The comma 3X is custom hardware designed to live in your car, and purpose built to run openpilot. The comma 3X has three beautiful HDR cameras, two cameras to watch the road and one night-vision camera to see inside the car. Besides cameras, the comma 3X has a suite of connectivity and sensors including cellular LTE, Wi-Fi, an IMU, high-precision GPS, and microphones.
Comma 3X gives a comfortable highway self driving experience based upon early reviews.
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I need better placement of my eyes for driving, but we get the sensor package we get.
You’re right that were going to keep seeing improvements in hardware over time, and a cheap, capable robot is likely inevitable.
As I understand it, Optimus will be using the same “brain” and training as Tesla uses in their cars.
After the first round of robots hits the wider market, and enough interested, skilled and creative people have torn down a bunch of them, we’ll start seeing simpler, cheaper models bubbling up through forums and maker groups, with a few of those makers basic bot concepts managing to get financing.
I suppose designing ones robot to have a central stalk in the middle of its forehead might help a start-up achieve Unicorn status a bit quicker than the rest.
Given the option, I believe it would be most cost effective to have a basic robot, hosting a Personal Agent whose skill sets include driving.
A base robot, with household chore levels of mobility and dexterity, would cost less than a full function, high mobility and dexterity models.
Not much physically demanding about driving.
Then every year, make, and model of car becomes “self-driving”.
And when you get home, your investment can open its door, get the groceries from the trunk, bring them inside… etc.
Same way any fighter jet can become “self-flying”, or tank “self-driving”.
No need for major retrofits, just far spendier, more capable robots.
Next-gen drone warfare.
I have wondered about this in passing too. I guess I assumed that there was some benefit to building the self-driving into the car but I don’t know for sure. Maybe the placement of cameras is more optimal and maybe the amount of processing power and memory you can have onboard without a perfectly stable connection to the net is too important.
You need better camera placement if you’re going to get good results, I think. And directly controlling the car gives you a jump on response time. But in principle your general purpose robot could jack straight into the car bypassing manual controls (That are often “fly by wire” anyway.) and “seeing” with the car’s cameras.
Another issue is whether the robot brain is actually up to controlling a car AND being a general purpose robot. If the brain is dedicated to just being a car, it doesn’t have to be quite so smart to do a good job of it. But I assume that’s just a question of improving the brain, maybe 2-3 years progress.
Tesla is locked in to a business plan, as far as self-driving goes.
However, Optimus will be utilizing the same basic hardwarre and training, so including driving authority — for a fee, might happen.
Alternatively, in a race between open source DIY robot devs, and a herd of start-ups, all focused on delivering a low budget product, as capable in the driver’s seat as they are in the bedroom, (making the bed is a chore) we might have many other choices than a Musk Ox.