4 ms·

Seems like it happens whenever a car in front moves out of the way. It goes full stupid-cruise-control mode and just accelerates to the stored speed. Of course

Seems like it happens whenever a car in front moves out of the way. It goes full stupid-cruise-control mode and just accelerates to the stored speed. Of course there's a lot of noise in terms of things in the stationary reference frame, but still, big red firetrucks don't exactly look like lane markings. At the very least, as a driver, I'm slightly cautious when I see a car move out of the lane in front. I feel like the solution lies in: (a) separating the signal from the noise in the set of things moving with the ground, and (b) getting the car to 'understand' why other cars change lanes. Sometimes it's so they can avoid obstacles in the road. It almost feels like cars need to have a theory of mind of other cars. I certainly drive with an intuition of driver intentions stuck in my head.

pavs 8y ago
The thing is Tesla will never be an autonomous car or a reliable semi-autonomous car with its current hardware. Elon needs to admit it (he insist, this isn't the case) and he needs to reliably convince his customers this isn't the case. Tesla needs to see a couple of cars before, in order to drive safely (these are no edge cases, this happens in real life a lot), but it can't see ahead without LiDAR but Elon insists they don't need LiDAR. The problem is you can't have a pre-existing bias when working with this kind of technology, you need to be able to adapt to whatever changes that need to be made.
- biswaroop 8y ago
  Well it's not completely clear to me that cameras can't look a few cars ahead. If we can, cameras can too. Maybe they're not smart enough yet, but I don't see the fundamental limitation. Apart from that, I agree that cheap + effective LIDAR would help significantly to get autonomous vehicles on the road now.
  - pavs 8y ago
    > If we can, cameras can too. A camera is not a replacement of how our eyes work, how our brain distinguishes between objects and understand from prior experience and can make independent decisions on the fly. But neither does LiDAR, but with LiDAR and good machine learning (ie, Waymo), you can drastically improve the reliability of your autonomous system. Elon is insisting on a no-LiDAR system at the same time advertising tesla autopilot as an autonomous system and has said multiple times that All Tesla on the road is already equipped with the hardware needed for fully autonomous driving. This is dangerously false. There is not a single autonomous car out there (at least serious ones that we know of), that has a non-LiDAR system. Reality Distortion Field is strong with Elon, Unlike Steve Jobs and Apple products, this one will kill people.
    - nmca 8y ago
      So I do a lot of work with both vision and lidar data, and am pretty intimately familiar with the public state of the art in terms of perception systems that rely on each or both, if not planning. I don't think you need lidar. I'm not saying that vision-only won't take longer, because it will, but I believe it'll probably happen unless the cost of lidar falls a great deal. Have a look at, for example, "learning to see in the dark" (the CVPR 2018 one), DensePose (the FB research one) to get a sense of how quickly difficult problems are being solved.
      - pavs 8y ago
        The cost of LiDar has been falling for a while now: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/driving-around-without-a-driver-lidar-technology-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/driving-around-without-... Waymo LiDAR is custom made and they cost a lot less than what is available in the market. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-in-lidar-technology-cuts-costs-by-90-percent/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-i... I don't think it's a cost, Elon has a personal bias, or maybe he didn't account for the fact that in the not so near future LiDAR cost will go down drastically.

pavs 8y ago

The thing is Tesla will never be an autonomous car or a reliable semi-autonomous car with its current hardware. Elon needs to admit it (he insist, this isn't the case) and he needs to reliably convince his customers this isn't the case. Tesla needs to see a couple of cars before, in order to drive safely (these are no edge cases, this happens in real life a lot), but it can't see ahead without LiDAR but Elon insists they don't need LiDAR. The problem is you can't have a pre-existing bias when working with this kind of technology, you need to be able to adapt to whatever changes that need to be made.

biswaroop 8y ago
Well it's not completely clear to me that cameras can't look a few cars ahead. If we can, cameras can too. Maybe they're not smart enough yet, but I don't see the fundamental limitation. Apart from that, I agree that cheap + effective LIDAR would help significantly to get autonomous vehicles on the road now.
- pavs 8y ago
  > If we can, cameras can too. A camera is not a replacement of how our eyes work, how our brain distinguishes between objects and understand from prior experience and can make independent decisions on the fly. But neither does LiDAR, but with LiDAR and good machine learning (ie, Waymo), you can drastically improve the reliability of your autonomous system. Elon is insisting on a no-LiDAR system at the same time advertising tesla autopilot as an autonomous system and has said multiple times that All Tesla on the road is already equipped with the hardware needed for fully autonomous driving. This is dangerously false. There is not a single autonomous car out there (at least serious ones that we know of), that has a non-LiDAR system. Reality Distortion Field is strong with Elon, Unlike Steve Jobs and Apple products, this one will kill people.
  - nmca 8y ago
    So I do a lot of work with both vision and lidar data, and am pretty intimately familiar with the public state of the art in terms of perception systems that rely on each or both, if not planning. I don't think you need lidar. I'm not saying that vision-only won't take longer, because it will, but I believe it'll probably happen unless the cost of lidar falls a great deal. Have a look at, for example, "learning to see in the dark" (the CVPR 2018 one), DensePose (the FB research one) to get a sense of how quickly difficult problems are being solved.
    - pavs 8y ago
      The cost of LiDar has been falling for a while now: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/driving-around-without-a-driver-lidar-technology-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/driving-around-without-... Waymo LiDAR is custom made and they cost a lot less than what is available in the market. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-in-lidar-technology-cuts-costs-by-90-percent/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-i... I don't think it's a cost, Elon has a personal bias, or maybe he didn't account for the fact that in the not so near future LiDAR cost will go down drastically.