Everyone who took Sebastian Thrun's Udacity "Building a self driving car" course (or everybody that has had training in robotics) will see that there's a whole lot more than mere training data to build a self driving car.
It could be helpful in certain scenarios, but it's for sure not enough for the data for the cars to be the main reason behind street view. As the author himself notices, the map business is huge, and it's even bigger when coupled with always connected location aware devices.
I took most of Thrun's course. There was a lot about robot localization based on pre-existing map data...exactly what StreetView is collecting.
If the StreetView cars are using LIDAR, they have a lot of high-quality 3D maps, perfect for robot localization. Even if they're just taking photos, various groups have demonstrated building 3D models from collections of photos.
Yes, that's right. What I find hard to believe is that the main reason behind the project is the self driving car. I can easily believe it's one of a set of objectives.
> It could be helpful in certain scenarios, but it's for sure not enough for the data for the cars to be the main reason behind street view.
Your logic doesn't go through. Driverless cars are potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. It could easily be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to make them 2% better.
How so? If that data alone won't bring significant improvements, how could it be the primary reason behind its collection? Much more likely they are collecting the data mainly for other applications and have the self driving car data as a nice addon.
Buying paper clips won't bring a significant improvement to my office productivity--less than 1%, I would say--but it's still true that the primary reason for buying paper clips is to improve productivity. It's just that paper clips are so cheap compared to the value of my total office output that it's still worth buying them for a tiny improvement. This is all still true if I also occasionally use the paper clips to construct tiny toy ninjas for fun.
It could be helpful in certain scenarios, but it's for sure not enough for the data for the cars to be the main reason behind street view. As the author himself notices, the map business is huge, and it's even bigger when coupled with always connected location aware devices.
An unlikely, if fun, story.