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Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, I'm intrigued that the color is relevant in the car'
by petercooper 10y ago
Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky,
I'm intrigued that the color is relevant in the car's case - wouldn't it be using some sort of radar to detect and map objects rather than vision? I appreciate I am probably missing something.
- krschultz 10y agoAutopilot uses a forward facing camera & radar. It sounds like the truck came in at a perpendicular angle. It may have been in the cone of sight for the camera but not the radar depending on how those are setup. The 360 degree sensors on the Tesla are for parking only (< 20 feet range). Personally when I worked on a self driving car we were going with 360 degree camera and doing path planning based on that, but Tesla has opted not to do that.
- Johnie 10y agoDoesn't a 360 degree camera require it to be placed on top of the car?
- krschultz 10y agoYou could merge multiple cameras in software, it's actually pretty straightforward to stitch them together in OpenCV. Basically just have to correct for the difference between cameras & their physical locations, but that is trivial since they are statically mounted on the car.
- etangent 10y agoYou can use a radar, a laser, or even a regular camera (which is what Teslas have I believe).
- mikeash 10y agoTesla's Autopilot uses a radar unit, a front-facing camera, and twelve ultrasonic sensors on the front and back bumper. The ultrasonic sensors are short range and are for detecting adjacent cars and obstacles while parking, the camera is used for detecting lanes, and the camera and radar work together to detect cars. The radar is low to the ground and probably doesn't pick up a trailer that's high off the ground. The camera could, but not if contrast is too low. (And I'm not sure if the software is able to recognize the side of a trailer anyway.)
- XCSme 10y agoYeah, the height seems to be the problem. There was a "similar" accident a few months ago where a Tesla was summoned out of the garage and it hit a trailer because it was to high for the radar to get it. http://s3.amazonaws.com/digitaltrends-uploads-prod/2016/05/Tesla-truck.jpg http://s3.amazonaws.com/digitaltrends-uploads-prod/2016/05/T...
- TylerE 10y agoSeems like a pretty clear case for adding a radar at the top of the windshield
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- curiousgal 10y agoWould an infrared camera have picked up the trailer?
- mikeash 10y agoGood question. I wouldn't be surprised if the existing hardware already incorporated some infrared, but I really have no idea.
- jdmichal 10y agoThe range of most, if not all, digital camera sensors ranges into the infrared spectrum. I don't know if it's a useful part of the spectrum for this purpose, nor whether Tesla uses image processors that maintain the full sensor data. Would definitely be an interesting thing to work with, from a tech point of view.
- extrapickles 10y agoSunlight swamps infrared and thermal cameras as well. The only way to see it would be lidar (it might have issues too) or radar. Ultrasonics don't have the range. They should have the autopilot refuse to operate when the sun is within X degrees of the road in the direction of travel.
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- Shivetya 10y agoWell it certainly makes me wonder how well it will do in snowy conditions, let alone any low sight conditions.
- wrsh07 10y agoI'm not sure what the claims are about autopilot, but I would currently only use it in situations similar to those I would use cruise control. It's going to get better, but it's crazy to assume it's currently much more than a highly-assistive cruise control.