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It is rather funny that in nearly every Tesla-related thread, they are slammed as irresponsible fraudsters for their decision to not use LIDAR and rely on a rad

It is rather funny that in nearly every Tesla-related thread, they are slammed as irresponsible fraudsters for their decision to not use LIDAR and rely on a radar/camera-based system. Cameras cannot detect obstacles, we are told, and they'll never be able to make an autonomous vehicle without it. This, despite the fact that humans do well enough and that Structure From Motion has been a well-established part of Computer Vision research for a while. More on topic, this is pretty great work and it'll have wide applications, for example Google's own efforts to make robot arms more perceptive using regular cameras: https://ai.google/research/teams/brain/robotics/ https://ai.google/research/teams/brain/robotics/

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Humans do awful at it. All sorts of visual confusion can fool humans about how far away something is. Versus lidar, which can't be fooled about how far away something is. Robot arms in a factory environment are very different from driving in a snowstorm, or blowing rain, or through a construction site, or with tree branches waving around. It's precisely this experience that drives people to ask Wtf are they thinking?
- bitL 8y ago
  LiDAR can be easily fooled by litter, bad weather, snow etc. It basically works reliably well only in good weather.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> It is rather funny that in nearly every Tesla-related thread, they are slammed as irresponsible fraudsters for their decision to not use LIDAR and rely on a radar/camera-based system. Cameras cannot detect obstacles, we are told, and they'll never be able to make an autonomous vehicle without it. I don't think anyone reasonable says it's impossible - after all, humans are living, walking proof that it's entirely doable. The core of criticism is that it's insanely more difficult than just using LIDAR data. One could even say that LIDAR, as a specialized tool for depth detection, is a intrinsically better tool for the job.
- haberman 8y ago
  In particular, I find this claim questionable: "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware." https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now... As you mention, this is trivially true on the level of the sensors. We know cameras are enough because human brains can do it with eyes (biological cameras). But there is no evidence that we know how to write software for the processing part of it (to an acceptable degree of safety) with cameras only, nor that the computing power on-board is up to the task. How can you say that hardware package X is sufficient to implement something that has literally never been done before?
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    >this is trivially true on the level of the sensors. Maybe. The human eye is fundamentally different than cameras in terms of how it focuses on things. For similar performance, we may need much higher resolution cameras. We don't know.
    - haberman 8y ago
      Interesting, I wasn't aware. How are they different?
      - joshuamorton 8y ago
        Eyes don't have uniform resolution. The centers of our eyes (or what we're focusing on) have very, very high resolution, while the outer parts have much lower. Cameras normally have something like a middling resolution in comparison.
        sorenjan 8y ago
        Eyes doesn't send the entire picture to the brain at once at a constant sampling rate either, they work more like event cameras [0]. Combine this with micro movements of the eye, and specialized brain structures and it's not as easy as saying that because we only need two eyes, robots only need two cameras. Sure, stereo vision might be enough, but what kind of cameras, and what kind of computers do we need to reach feature parity with our own sight? [0] http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/iros15workshop/papers/IROS2015-WASRoP-Invited-04-slides.pdf http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/iros15workshop/papers/IROS2015-WASR...
dahart 8y ago
As an occasional pedestrian & occasional road cyclist, I'd personally much rather have any automated cars around me using both LIDAR and SFM than SFM without LIDAR. Wouldn't you?
bodyfour 8y ago
I think that's a poor description of the LIDARless controversy. In the current state of the art there are many things that a self-driving car can do better than any human (reaction speed, never gets distracted, etc) Then there are other driving tasks that humans are still far better at... I'm not a self-driving expert, but I suspect that they're still worse at picking up complicated environmental cues (say, a pedestrian acting unusual or trying to alert you to something) The safety premise of self-driving is that the former can outweigh the latter. The idea is that there will be some accidents that might have been avoidable by a proficient human driver, but many more that will be prevented by a machine's super-human capabilities in other areas. To make a self-driving car as safe as possible, you'd want to give it every super-human capability that's practical. LIDAR provides one such capability -- a super-human understanding of where objects are even when the visual environment is challenging. The question isn't whether it's possible for a LIDARless system to operate safely. Obviously humans don't have LIDAR and they're considered "safe enough" to put on the roads. The concern is whether it would be as safe as possible... and whether it would be so safe that people would feel comfortable sharing the highway with such a car.
- bitL 8y ago
  If you have hardware that can operate at 1000fps at full HD, then I'd bet it could drive very safely even without LiDAR. But if at best it manages 5fps, uses imprecise extended Kalman filters to interpolate movement of obstacles, low-res SfM and normal-based 3D detection, it could get really bad results at times. All these systems together at 1000fps would probably obliterate humans comfortably. It was said that self-driving is a solved problem, the faster HW the better results. However, detailed path planning (in inches/centimeters) is way way worse than average human and due to NP-hard fun there is not much hope there will be any great solution anytime soon.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Humans do awful at it. All sorts of visual confusion can fool humans about how far away something is. Versus lidar, which can't be fooled about how far away something is. Robot arms in a factory environment are very different from driving in a snowstorm, or blowing rain, or through a construction site, or with tree branches waving around. It's precisely this experience that drives people to ask Wtf are they thinking?

bitL 8y ago
LiDAR can be easily fooled by litter, bad weather, snow etc. It basically works reliably well only in good weather.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> It is rather funny that in nearly every Tesla-related thread, they are slammed as irresponsible fraudsters for their decision to not use LIDAR and rely on a radar/camera-based system. Cameras cannot detect obstacles, we are told, and they'll never be able to make an autonomous vehicle without it. I don't think anyone reasonable says it's impossible - after all, humans are living, walking proof that it's entirely doable. The core of criticism is that it's insanely more difficult than just using LIDAR data. One could even say that LIDAR, as a specialized tool for depth detection, is a intrinsically better tool for the job.

haberman 8y ago
In particular, I find this claim questionable: "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware." https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware?redirect=no https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now... As you mention, this is trivially true on the level of the sensors. We know cameras are enough because human brains can do it with eyes (biological cameras). But there is no evidence that we know how to write software for the processing part of it (to an acceptable degree of safety) with cameras only, nor that the computing power on-board is up to the task. How can you say that hardware package X is sufficient to implement something that has literally never been done before?
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  >this is trivially true on the level of the sensors. Maybe. The human eye is fundamentally different than cameras in terms of how it focuses on things. For similar performance, we may need much higher resolution cameras. We don't know.
  - haberman 8y ago
    Interesting, I wasn't aware. How are they different?
    - joshuamorton 8y ago
      Eyes don't have uniform resolution. The centers of our eyes (or what we're focusing on) have very, very high resolution, while the outer parts have much lower. Cameras normally have something like a middling resolution in comparison.
      - sorenjan 8y ago
        Eyes doesn't send the entire picture to the brain at once at a constant sampling rate either, they work more like event cameras [0]. Combine this with micro movements of the eye, and specialized brain structures and it's not as easy as saying that because we only need two eyes, robots only need two cameras. Sure, stereo vision might be enough, but what kind of cameras, and what kind of computers do we need to reach feature parity with our own sight? [0] http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/iros15workshop/papers/IROS2015-WASRoP-Invited-04-slides.pdf http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/iros15workshop/papers/IROS2015-WASR...

dahart 8y ago

As an occasional pedestrian & occasional road cyclist, I'd personally much rather have any automated cars around me using both LIDAR and SFM than SFM without LIDAR. Wouldn't you?

bodyfour 8y ago

I think that's a poor description of the LIDARless controversy. In the current state of the art there are many things that a self-driving car can do better than any human (reaction speed, never gets distracted, etc) Then there are other driving tasks that humans are still far better at... I'm not a self-driving expert, but I suspect that they're still worse at picking up complicated environmental cues (say, a pedestrian acting unusual or trying to alert you to something) The safety premise of self-driving is that the former can outweigh the latter. The idea is that there will be some accidents that might have been avoidable by a proficient human driver, but many more that will be prevented by a machine's super-human capabilities in other areas. To make a self-driving car as safe as possible, you'd want to give it every super-human capability that's practical. LIDAR provides one such capability -- a super-human understanding of where objects are even when the visual environment is challenging. The question isn't whether it's possible for a LIDARless system to operate safely. Obviously humans don't have LIDAR and they're considered "safe enough" to put on the roads. The concern is whether it would be as safe as possible... and whether it would be so safe that people would feel comfortable sharing the highway with such a car.

bitL 8y ago
If you have hardware that can operate at 1000fps at full HD, then I'd bet it could drive very safely even without LiDAR. But if at best it manages 5fps, uses imprecise extended Kalman filters to interpolate movement of obstacles, low-res SfM and normal-based 3D detection, it could get really bad results at times. All these systems together at 1000fps would probably obliterate humans comfortably. It was said that self-driving is a solved problem, the faster HW the better results. However, detailed path planning (in inches/centimeters) is way way worse than average human and due to NP-hard fun there is not much hope there will be any great solution anytime soon.