the Acura ILX. Support for more vehicles and brands has been added through open-source contribution. [22] As of November 2023, the list of officially supported vehicles contains more than 250 entries, [3] and can be viewed at https://comma.ai/vehicles.
Development is supported by an open-source community using Discord [23] and GitHub.
comma.ai has released tools and guides to help developers port their cars. [24] In addition, they released tools to let users review their drives. [25]
comma.ai maintains the openpilot codebase and releases, and there is a growing community that maintains various forks of openpilot. These forks consist of experimental features such as stop light detection.
Pre-Autopilot Tesla models have been retrofitted with openpilot through a community fork. [26] Chrysler and Jeep models have also gained support through community contributions. [27] [28]
There are over 6,600 forks of the openpilot GitHub repository. [12]
A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car (AC), driverless car, robotic car or robo-car, is a car that is capable of operating with reduced or no human input. Self-driving cars are responsible for all driving activities including perceiving the environment, monitoring important systems, and controlling the vehicle, including navigating from origin to destination.
A dead man's switch is a switch that is designed to be activated or deactivated if the human operator becomes incapacitated, such as through death, loss of consciousness, or being bodily removed from control. Originally applied to switches on a vehicle or machine, it has since come to be used to describe other intangible uses, as in computer software.
Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are technologies that assist drivers with the safe operation of a vehicle. Through a human-machine interface, ADAS increase car and road safety. ADAS use automated technology, such as sensors and cameras, to detect nearby obstacles or driver errors, and respond accordingly. ADAS can enable various levels of autonomous driving.
In road-transport terminology, a lane departure warning system (LDWS) is a mechanism designed to warn the driver when the vehicle begins to move out of its lane on freeways and arterial roads. These systems are designed to minimize accidents by addressing the main causes of collisions: driver error, distractions and drowsiness. In 2009 the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began studying whether to mandate lane departure warning systems and frontal collision warning systems on automobiles.
Teleoperation indicates operation of a system or machine at a distance. It is similar in meaning to the phrase "remote control" but is usually encountered in research, academia and technology. It is most commonly associated with robotics and mobile robots but can be applied to a whole range of circumstances in which a device or machine is operated by a person from a distance.
Vehicular automation involves the use of mechatronics, artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems to assist the operator of a vehicle such as a car, lorries, aircraft, or watercraft. A vehicle using automation for tasks such as navigation to ease but not replace human control, qualify as semi-autonomous, whereas a fully self-operated vehicle is termed autonomous.
Tesla, Inc. is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company headquartered in Austin, Texas, which designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale, solar panels and solar shingles, and related products and services.
Adaptive cruise control (ACC) is a type of advanced driver-assistance system for road vehicles that automatically adjusts the vehicle speed to maintain a safe distance from vehicles ahead. As of 2019, it is also called by 20 unique names that describe that basic functionality. This is also known as Dynamic cruise control.
George Francis Hotz, alias geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur, and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 onwards, he has been working on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai. Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework.
Alexander Roy is an American writer, podcaster, TV host and rally race driver who has set various endurance driving records, including the US "Cannonball Run" transcontinental driving record, which he and Dave Maher broke in 2007 in 31 hours and 4 minutes, featured in the 2019 documentary APEX: The Secret Race Across America.
The Tesla Model S is a battery electric executive car with a liftback body style built by Tesla, Inc. since 2012. The Model S features a battery-powered dual-motor, all-wheel drive layout, although earlier versions featured a rear-motor and rear-wheel drive layout.
A connected car is a car that can communicate bidirectionally with other systems outside of the car. This connectivity can be used to provide services to passengers or to support or enhance self-driving functionality. For safety-critical applications, it is anticipated that cars will also be connected using dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) or cellular radios, operating in the FCC-granted 5.9 GHz band with very low latency.
Mobileye Global Inc. is an Israeli autonomous driving company. It is developing self-driving technologies and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) including cameras, computer chips, and software. Mobileye was acquired by Intel in 2017 and went public again in 2022.
CarPlay, or Apple CarPlay is an Apple standard that enables a car radio or head unit to be a display and controller for an iOS device. It is available on iPhone 5 and later models running iOS 7.1 or later.
Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.
Nvidia Drive is a computer platform by Nvidia, aimed at providing autonomous car and driver assistance functionality powered by deep learning. The platform was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2015. An enhanced version, the Drive PX 2 was introduced at CES a year later, in January 2016.
Tesla Autopilot is an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) developed by Tesla that amounts to partial vehicle automation. Tesla provides "Base Autopilot" on all vehicles, which includes lane centering and traffic-aware cruise control. Owners may purchase an upgrade to "Enhanced Autopilot" (EA) which adds semi-autonomous navigation on limited access roadways, self-parking, and the ability to summon the car from a garage or parking spot. The company claims the features reduce accidents caused by driver negligence and fatigue from long-term driving. Collisions and deaths involving Tesla cars with Autopilot engaged have drawn the attention of the press and government agencies.
In road-transport terminology, lane centering, also known as auto steer or autosteer, is an advanced driver-assistance system that keeps a road vehicle centered in the lane, relieving the driver of the task of steering. Lane centering is similar to lane departure warning and lane keeping assist, but rather than warn the driver, or bouncing the car away from the lane edge, it keeps the car centered in the lane. Together with adaptive cruise control (ACC), this feature may allow unassisted driving for some length of time. It is also part of automated lane keeping systems.
The Aptera is a two-seat, three-wheeled solar electric vehicle under development by the crowd-funded American car manufacturer Aptera Motors. The stated design goal of the car is to be the most energy efficient mass produced vehicle ever. The design has an aerodynamic shape and uses lightweight carbon fiber and fiberglass composite materials, wheel hub motors, and built-in solar panels to significantly extend its range.
Tesla, Inc. has been criticized for its cars, workplace culture, business practices, and occupational safety. Many of the criticisms are also directed toward Elon Musk, the company's CEO and Product Architect. Critics have also accused Tesla of deceptive marketing, unfulfilled promises, and fraud. The company is currently facing criminal and civil investigations into its self-driving claims. Critics have highlighted Tesla's downplaying of issues, and Tesla's alleged retaliation against several whistleblowers.