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Hard braking at 80mph isn't as dangerous as not seeing a tractor trailer, but it could definitely cause a serious accident. I'm starting to understand why all

by api 8y ago

Hard braking at 80mph isn't as dangerous as not seeing a tractor trailer, but it could definitely cause a serious accident. I'm starting to understand why all the other self-drive companies use active sensors like lidar. You need that to compensate for the fact that the AI actually driving the car is less intelligent than a honeybee. A self-drive "AI" is dumb. It's just a glorified expert system with a lot of pattern recognition and other stuff bolted on. But the performance of dumb things can sometimes be improved by giving them more information. Self-driving cars need super-human senses. Lidar is doubly special because its an active sensing system. If the car hits an undecidable edge case it can probe it to see if it's physical or a lighting artifact. It needs to be able to do this because it has no higher order conceptual model of the world to reference. It doesn't "know" what an overpass or the sun "are." Edit: This principle is also why "big data" has helped revive "AI." We need big data because our AI isn't very I. Biological intelligences do incredible things with very small amounts of data because they have more I. What's so impressive about biology is what it can do with small data.

ModernMech 8y ago
> I'm starting to understand why all the other self-drive companies use active sensors like lidar. Every roboticist since the DARPA Grand Challenge knew this, as every team that finished had a Velodyne LIDAR. It was THE piece of tech that made that race possible. So for everyone who learned that lesson, to then see Telsas out on public roads with a feature called "autopilot" that did not have any LIDAR sensor attached to it... well... Let's just say we've been saying "I told you so" since then.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  I think it's a little early for people who don't "do" to call it that LIDAR is mandatory, and that optics and radar aren't sufficient. Autopilot is still in development.
  - api 8y ago
    LIDAR is not necessarily categorically mandatory, but shadow braking and other autopilot failure modes demonstrate that it or something with its capabilities are probably necessary right now to enable today's "AI" to safely drive a car. My point about active sensing being able to decide edge cases explains why this is likely the case. IMHO doing without precise active sensing would require a breakthrough in AI that hasn't happened yet. On the plus side the fact that Tesla's autopilot is able to work as well as it does without lidar might indicte that with a lidar system it might be the best autopilot on the market. Who knows.
    - sjg007 8y ago
      Seems weird that the Tesla can't infer that there is no wall there from GPS data.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        They do over time. The vehicle “learns” from no impact at the overpass and uploads that to the mothership for fleet-wide distribution.
      - ggm 8y ago
        What if a wall is there tomorrow?
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    Obviously LIDAR is not mandatory. We have a billion proof of concept controllers that only use binocular image data to navigate just fine. So one day ostensibly that could be enough. But we need a computer as good as the human brain to make it work, and that's not happening anytime soon. So until then, dropping LIDAR from the sensor suite is really going to limit your performance.

by api 8y ago

ModernMech 8y ago

> I'm starting to understand why all the other self-drive companies use active sensors like lidar. Every roboticist since the DARPA Grand Challenge knew this, as every team that finished had a Velodyne LIDAR. It was THE piece of tech that made that race possible. So for everyone who learned that lesson, to then see Telsas out on public roads with a feature called "autopilot" that did not have any LIDAR sensor attached to it... well... Let's just say we've been saying "I told you so" since then.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
I think it's a little early for people who don't "do" to call it that LIDAR is mandatory, and that optics and radar aren't sufficient. Autopilot is still in development.
- api 8y ago
  LIDAR is not necessarily categorically mandatory, but shadow braking and other autopilot failure modes demonstrate that it or something with its capabilities are probably necessary right now to enable today's "AI" to safely drive a car. My point about active sensing being able to decide edge cases explains why this is likely the case. IMHO doing without precise active sensing would require a breakthrough in AI that hasn't happened yet. On the plus side the fact that Tesla's autopilot is able to work as well as it does without lidar might indicte that with a lidar system it might be the best autopilot on the market. Who knows.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    Seems weird that the Tesla can't infer that there is no wall there from GPS data.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      They do over time. The vehicle “learns” from no impact at the overpass and uploads that to the mothership for fleet-wide distribution.
    - ggm 8y ago
      What if a wall is there tomorrow?
- ModernMech 8y ago
  Obviously LIDAR is not mandatory. We have a billion proof of concept controllers that only use binocular image data to navigate just fine. So one day ostensibly that could be enough. But we need a computer as good as the human brain to make it work, and that's not happening anytime soon. So until then, dropping LIDAR from the sensor suite is really going to limit your performance.