5 ms·

> "it piggybacks on the hard work of engineers at major manufacturers" What hard work? It's a COTS part. Not to mention, front-facing radar, even combined wit

> "it piggybacks on the hard work of engineers at major manufacturers" What hard work? It's a COTS part. Not to mention, front-facing radar, even combined with image recognition is woefully inadequate for true self-driving. (As opposed to, for example, Tesla's so called "Auto Pilot".

kristoffer 10y ago
What do you need for "true self-driving" in your mind? Cameras + radar is more than humans have at least, so I think that should be enough. Solid state LIDARs will soon be cheap enough and a good complement of course but I find it hard to believe autonomous driving would be impossible without it.
- nzjrs 10y ago
  > Cameras + radar is more than humans have at least execpting perhaps, that kilogram lump of gray matter floating around in our skulls.
- argonaut 10y ago
  You don't need LIDAR for self driving cars. You also don't need megawatts of power to play top-level Go: humans do it with a few tens of watts of energy. Yet Google needed ~megawatts of energy to run AlphaGo on their massive server farm. Imagine two companies competing to win at Go, and one company had the attitude that megawatts of energy was not necessary, and another company threw whatever resources they could. The second company just played top-level Go this year. The first company is at least another 5-10 years away from it. I'd also like to point out that humans do SLAM already (LIDAR solves SLAM). From a previous comment: Humans implicitly perform SLAM (simulataneous localization and mapping). What do I mean? Look around your room. Close your eyes. Visualize the room. As a human, you've built a rough 3D model of the room. And if you keep your eyes open and walk through the room, that map is pretty fine-grained/detailed too and humans can keep track of where they are in the map.
  - blt 10y ago
    LIDAR solves SLAM? LIDAR is a sensor you can use as part of a SLAM system.
    - argonaut 10y ago
      Yes. The problem of SLAM from LIDAR, GPS / IMU data (which are cheap sensors), and pre-recorded maps was solved years ago.
      - kristoffer 10y ago
        You can do SLAM with only cameras ...
        argonaut 10y ago
        No you can't. Have you tried it? Firstly, the state of the art (which is not deep learning based) still has trouble when the camera doesn't turn/swivel a lot (e.g. it has trouble when the camera is just moving straight). And that's not even getting to the most critical assumption. All of visual SLAM right now assumes the environment is static (!!!), and doesn't work when things in the environment are allowed to move.
      - blt 10y ago
        In my opinion, a system that combines LIDAR, GPS, and a pre-recorded map is not really doing SLAM. This scenario does not suffer from the "chicken and egg" problem which is a defining characteristic of SLAM. GPS and the pre-recorded map both make the problem much, much easier than SLAM in a GPS-denied, unmapped area. Maybe we are just arguing over terminology.
        argonaut 10y ago
        We are. SLAM, LAM, same thing as far as building a 3d model of your environment is concerned.

kristoffer 10y ago

What do you need for "true self-driving" in your mind? Cameras + radar is more than humans have at least, so I think that should be enough. Solid state LIDARs will soon be cheap enough and a good complement of course but I find it hard to believe autonomous driving would be impossible without it.

nzjrs 10y ago
> Cameras + radar is more than humans have at least execpting perhaps, that kilogram lump of gray matter floating around in our skulls.
argonaut 10y ago
You don't need LIDAR for self driving cars. You also don't need megawatts of power to play top-level Go: humans do it with a few tens of watts of energy. Yet Google needed ~megawatts of energy to run AlphaGo on their massive server farm. Imagine two companies competing to win at Go, and one company had the attitude that megawatts of energy was not necessary, and another company threw whatever resources they could. The second company just played top-level Go this year. The first company is at least another 5-10 years away from it. I'd also like to point out that humans do SLAM already (LIDAR solves SLAM). From a previous comment: Humans implicitly perform SLAM (simulataneous localization and mapping). What do I mean? Look around your room. Close your eyes. Visualize the room. As a human, you've built a rough 3D model of the room. And if you keep your eyes open and walk through the room, that map is pretty fine-grained/detailed too and humans can keep track of where they are in the map.
- blt 10y ago
  LIDAR solves SLAM? LIDAR is a sensor you can use as part of a SLAM system.
  - argonaut 10y ago
    Yes. The problem of SLAM from LIDAR, GPS / IMU data (which are cheap sensors), and pre-recorded maps was solved years ago.
    - kristoffer 10y ago
      You can do SLAM with only cameras ...
      - argonaut 10y ago
        No you can't. Have you tried it? Firstly, the state of the art (which is not deep learning based) still has trouble when the camera doesn't turn/swivel a lot (e.g. it has trouble when the camera is just moving straight). And that's not even getting to the most critical assumption. All of visual SLAM right now assumes the environment is static (!!!), and doesn't work when things in the environment are allowed to move.
    - blt 10y ago
      In my opinion, a system that combines LIDAR, GPS, and a pre-recorded map is not really doing SLAM. This scenario does not suffer from the "chicken and egg" problem which is a defining characteristic of SLAM. GPS and the pre-recorded map both make the problem much, much easier than SLAM in a GPS-denied, unmapped area. Maybe we are just arguing over terminology.
      - argonaut 10y ago
        We are. SLAM, LAM, same thing as far as building a 3d model of your environment is concerned.