Flowpilot - The Past, The Present & The Future.
The Past
Project flowpilot was started one year ago by three people. Initially, it was supposed to be an ADAS system written from the ground up following ideologies that were totally different from openpilot. Though, this is still our long term research goal, the more we explored openpilot, the more we realized that it would be idiotic not to leverage the work already done by thousands of people from around the world who are maintaining and improving openpilot day by day.
I have not seen many companies that are leveraging the work already done by the openpilot community. Are the companies ignorant? Or are they just too ashamed of taking openpilot’s name in the public? One such example is X-matik. They had money, they had good hardware and they could had really launched off if they invested more time into openpilot. But nope, they were too ignorant and now their business got shut down and the founder is now apparently running some random driver analytics company.
Along with openpilot, we also decided to leverage stuff from the android opensource project. Google and many people around the world have worked hard enough to develop APIs for android that work consistently across millions of devices.
There has always been a trade off between over-optimizing and flexibility/generalizability. Given the sheer amount of android smartphones popping up everyday in the market, We are more inclined towards “buy a better machine if code runs slow” approach. This also solves a large part of the supply-chain problem since now you have so many devices to build upon.
The aim was now to build something that reuses as much code from openpilot as possible while expanding it’s target list of supported devices.
The Present
Up until now, the project was mostly in the proof-of-concept phase and was being tested and developed on simulators and video-games because It’s too difficult to get access to an ADAS supported car in a third world country without selling your house. But it has now almost moved out from the POC phase after people actually got their real cars driven with flowpilot.
Thanks to miso !
As promised, flowpilot ran on stock android phone (oneplus 6t in the video) without any modification to the stock android and that too without root. This means, that the phone currently in your pocket could most probably be able to drive your car without any modifications to it.
This is a huge deal. Just think about it. It may look simple at first glance but the work that went behind it is insane. It wasn’t made in one day, it progressed slowly. There were hurdles, which we would like to discuss in next blog posts.
Now, currently we would be working on making the project more user friendly and stable. A lot of benchmarking and testing needs to be performed to get a better idea to questions like which phone should be the best to run flowpilot ? Is rooting the phone worth the hassle compared to the benifits it would provide ? Can the flowpilot drive continously for more than 5 hours without issues ? Is the driving performance same for all camera lens types ? Which phones support simultaneous charging and usb-host mode ?
Apart from this, driver monitoring is a very critical thing that flowpilot is currently missing. It’s mainly due to not being able to run two cameras at same time in some smartphones through higher level APIs. This is one of the main reasons we are not publicising or hyping the project much right now. Very few people know about flowpilot for now.
The Future
Given that flowpilot is able to install so easily on random smartphones, flowpilot will run atleast 10 versions behind the latest openpilot version.
In the end, we are not here to open up a clone community or company, we are here to solve self driving cars, we are mostly interested in reserch around self driving cars. With time, flowpilot will slowly diverge it’s path from openpilot with introduction of umm.. maybe different models? different control algorithms? different strategy than end-to-end? different features?
Time will tell.
Join the community
Join the discussion on discord and follow our twitter account for more updates.