Comment on Elon Musk May Have Made a Huge Mistake on Full Self-Driving That It's Too Late to Correct.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 month agoExcept the radar doesn’t know where every object is. It can’t detect stopped things while traveling at high speeds.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 month ago
the large majority of current self driving cars have radar, lidar, ultra sonic, and cameras. their detection sets overlap, and complement each other so they can see a wide array of things that others can’t. focusing on 1 and saying “it doesn’t see X” is a very poor argument when others see those things just fine
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The point is that to be truly autonomous when vision is the only fail safe reliable sensor, then vision MUST work to have a truly autonomous vehicle.
You can’t rely on radar without vision or lidar because it can’t see stopped vehicles at high speed.
You can’t rely on lidar in rain/fog/snow/dust because the light bounces off of the particles and gives bad data, plus it can’t tell youanything about what the object is or might intend to do, only that it’s there.
Only vision can do all of those, it’s just a matter of number of cameras, camera quality, and AI processing capabilities.
If vision can do all those things perfectly, maybe you don’t need those other sensors after all?
pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 month ago
i don’t think anyone is relying solely on radar - that’s the point. every sensor we have as fallible in some way (and so, btw, are our eyes - they can’t see through things but radar can in some cases!)
even if you CAN rely solely on vision, why hamstring yourself? with a whole sensor package, the algorithms know when certain sensors are useless - that’s what the training is for… knock 1 out, the others see that it’s in X condition and works around it
if you only have a single sensor (like cameras) then if something happens you have 0 sensors… our eyes are MUCH better at vision than cameras - just the dynamic range alone, let alone the “resolution”… and that’s not even getting into, as others have said, the fact that our brains have had millions of years of evolution to process images.
the technology for vision only just isn’t there yet. that’s just straight up fact. can it be? perhaps, but “perhaps in the future” is not “we should do this now”. that’s called a beta test, and you’re playing with human lives not just UI bugs - and there’s no good reason… just add extra sensors
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Their stance is that by using lidar OEMs are hamstringing themselves on solving vision because they are so reliant on it. They spend less time and resources perfecting vision so they never truly solve the problem. From their perspective you got it backwards.
The more sensors you deal with, the more your attention gets divided. You aren’t laser focused on one thing.
The extra sensors also cost a lot of money, you can’t put waymo’s sensor package onto millions of cars that consumers can buy when the suite is 10s of thousands of dollars (and originally well over 100k).
By focusing on vision where the system can be put onto millions of cars, you can get massive amounts of extra training data and training data is going to be a huge part of solving this problem.
You might not like the reasons, or their stance, but it’s not such an unreasonable position to take. Mobile Eye even cancelled their next gen lidar project after seeing improvements in vision and radar. What happens when they keep seeing improvements in vision and now radar isn’t needed?
I don’t know if you’ve ever used AP but all the crazy headlines you see about it are idiots in cars being idiots. As a L2 vision only system it works very well.
If you wanna blame Elon for convincing people to be idiots, sure, you can do that, but that has nothing to do with the actual approach they are taking.