Module 01: The "Why" and The Architecture
Why L5 autonomy is harder than a moon landing. Understanding ODD, latency loops, compute constraints, and the modern Hybrid Architecture (Modular vs. End-to-End).
Your Unique Edge
How self-driving cars actually work—prediction, calibration, sensing, and closed-loop reasoning.
12 articles covering robotics
Why L5 autonomy is harder than a moon landing. Understanding ODD, latency loops, compute constraints, and the modern Hybrid Architecture (Modular vs. End-to-End).
The raw senses of an autonomous vehicle: What data does each sensor provide? Covers cameras, radar, LiDAR, ultrasonics, and microphones—their physics, strengths, weaknesses, and why fusion is necessary.
If you don't know where your eyes are relative to your feet, you trip. Covers intrinsics, extrinsics, SE(3) transforms, online vs. offline calibration, and time synchronization.
From GPS to centimeter accuracy: How autonomous vehicles know their exact position. Covers GNSS, IMU, wheel odometry, scan matching, and Factor Graphs.
How autonomous vehicles remember the world. Covers HD maps, lane graphs, offline vs. online mapping, MapTR, and the map-heavy vs. map-light debate.
From pixels to 4D realities: How AVs understand their environment. Deep dive into BEV Transformers, Panoptic Occupancy, Scene Flow, and Foundation Models for open-world perception.
The hardest problem in AV: predicting human irrationality. From physics-based Kalman Filters to Joint Autoregressive Distributions, Generative Motion Diffusion, and World State Propagations.
From perception to action: How autonomous vehicles make decisions. Covers cost functions, game-theoretic planning, MPC, and the "End-to-End" debate.
From modular stacks to unified intelligence: How foundation models are reshaping AV and generalist robotics. Covers VLA models (GR00T, Pi0), Physical AI, and the 2026 embodied revolution.
How diffusion models predict action sequences instead of pixels. Covers Diffusion Policy, world models for robotics, and connecting diffusion to reinforcement learning for autonomous systems.
Reflections on building production-grade behavior prediction systems for autonomous vehicles — and why closed-loop reasoning is the bridge between perception and planning.
How we used deep learning to automatically calibrate traffic cameras by observing vehicle motion—work that won Best Paper Award at ACM BuildSys 2017.