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From Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot who oversaw the implementation of HW2: >Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have th

From Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot who oversaw the implementation of HW2: >Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get boosted to an error every billion miles. It is extremely difficult to achieve this level of accuracy with a single modality alone. >Different sensor modalities have different strengths and weaknesses; thus, incorporating multiple modalities drives orders of magnitude improvements in the reliability of the system. Cameras suffer from difficulty in low-light and high dynamic range scenarios; radars suffer from limited resolution and artifacts due to multi-path and doppler ambiguity; lidars “see” obscurants. https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-development-5e42fec2ee4b https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-developme...

dstroot 8y ago
First, thanks for sharing this! Second - based on the language used I can’t tell if he is saying Tesla’s camera and Radar approach will work, or that it won’t. The only thing that I pulled out was that if we increase the types of sensors we get better results because they have different strengths and weakenesses.
- Fricken 8y ago
  Sterling does believe cameras may someday be good enough, but I'm personally of the belief that Lidar will get cheap before vision gets good, and as such there's no good reason to not have the extra redundancy.
salty_biscuits 8y ago
He is basically just saying that the errors need to be independent, so you can get that with different capture mechanisms. I think that is wrong. For example, small, fast and poorly reflective will have similar detection performance for lidar and cameras. I think that the real problem is getting consistent statistical estimators and fusing them at a useful update rate. Has anyone seen the lidar from the uber crash? It would be interesting to see if a person could "tell" that the poor pedestrian wasn't an artifact quickly from lidar alone.
- Fricken 8y ago
  The radar, Lidar and cameras on the Uber that struck Elaine Herzberg all detected her, it wasn't a sensor failure that led to her death, it was a software failure, the autonomous OS tuned to not respond to positives below a certain threshold.

dstroot 8y ago

First, thanks for sharing this! Second - based on the language used I can’t tell if he is saying Tesla’s camera and Radar approach will work, or that it won’t. The only thing that I pulled out was that if we increase the types of sensors we get better results because they have different strengths and weakenesses.

Fricken 8y ago
Sterling does believe cameras may someday be good enough, but I'm personally of the belief that Lidar will get cheap before vision gets good, and as such there's no good reason to not have the extra redundancy.

salty_biscuits 8y ago

He is basically just saying that the errors need to be independent, so you can get that with different capture mechanisms. I think that is wrong. For example, small, fast and poorly reflective will have similar detection performance for lidar and cameras. I think that the real problem is getting consistent statistical estimators and fusing them at a useful update rate. Has anyone seen the lidar from the uber crash? It would be interesting to see if a person could "tell" that the poor pedestrian wasn't an artifact quickly from lidar alone.

Fricken 8y ago
The radar, Lidar and cameras on the Uber that struck Elaine Herzberg all detected her, it wasn't a sensor failure that led to her death, it was a software failure, the autonomous OS tuned to not respond to positives below a certain threshold.