ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - November 2023 - 10

Cover Story
"
When we tried simulation, it didn't work for us. It wasn't good enough.
"
indicators (KPIs), on what Viscardi called an extensive
validation data set.
" On the issue of real-world versus simulated
testing, because it's a very general net, we can validate
on data across the world, " he said. " It's been trained
on a wide range of data that can then be specialized
to certain geographies or cameras. "
Helm.ai also can adjust its AI to evaluate specific
data from an OEM, fine-tuning it to allow for largescale
testing and better accuracy.
" Unsupervised learning means that for every
Imagry CEO Eran Ofir speaks at the IAA Mobility 2023 exposition in
Munich, Germany.
Counterpoint: Heml.ai
Unsupervised learning is exactly the technology that
Helm.ai sees as the key to training its own software.
Helm.ai is working on perception for self-driving
cars and robotics. Its software takes raw images from
cameras and attempts to detect things that an AV needs
to see: pedestrians, vehicles, wheels, drivable surfaces
and so on. Michael Viscardi, tech lead for perception at
helm.ai, said unsupervised learning was vital to getting
its AI to understand difficult conditions like nighttime
driving or when there's lots of fog or glare.
" This is where a lot of autonomous vehicles
struggle, and humans, too, " Viscardi told SAE Media
at IAA. " We developed this method. Instead of deep
learning, and call it deep teaching. The neural net is
basically able to teach itself using large-scale, unsupervised
learning on millions of images to get robustness
to all these corner cases. "
So, to learn how to drive at night, Helm's AI
used millions of frames that were not annotated by
humans, Viscardi said. Helm's AI strategy is to ingest
data from a bewildering number of different sources -
for example, dashcam footage from YouTube showing
rain or night - so the neural net can learn from that
data and produce robust lane predictions.
Helm.ai double-checks what the AI has learned
through compute metrics, including key performance
single corner case that comes up, we don't need to
go and collect a million frames and then get them all
labeled, which is very expensive and time-consuming, "
he said. " You could keep throwing money and time at
it and maybe eventually you'll get there, but it's not a
scalable approach. What we provide is scalability across
cameras, across geographies and across corner cases. "
Unsupervised learning also costs less time and money
than hand-annotating files of edge cases, he asserted, and
the system also is hardware-agnostic. Viscardi admitted
that there likely will be a plateau of some sort to what
Helm's AV AI can learn, but the company isn't yet
anywhere near that limit. For now, the more data, the
better, he said, especially as Helm starts work on an urban
AI pilot to add to its highway pilot system.
" Getting autonomous driving right in urban
scenarios based on that perception, that's kind of what
we're really excited about working on right now, " he said.
From YouTube to AVs: DeepScenario
Helm.ai is not the only AV-development company
that disagrees with Imagry's anti-simulation stance.
DeepScenario's goal is to be able to measure a location
and be able to simulate much quicker than anyone else
while providing " the highest, highest detail, " according
to DeepScenario co-founder Holger Banzhaf. A
10-person, Stutgart-based startup that spun off from
TU-München (the Technical University of Munich) in
2021, DeepScenario has developed software that creates
testbed environments for automakers to run their automated-driving
algorithms against virtual scenarios.
" Right now, [the software shows] just boxes, "
Banzhaf told SAE Media at IAA. " But cars have a
shape, and they have colors, and that matters for the
perception algorithms, because black objects are not
as well-detected as white ones. "
10 November 2023
ADAS & AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ENGINEERING
10 November 2023
ADAS & AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ENGINEERING
Sebastian Blanco
http://www.Helm.ai http://www.Heml.ai http://www.Helm.ai http://www.Helm.ai http://www.helm.ai http://www.Helm.ai http://www.Helm.ai
ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Engineering - November 2023

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