Gold Star Minute

Here at comma.ai, you all teach us how to drive. But a question we get a lot is, how much are we teaching the car? Are we teaching the car the right things.

Now you can finally know! If you are doing well, just like in school, your minute of driving will get a gold star!

1. Have a supported car — You’ll need a car openpilot supports, aka a modern Honda or Toyota. In order for our models to learn, we use the sensors in the car.
2. Have supported hardware — To get Gold Star Minutes, you’ll need a comma EON Dashcam. You’ll also need a grey panda properly connected to an appropriate giraffe. Fortunately, all of these items are available in the comma.ai shop.
3. Have supported software — Your EON will need to be running openpilot or chffrplus ≥ 0.4.3.2. That’s the first one with HDR and autofocus. You don’t even have to go to the shop for this, only GitHub.
4. Mount your hardware properly — EON need to be mounted stably, so they don’t wobble all over the place. grey panda antenna need to see the sky. Included mounts are great. And clean your dirty windshield!
5. Move — Move more than 100 meters in both this minute, the last minute, and the next minute. That’s an average speed of 6 miles per hour. You can almost run that fast…
6. Don’t crash — This is obvious. We will not give gold stars if you crash.
7. Drive in USA or Canada — Gold Star Minute program is USA and Canada only for now. Will be expanded. (note that chffrplus/openpilot will still work elsewhere)
8. Drive over 4 minutes — The first 2 and last 2 minutes of a drive can’t be Gold Star Minutes.
9. Things out of your control — Kalman filter didn’t init right? Government broke the GPS satellites? ORB features matched poorly? You might have done nothing wrong and still not get a Gold Star. I’m sorry life isn’t fair. We are working to make life as fair as possible. Gold Star Minute requirements liable to change at any time. Check this blog post for updates. Just like a schoolteacher, we will try our best to give feedback to help you make more of your minutes gold star minutes!

Gold Star Minutes won’t just be used for training models. (btw, the more you gold star, the more the model will drive like you) They will also be used for making HD maps. Soon™ you might even be able to see the maps. And eventually™, your openpilot will stop at the stop signs and stop lights from your gold star minutes.

Any questions, join us on Slack.

And always, follow us on Twitter @comma_ai