16 ms·

Lidar Is a Crutch

122 points by lawrenceyan 8y ago

twtw 8y ago
Good discussion. The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and engineering isn't about imagining the minimum theoretical requirements, it's about building stuff that works with what is available. People can navigate cross country without gps, but it's not wrong to put gps in cars. It seems like the teams working on autonomous vehicles need all the crutches they can get, and it seems like a good idea to lean on superhuman sensors to make up for subhuman "cognition." I do wish, though, that people would stop equating all radar with the adaptive cruise control style radar - imaging radars are a thing that exist, and can be competitive with lidar.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >It seems like the teams working on autonomous vehicles need all the crutches they can get, and it seems like a good idea to lean on superhuman sensors to make up for subhuman "cognition." In a perfect world, yes. But cost always comes into the equation. Companies like comma.ai and Nexar are getting their devices in to the hands of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. When you can get that level of training and autonomy from a simple camera based device it becomes a really compelling product, even though you're nowhere near full level 4 self driving.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Comma.ai isn't even close to Level 3. Edit: And neither is Tesla. Anybody operating either of these systems without paying attention to the road and being prepared to control the wheel at all times should have their drivers license confiscated. See page 73 of the Model 3 owners manual: https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%203%20Owners%20Manual.pdf https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%... Warning: Autosteer is a hands-on feature. You must keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times. Warning: Autosteer is intended for use only on highways and limited- access roads with a fully attentive driver. When using Autosteer, hold the steering wheel and be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic.* Key terms: "hands-on", "fully attentive driver". It's a Level 2 system. Page 74 makes this even more clear: Warning: Autosteer is not designed to, and will not, steer Model 3 around objects partially or completely in the driving lane. Always watch the road in front of you and stay prepared to take appropriate action. It is the driver's responsibility to be in control of Model 3 at all times.
    - aphextron 8y ago
      Sure they are. The latest openpilot is easily on par with Tesla Autopilot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4
    - ec109685 8y ago
      It will stop for objects in front of you. Agree though that it's a nice assist, but as you get used to it, you can predict the situations where it will fail. Definitely would not trust it to drive in an unconstrained environment.
      - darkpuma 8y ago
        > It will stop for objects in front of you. Until it doesn't. Failure to stop for a stationary gore point: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-tesla-car-toward-traffic-barrier-before-deadly-crash/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-... https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash-in-september-showed-similarities-to-fatal-mountain-view-accident/3302389/ https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash... Failure to stop for a stationary fire truck: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ Again, the Model 3 user manual is illuminating: Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h), may not brake/decelerate when a vehicle or object is only partially in the driving lane or when a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary or slow-moving vehicle or object is in front of you. Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death. In addition, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may react to vehicles or objects that either do not exist or are not in the lane of travel, causing Model 3 to slowdown unnecessarily or inappropriately. Warning: Several factors can affect the performance of Automatic Emergency Braking, causing either no braking or inappropriate or untimely braking, such as when a vehicle is partially in the path of travel or there is road debris. It is the driver’s responsibility to drive safely and remain in control of the vehicle at all times. Never depend on Automatic Emergency Braking to avoid or reduce the impact of a collision. The user manual tells a different tale than Elon Musk does (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4a78-750-563.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4...) Elon Musk gravely misrepresents the capabilities of these systems to impress consumers, who are left with the mistaken impression that Tesla sells cars with Level 3 capabilities.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Humans also have 576 MP quality eyes with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating. The idea that you can throw a cheap camera in a car and think you can achieve the same always seemed strange to me.
  - grogenaut 8y ago
    are you telling me the retina display is a LIE?
    - bm1362 8y ago
      They never said who’s retinas you were getting.
    - mkbosmans 8y ago
      So how much is that 1MP retina display covering of your field of view?
      - grogenaut 8y ago
        the way I see most people using it when driving, walking, in meetings, at a resturant? 80% of the high res part.
  - visarga 8y ago
    > with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating Let's not forget about human experience. It gives context to any visual perception, and can't be replicated by cars. We simply have access to a larger, more complex environment, and the environment fosters our intelligence. It's easy to overemphasise the brain to the detriment of environment, but in reality the environment is the main cause for the development of intelligence in the brain. The corollary is also true - a lower complexity environment will lead to lesser intelligence, no matter how powerful the brain is. Intelligence springs where agent needs meet with external limitations, those limitations guide its development. By analogy, the environment is like the training set and the brain is like a deep neural net. A deep neural net with a poor training set is not going to be accurate. That's why DeepMind, OpenAI and others have focused so much on artificial environments (games) to train agents - they know that environments are the key to training advanced AI. A mere dataset is like a static environment where nothing new happens. Research is transitioning from datasets to simulated environments for the next step in AI. I'd even go as far as to track the evolution of AI by the evolution of environments and environment models.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Well, You also say lidar isn't a crutch because self-driving cars aren't ever really going to be able to go by image recognition and enough logic to know what to do - rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along - and set-up in Arizona where the unpredictable is kept to the minimum.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    > rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along Indeed, and that's how autopilot driven buses, that were around for at least a decade, work. Except their movement trajectories are predetermined, and they are very slow, and stop at every obstacle imaginable.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  >I do wish, though, that people would stop equating all radar with the adaptive cruise control style radar - imaging radars are a thing that exist, and can be competitive with lidar. Notably however, the radars employed by current Tesla cars lack the angular resolution to distinguish between stationary objects next to the road, and stationary objects in the middle of the road.
- Cookingboy 8y ago
  >The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes I see that argument a lot, "well humans only have two eyes so of course two cameras would be enough". Well monkeys have two eyes too but they wouldn't be driving on the autobahn anytime soon would they. That argument is really used by people who have no idea how any of this works, and it really is frustrating.
  - grecy 8y ago
    Your example does nothing to persuade me that two cameras aren't enough. It just says you need a powerful intelligence behind those two cameras.
- deleted 8y ago
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- Waterluvian 8y ago
  Isn't this the best part of capitalism? Someone makes a lightbulb that's super inefficient but gets everyone thinking about the brilliance of candleless light at night. We then spend generations evolving the concept hundreds of times, with a market that rewards these innovations through sales. Is there a better way to build a better autonomous car? We're at the initial stage of exciting people with an implementation that kind of works. We will now spend generations selling better and better cars with different, fewer, better, cheaper sensors and other parts.
  - twtw 8y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with your analogy between current "autonomous" vehicles and an inefficient lightbulb. I'd say it's more like a lightbulb that flickers and burns out in 5 seconds. In which case it probably makes more sense to make the lightbulb not burn out first. I don't think Edison (and his employees) got a momentary flash of light from a lightbulb and then said, "alright, it's almost working, now let's see if we can do it without the fragile glass bulb."
    - bewo001 8y ago
      It usually takes some time from the point "we have done all the basic research" to something that is successful in the market. Today, autonomous driving seems still to be in the basic research stage. If there was a research car, filled with ridiculously expensive hardware, able to perform at human level, I'd be more optimistic about the introduction of a marketable self driving car ten years from now. Take the mouse + graphical GUI example. It was demonstrated in the late 1960s but became only economically viable in the mid 1980s.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      Your intuition is correct. Practical electric lights, in the form of arc lamps, existed before Edison was even born and were successfully commercialized many years before the incandescent light bulb. Effective incandescent light bulbs were also around before Edison's. The main things Edison's team brought to the table were a better filament material, a better vacuum in the bulb, and supporting electrical infrastructure (generators, etc.)
- spacenick88 8y ago
  I think the real point is that LIDAR has its own shortcomings. Currently the range is too limited, it's sensitive to fog and rain (more than cameras) and it's very expensive. Note that Tesla's for example don't only use cameras, they do have radar and use that to "see" two cars ahead even now. Still they don't use LIDAR and Musk's thesis is that this particular tech isn't needed and overly expensive and cumbersome
  - twtw 8y ago
    The radar in tesla vehicles is the type intended for use in adaptive cruise control. Extremely low angular resolution with a filter that ignores objects that are close to stationary. This is why Teslas keep running into stationary cars. The radar in them is not designed for this, and can't tell the difference between a fire truck in the lane and the barrier to the side of the lane.
- xoa 8y ago
  >The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and engineering isn't about imagining the minimum theoretical requirements, it's about building stuff that works with what is available. People can navigate cross country without gps, but it's not wrong to put gps in cars. At least as important, and something that comes up shockingly little as well (I don't see any responses to you yet on it here even!), is that overall humans stink at driving. Like you said, arguments begin with "because humans can do it" and need to be stopped right there, because that needs a lot of qualification. "Humans can do it"... with well over 1.25 million deaths a year worldwide [1] and another 20-50 million injured/disabled. Also these stats are actually worse then they look at first glance, because it's not a uniform age distribution. A lot of young people die on the roads vs other causes of death, which represents an even bigger loss in terms of human years. Personalized arbitrary point to point mechanized transportation is so insanely valuable that it's well worth that kind of death/injury rate, or for that matter one vastly higher (as it was in previous decades before modern safety standards), but there is also no reason to use it as a benchmark for "acceptable" if the opportunity exists to do better. And in particular there is no reason to limit autonomous systems to human visual spectrum for information input. That doesn't cut it for a lot of adverse weather conditions, or even just for humans along the road or animals jumping across the road at night for that matter. A big part of the pitch shouldn't be to match humans, it should be to exceed them and by a sizable margin as well. ---- 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/traffic-deaths-continue-climb-worldwide-per-capita-rate-has-stabilized-who-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/tra...
  - pnutjam 8y ago
    There's no guarantee that computers will do better. We don't have the data. They currently do worse. Some people claim that they won't make the same mistake twice, but how many times have you seen the same bug crop up after it was fixed in previous updates? I would also posit that the existing statistics provide a "good enough" floor. If a million people currently die, the software will be good enough when it has the same level of fatalities. There is no incentive to make it better, at least not in our Capitalistic system. Investments would be better spent on differentiating widgets that dazzle the occupants, not protecting non-customers outside the vehicle.
- itwas10pm 8y ago
  It was 10pm in the evening. I drove home in my hyundai but the tank was empty. I probably couldn't make it if I went full speed at 130km/h so I drove carefully at 80km/h. Nothing eventful happened on the highway and I got off safely. 5 minutes later I am roughly 100m away from home. I have to take a right turn uphill which meant that my car slowed down to slightly less than 20km/h and then I have to turn left to get to the parking lot. As you can guess it was dark and I was primarily paying attention to the sidewalk because pedestrians are hard to see. As I turn left suddenly BAM. A bicycle with a small hard to see light has crashed into the rear door on the right side at a pace of possibly more than 30km/h as it was going downhill. The car door and the front of bicycle were completely trashed. Luckily the cyclist didn't sustain any serious injuries. I was obviously protected in a huge cage of steel (compared to american one's its still tiny) but I slowly started to hate driving, especially at night. All the bullshit speeding tickets, the annoying maintenance and now accidents are adding up to a miserable experience. If I had 360° night vision this wouldn't have happened. I can't trust my own two eyes. I wouldn't trust anyone's two eyes for that matter to drive a car safely. They weren't good enough last year and they won't be enough next year. Replicating humans will just replicate their weaknesses. I'll take all the crutches I can get.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- bluGill 8y ago
  Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. I constantly have to take my eyes off the road to check mirrors. I hope while checking what is behind me that nothing happens in front. I hope while looking in front of me nothing I need to worry about from the sides/back of me matter. Of course most of the danger is in front of me so I spend most of the time looking there, but there are times when things not in front of me are dangerous to me. By giving a car more than two eyes it has the potential to become a better driver than me because it can watch more. By adding more than just visible light cameras it can see things that I would never see. I want my next car to be safer, the big limit is not seat belts, brakes, crumple zones, airbags, and such - the big limit is the limited human in control. There is potential to make some of the above obsolete if the control system is enough better.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    > Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. This isn't really the point, it's that humans are able to successfully build an accurate-enough model of the world to navigate terrain with only camera like vision -- and a really bad one at that. There is, of course, no problem with giving cars more sensory abilities to make them safer but what they mean by a crutch is that the CS breakthrough that will make self-driving cars compete with humans will function about as well with two crappy cameras mounted on the drivers seat as it would with an array of high-precision sensors.
    - EamonnMR 8y ago
      Pretty good vision, all told. Though the constant scanning motions of the eyes as opposed to fixed cameras mean they may have at least as much in common with LIDAR.
    - sangnoir 8y ago
      (tongue firmly in cheek) Material science breakthrough could result in aircraft that flap wings that could compete with condors too, but what would be the point? Naturally evolved mechanism are not the gold standard; they developed under completely different constraints.
- jsight 8y ago
  I feel like I have been somewhere in the middle on this. I feel like to reach level 5 autonomy, the vehicles are going to have to have really good image processing from conventional cameras. In fact, they might need it to be so good that the lidars themselves become redundant. But there are a lot of possibilities between zero autonomy and level 5 autonomy that might almost require lidar too in the short term.
gpm 8y ago
I'm pretty sure a crutch isn't a crutch-crutch but a body-crutch. Ducttape is a crutch-crutch when applied correctly.
trixie_ 8y ago
Lidar can create a great 3d representation of an environment, but then you're back to the same problem as cameras. You need some sort of AI to identify objects in the data. So the question is how much of an advantage does lidar give you in object identification? It's hard enough to identify objects with confidence in 2d images. Where is the confidence level at for identifying and/or discerning 3d objects with AI?
- sliken 8y ago
  Sure, lidar gives you way less resolution. Take the velodyn alpha puck for instance, 300k points/sec. If you are moving at 60 mph once second = 88 fps. So the puck spreads 300k points over 88 feet of highway. The tesla system has 10 cameras, but I believe only two of them look forward. I believe they are 1280x960 @ 30 FPS or 36M pixels/sec. But there's two of them, 73M pixels/sec. Each pixel is in color (lidar is just a distance). So the tesla system has WAY more information about the environment, granted distance has to be inferred, but it also had radar to help with that. Additionally being inherently more similar to eye sight, a car using cameras is likely to get along with human drivers better. Slowing down when it's foggy or rainy, seeing at similar ranges to humans, and being able to use color for additional context. Is that a UPS truck or an ambulance? Is that a reflection of a police car with it's light on or just a window reflection? Is that a boulder or a wind filled trash bag?
  - yokaze 8y ago
    > So the tesla system has WAY more information about the environment, granted distance has to be inferred, but it also had radar to help with that. I'd argue the contrary. Intelligence is primarily not about the amount of data, but the amount _and_ quality of data you receive. If I would have a magic sensor giving me obstacles in a segmented form, that would be couple of KB, and it would beat any other sensor on the market. Inferring the distance from stereo images has its own failure-modes and are not easy to account for as in LiDAR. LiDAR also gives you reflectivity, so you will be able to differentiate between a UPS truck and an ambulance. > Is that a reflection of a police car with its light on or just a window reflection? Fun thing, to my knowledge reflections are a major unsolved problem for vision. It is easier for LiDAR, as you can rely on the distance measurement and will have an object somewhere outside of any reasonable position (e.g underground, behind a wall). Depending on the lidar, the glass might even register as a second (actually primary) return. Yes, you need cameras (likely color) to be able recognise any light based signalling (traffic lights, ambulance/police lights...), so LiDAR is not the panacea. But having the lidar telling you that there is a window and that police is behind it is likely vastly more robust with lidar. Also, the difficulty is that you have to see arbitrary objects, on the road and possibly stop for them. As long it is larger than maybe a couple of centimeters (or an inch), it will show on the LiDAR, with stereo vision, you need a couple of pixel texture to infer it.
pauljurczak 8y ago
He is right about lidar being a crutch, but he is wrong about the amount of time needed to develop machine vision software good enough to make lidar unnecessary.
- s17n 8y ago
  Lidar will get cheap before this happens, at which point it won't be question of whether it is "necessary" but whether it is useful.
cameldrv 8y ago
Maybe Lidar is a crutch. For a lot of things, a crutch is an adequate substitute for a non-broken leg. The trouble with crutches is that if you want to dance, or play baseball, or ride a bike, you can't do it. I can tell you how I've gotten a much bigger annotated dataset, and if I keep collecting, soon I'll be as fast as a normal person at walking down the sidewalk, but people want to do more than just walk down the sidewalk.
- close04 8y ago
  Just because it's a crutch doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. It means you should use it until you have a tool that can do better (your healed leg?). As far as I can tell Musk insists walking unassisted with a broken leg is better than using a crutch because a good leg is better than a crutch. Sure, but he's not providing a good leg, he's providing a broken one. It's like telling people to drag their broken leg today because 3 months from now it will be better than a crutch. And he's not taking this route because today's cars do better with normal cameras than with LIDAR (future cars might though what good is that today?) but because it's cheaper while still allowing big claims. Use the right tool at the right time. In the meantime develop the next tool and start using it when it becomes appropriate.
deleted 8y ago
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iabacu 8y ago
Not using lidar for self driving cars is a giant premature optimization (just like premature automation, etc)
- sliken 8y ago
  Maybe, but where are all the lidar cars that drive significantly better than a Tesla?
  - raihansaputra 8y ago
    Well, all of them are still in extensive testing with bug reports from small-event disengagement, not in customer bought cars involved in fatal crashes.
    - sliken 8y ago
      Except for the lidar equipped uber that killed a woman you mean? Sure, watching a Disney movie while a Telsa drives is stupid and got someone killed. Seems like a pretty poor proof that lidar is superior. Not to mention Tesla hardware and software has some pretty far since then.
      - gamblor956 8y ago
        The lidar detected the woman. However, the car was programmed not to brake... The problem was the software, not the hardware.
        gnulinux 8y ago
        How's this a good argument? The entire point in favor of lidar is that the hardware gives more data to software which can in turn be used to make decisions. There is no hardware/software distinction here. Nobody claims that lidar isn't capable of detecting objects. (Note that this is not a comment against lidar, I agree with you but I don't think your argument is sufficient)
sbr464 8y ago
I'm sure this is being considered, but I'm curious what the strategy is for handling signal/laser interference in dense traffic situations, in the future when all cars have 3d lidar installed. For example, assuming 3 lidar units on the front of each car, in a large intersection, say two lanes of cars turning in front of 4 lanes of cars pointed at them, waiting at a red light. That would be hundreds of potential reflection/collisions per second. The user manual for an older Hokuyo lidar with a single scanning plane (for example, mounted on a forklift to avoid hitting a wall) mentions to offset the mounting/angle slightly across the fleet to avoid interference.
- taneq 8y ago
  I've always wondered this about LIDAR. It's all peachy with one car wandering down the road on its own, but a busy freeway with half a dozen cars all busily scanning everything is a different situation. Not to mention issues with sun glare dazzling sensors etc. Nobody talks about it so maybe it's not an issue in practice, but my own experience with sensors of all sorts is that they're never as good as you'd hope they are.
- deleted 8y ago
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- etrautmann 8y ago
  current state of the art LIDAR systems have unbelievably tight windows in terms of space, time, frequency, and pulse coding which collectively allow for excellent background rejection. In practice, this actually isn't that much of an issue. Sunlight and retro reflectors are more difficult challenges to deal with than other LIDARS causing interference. More specifically, each detector is looking through a soda straw at a tiny spot in space, and rejecting anything that doesn't arrive within a narrow range of time, which also has to have the right light frequency and something like a pseudorandom code sequence which gets match filtered against itself. In practice, you'd have to send the right wavelength of light to the right 1cm circle in space, send it during just the right few hundred nanoseconds, send it with the right pulse sequence (which one could determine but would be unlikely to happen by chance). Even if it happens once, it would have to happen many times at the imaging rate of the sensor to cause major issues...
ecpottinger 8y ago
Personally, I don't think Lidar is needed to make self-driving cars. Otherwise we have a problem since humans do not come with them to date. The problem I have with the article is he said Lidar will never come done in costs to that of a headlight. Tech marches on and headlights are not really that cheap, in the future I would not be surprised with mass production that Lidar does get that cheap. How much did the first Kim-1 computers cost? How does that compare to a simple Arduino with a hundred times the power and memory cost today?
- bluGill 8y ago
  Humans are not safe drivers. If Lidar makes the autonomous care safer than humans I want lidar.
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    > Humans are not safe drivers I see this repeated over and over in this thread, elsewhere on HN, and in many other places on the web. But no one explains what they mean by a safe driver. There are other factors at work than mere human-ness. For instance the US has more than double the number of fatalities per unit vehicle distance than the UK, more than triple per head of population. In both countries the driver is a human yet the disparity in outcome is huge. Perhaps whatever it is that causes this sort of difference should be addressed rather than insisting on a new an inherently unproven technology. Or, at least, give us some numbers so that we can tell what you mean by safe. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
    - bluGill 8y ago
      Even in the UK there are deaths. Yes the US should work on whatever it is that makes UK drivers safer, but UK drivers still kill people and are thus unsafe. You have just given numbers: when autonomous cars beat those numbers they are better. Until then we should be careful.
- KaiserPro 8y ago
ijafri 8y ago
I didn't get the Uber reference, have not they given up on driverless cars, at least for the near future? after the sensor / lidar failure resulting in a fatal crash.
- googlemike 8y ago
  What makes you think that?
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Uber stopped for a few months after killing a woman, but resumed testing a month ago: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/uber-self-driving-car-testing-resumes-pittsburgh/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/uber-self-driving-car-test...
- JshWright 8y ago
  It wasn't a sensor failure. Multiple sensors (including the lidar) detected the woman with plenty of time to stop.
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    It was a management failure. The car had a perfectly ordinary radar based emergency braking function factory fitted by Volvo but Uber disabled it, presumably to avoid interference with the cars autonomous driving functions (if I recall correctly).
baybal2 8y ago
Mr. Musk is wrong, and behind his error is, perhaps, his lack of technical aptitude. > Musk and almost everyone else in the business recognize self-driving cars and trucks as the future of automotive transportation. Those people in their prime majority think that some kind of "AI" program will be somehow think over the inputs and tell where to drive. They all have too much expectations for technology coming under the word "AI" these days They all do so without understanding what those "AIs" actually are, and not realising that such programs can't make any "cognition." Until that change, any talk of "self-driving" is premature. This does not preclude however the coming improvements in cruise control, and computerised collision avoidance.
- iknowstuff 8y ago
  Elon Musk does not know what AIs are? Are you serious?
  - baybal2 8y ago
    I am, he did not make an impression of a that much smart person. The man began his career as a so so game dev, and been going from one random businesses to another (this is a part of his career he doesn't like to be public about) before Paypal "happened upon him." He has no substantial CS or technical background. He dropped out of his physics masters. Give him an evaluation.
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      He dropped out of a PhD program in Physics. Also, he has a startup on AI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI even if you think he's not proficient in technical aspects of AI, he definitely has a lot of ideas about social implications of AI.
    - oldprogrammer2 8y ago
      From Wikipedia: He left in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor's degree in physics. After leaving Penn, Elon Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Education
panic 8y ago
I'm looking forward to lidar in human-driven cars. Imagine how cool it would be to see the 3D point cloud on your dashboard or reflected on your windshield as a heads-up display.
- elihu 8y ago
  ...or rendered on your head-mounted virtual reality headset as you drive around town in your windowless car with perfect visibility.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    I imagine it will be illegal for an actual human to drive on public roads by the time we get to this point, but it would be so cool to drive my car in third person camera like in racing games.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      I'm not against humans driving if the car will take over as required to keep everything safe.
    - elihu 8y ago
      I think banning human drivers will be unpopular in most areas as long as we have a significant proportion of the population who has grown up in a society where the ability to drive a personal car is viewed almost as a constitutional right. Technology can change quickly, but people's attitudes change much slower. What I expect in the next couple of decades is that we'll have certain individual roads and neighborhoods where human-drivers are banned, and maybe certain roads and neighborhoods where AI-driven cars are banned. Most roads will allow either, because it's not practical in most cases to maintain two separate road networks. Being able to drive a windowless car by head-mounted-display is something we could accomplish with maybe some minor tweaks to current technology. I doubt such a system would be safe or legal, though, because a software failure could be fatal and we're really bad at making complex software that is also reliable.
- dmitriid 8y ago
01100011 8y ago
What's wrong with hyperspectral imaging? Active IR systems work just fine at night. Passive night vision systems aren't exactly cheap but can probably allow optical navigation using ambient starlight. Throw thermal imaging in the mix and you have a ton of data to infer objects from.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  What about the sun which never rises above, let's say 10 degrees in winter in the Nordics?
  - JshWright 8y ago
    Self driving cars will have to solve the problem of "snow" long before they have to worry about that...
sethbannon 8y ago
Interesting counter argument: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/why-our-companys-trucks-wont-carry-lidar https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
Animats 8y ago
Todd Neff is the author of "The Laser That’s Changing the World", a history of lidar. It's a PR piece for his book. The terahertz radar people are slowly making progress. Good resolution, almost as good as LIDAR. Better behavior in rain. Beam steering with no moving parts. Plus you can tell who's carrying a gun. Musk is in trouble. No way is Tesla close to real automatic driving. Does Tesla even have reliable detection of stationary obstacles in a lane yet? Their track record on partial lane obstructions is terrible. So far, Teslas on autopilot have driven into a street sweeper, a stalled van, a fire truck, a crossing semitrailer, a lane divider....
ec109685 8y ago
That Darpa reference in the article is weak. Because in 2007 the state of the art needed Lidar, that means that it's still a necessary crutch in 2019? Image recognition has made unbelievable strides in the interim. As I watch Tesla's "Autopilot" do its thing, it seems its limitations are less about object recognition and more about what do with the data it has. Lidar won't help it intelligently handle a merge of two lanes into one, or seeing a turn signal and slowing down to let the person in, or seeing a red light and knowing to start slowing down before it recognizes the car in front of it slowing down, or knowing exactly what lane to enter on the other side of a tricky intersection without a car in front of it, or knowing that car X is actually turning right so you shouldn't start following it if you're going straight, or having the car see a clear path ahead and having it accelerate to the speed limit when all other cars are stopped or going much slower in adjacent lanes, or moving to the left to allow a motorcycle to lane split, etc., etc. It's still great, but there are a ton of things to learn. Maybe once there is no human in the driver's seat, you'll need the extra precision that lidar provide, but there are big gaps before even we get there.
- KaiserPro 8y ago
  A lidar sensor will almost certainly _always_ be lower latency than any sort of image processing engine. A lidar gives you a stream of 3d points in the order of megavertices a second. The processing pipeline for any visual system is at least frame rate of the camera (the faster the camera, the less light it can get) plus the GPU transfer time(if you are using AI) then processing. this means you are looking at ~200ms latency before you know where things are. Lidar is a brilliant sensor. Maybe it will be supplanted by some sexy beamforming Thz radar, but not in the near future.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Cameras built using dedicated hardware similar to what lidar systems are using would not have that sort of latency. You don't have to receive a full frame of data before it can be processed if you're not using generic COTS cameras.
    - 8y ago
rwallace 8y ago
> In daylight, cameras can do that, too, but not so much in the dark Why not? We've been seeing TV footage of cameras seeing perfectly well in the dark for decades. Why is there a problems with using them for automatic driving at night?
Aser 8y ago
> For many, owning a car to commute will make as much sense as owning a cell tower to scroll Instagram. This is total rubbish. I don't believe for a second that taking a self-driving uber to work and back everyday will be cheaper than driving my own car.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  Why not? Suppose your commute occupies the car for 1/24th of the hours of the day. In theory you could pay for only that usage. There would be some markup so the owning company has a profit margin, but the higher the price is, the greater the incentive for competitors to exist, which would exert downward pressure. So maybe you'd end up paying 1/20 the price of owning a car. If you don't agree, why not?
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    Most of the cost of operating a car is directly proportional to the usage of said car. Some costs per unit distance go down, some go up. In the end, if you need a car daily there is almost no way a service will work out cheaper.
  - wil421 8y ago
    Eventually you will own the car and the costs will decrease dramatically. My wife’s corolla is 14 years old, gets 30 miles a gallon, and costs about $250 a year due to failing sensors and a MAF replacement. If I used Uber every time I’ve used her corolla in the past 10 years it would far outweigh the cost of gas, insurance, and fixing the car.
    - bronco21016 8y ago
      You’ve completely left out the cost of the car though. Even over a 14 year period if you bought the car new for $15k (2005 MSRP Corolla LE) you’re still at roughly $90/month. Factor in insurance, gas, and continued maintenance and you’re at a couple hundred a month. Of course that number continues to fall but eventually you buy a new car. If ride sharing moves to a subscription model of just a straight $200-300/mo I think it completely obliterates the market for individually owned small cars used primarily for commuting.
offtheradar 8y ago
I'm not sure that he meant lidar is a crutch in the way that this article represents. Those tiny wavelengths that allow lidar to provide tremendous detail also make it unreliable in rain and snow. Until that problem is solved, and I haven't heard that it has been, lidar dependent cars either 1) can't drive in the rain or 2) must be able to operate reliably in the rain using technology other than lidar. Believe it or not, cars will need to be able to drive in the rain, so if you're going to eventually need to build a car that will work reliably without lidar then why not build that to begin with? It looks like most SDC companies are going with lidar because it is faster and easier, but if it only covers 90% of use cases then that does sound like a "crutch".

122 points by lawrenceyan 8y ago

twtw 8y ago

Good discussion. The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and engineering isn't about imagining the minimum theoretical requirements, it's about building stuff that works with what is available. People can navigate cross country without gps, but it's not wrong to put gps in cars. It seems like the teams working on autonomous vehicles need all the crutches they can get, and it seems like a good idea to lean on superhuman sensors to make up for subhuman "cognition." I do wish, though, that people would stop equating all radar with the adaptive cruise control style radar - imaging radars are a thing that exist, and can be competitive with lidar.

aphextron 8y ago
>It seems like the teams working on autonomous vehicles need all the crutches they can get, and it seems like a good idea to lean on superhuman sensors to make up for subhuman "cognition." In a perfect world, yes. But cost always comes into the equation. Companies like comma.ai and Nexar are getting their devices in to the hands of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. When you can get that level of training and autonomy from a simple camera based device it becomes a really compelling product, even though you're nowhere near full level 4 self driving.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Comma.ai isn't even close to Level 3. Edit: And neither is Tesla. Anybody operating either of these systems without paying attention to the road and being prepared to control the wheel at all times should have their drivers license confiscated. See page 73 of the Model 3 owners manual: https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%203%20Owners%20Manual.pdf https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%... Warning: Autosteer is a hands-on feature. You must keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times. Warning: Autosteer is intended for use only on highways and limited- access roads with a fully attentive driver. When using Autosteer, hold the steering wheel and be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic.* Key terms: "hands-on", "fully attentive driver". It's a Level 2 system. Page 74 makes this even more clear: Warning: Autosteer is not designed to, and will not, steer Model 3 around objects partially or completely in the driving lane. Always watch the road in front of you and stay prepared to take appropriate action. It is the driver's responsibility to be in control of Model 3 at all times.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    Sure they are. The latest openpilot is easily on par with Tesla Autopilot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4
  - ec109685 8y ago
    It will stop for objects in front of you. Agree though that it's a nice assist, but as you get used to it, you can predict the situations where it will fail. Definitely would not trust it to drive in an unconstrained environment.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      > It will stop for objects in front of you. Until it doesn't. Failure to stop for a stationary gore point: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-tesla-car-toward-traffic-barrier-before-deadly-crash/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-... https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash-in-september-showed-similarities-to-fatal-mountain-view-accident/3302389/ https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash... Failure to stop for a stationary fire truck: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ Again, the Model 3 user manual is illuminating: Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h), may not brake/decelerate when a vehicle or object is only partially in the driving lane or when a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary or slow-moving vehicle or object is in front of you. Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death. In addition, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may react to vehicles or objects that either do not exist or are not in the lane of travel, causing Model 3 to slowdown unnecessarily or inappropriately. Warning: Several factors can affect the performance of Automatic Emergency Braking, causing either no braking or inappropriate or untimely braking, such as when a vehicle is partially in the path of travel or there is road debris. It is the driver’s responsibility to drive safely and remain in control of the vehicle at all times. Never depend on Automatic Emergency Braking to avoid or reduce the impact of a collision. The user manual tells a different tale than Elon Musk does (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4a78-750-563.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4...) Elon Musk gravely misrepresents the capabilities of these systems to impress consumers, who are left with the mistaken impression that Tesla sells cars with Level 3 capabilities.
threeseed 8y ago
Humans also have 576 MP quality eyes with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating. The idea that you can throw a cheap camera in a car and think you can achieve the same always seemed strange to me.
- grogenaut 8y ago
  are you telling me the retina display is a LIE?
  - bm1362 8y ago
    They never said who’s retinas you were getting.
  - mkbosmans 8y ago
    So how much is that 1MP retina display covering of your field of view?
    - grogenaut 8y ago
      the way I see most people using it when driving, walking, in meetings, at a resturant? 80% of the high res part.
- visarga 8y ago
  > with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating Let's not forget about human experience. It gives context to any visual perception, and can't be replicated by cars. We simply have access to a larger, more complex environment, and the environment fosters our intelligence. It's easy to overemphasise the brain to the detriment of environment, but in reality the environment is the main cause for the development of intelligence in the brain. The corollary is also true - a lower complexity environment will lead to lesser intelligence, no matter how powerful the brain is. Intelligence springs where agent needs meet with external limitations, those limitations guide its development. By analogy, the environment is like the training set and the brain is like a deep neural net. A deep neural net with a poor training set is not going to be accurate. That's why DeepMind, OpenAI and others have focused so much on artificial environments (games) to train agents - they know that environments are the key to training advanced AI. A mere dataset is like a static environment where nothing new happens. Research is transitioning from datasets to simulated environments for the next step in AI. I'd even go as far as to track the evolution of AI by the evolution of environments and environment models.
joe_the_user 8y ago
Well, You also say lidar isn't a crutch because self-driving cars aren't ever really going to be able to go by image recognition and enough logic to know what to do - rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along - and set-up in Arizona where the unpredictable is kept to the minimum.
- baybal2 8y ago
  > rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along Indeed, and that's how autopilot driven buses, that were around for at least a decade, work. Except their movement trajectories are predetermined, and they are very slow, and stop at every obstacle imaginable.
darkpuma 8y ago
>I do wish, though, that people would stop equating all radar with the adaptive cruise control style radar - imaging radars are a thing that exist, and can be competitive with lidar. Notably however, the radars employed by current Tesla cars lack the angular resolution to distinguish between stationary objects next to the road, and stationary objects in the middle of the road.
Cookingboy 8y ago
>The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes I see that argument a lot, "well humans only have two eyes so of course two cameras would be enough". Well monkeys have two eyes too but they wouldn't be driving on the autobahn anytime soon would they. That argument is really used by people who have no idea how any of this works, and it really is frustrating.
- grecy 8y ago
  Your example does nothing to persuade me that two cameras aren't enough. It just says you need a powerful intelligence behind those two cameras.
deleted 8y ago
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Waterluvian 8y ago
Isn't this the best part of capitalism? Someone makes a lightbulb that's super inefficient but gets everyone thinking about the brilliance of candleless light at night. We then spend generations evolving the concept hundreds of times, with a market that rewards these innovations through sales. Is there a better way to build a better autonomous car? We're at the initial stage of exciting people with an implementation that kind of works. We will now spend generations selling better and better cars with different, fewer, better, cheaper sensors and other parts.
- twtw 8y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with your analogy between current "autonomous" vehicles and an inefficient lightbulb. I'd say it's more like a lightbulb that flickers and burns out in 5 seconds. In which case it probably makes more sense to make the lightbulb not burn out first. I don't think Edison (and his employees) got a momentary flash of light from a lightbulb and then said, "alright, it's almost working, now let's see if we can do it without the fragile glass bulb."
  - bewo001 8y ago
    It usually takes some time from the point "we have done all the basic research" to something that is successful in the market. Today, autonomous driving seems still to be in the basic research stage. If there was a research car, filled with ridiculously expensive hardware, able to perform at human level, I'd be more optimistic about the introduction of a marketable self driving car ten years from now. Take the mouse + graphical GUI example. It was demonstrated in the late 1960s but became only economically viable in the mid 1980s.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Your intuition is correct. Practical electric lights, in the form of arc lamps, existed before Edison was even born and were successfully commercialized many years before the incandescent light bulb. Effective incandescent light bulbs were also around before Edison's. The main things Edison's team brought to the table were a better filament material, a better vacuum in the bulb, and supporting electrical infrastructure (generators, etc.)
spacenick88 8y ago
I think the real point is that LIDAR has its own shortcomings. Currently the range is too limited, it's sensitive to fog and rain (more than cameras) and it's very expensive. Note that Tesla's for example don't only use cameras, they do have radar and use that to "see" two cars ahead even now. Still they don't use LIDAR and Musk's thesis is that this particular tech isn't needed and overly expensive and cumbersome
- twtw 8y ago
  The radar in tesla vehicles is the type intended for use in adaptive cruise control. Extremely low angular resolution with a filter that ignores objects that are close to stationary. This is why Teslas keep running into stationary cars. The radar in them is not designed for this, and can't tell the difference between a fire truck in the lane and the barrier to the side of the lane.
xoa 8y ago
>The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and engineering isn't about imagining the minimum theoretical requirements, it's about building stuff that works with what is available. People can navigate cross country without gps, but it's not wrong to put gps in cars. At least as important, and something that comes up shockingly little as well (I don't see any responses to you yet on it here even!), is that overall humans stink at driving. Like you said, arguments begin with "because humans can do it" and need to be stopped right there, because that needs a lot of qualification. "Humans can do it"... with well over 1.25 million deaths a year worldwide [1] and another 20-50 million injured/disabled. Also these stats are actually worse then they look at first glance, because it's not a uniform age distribution. A lot of young people die on the roads vs other causes of death, which represents an even bigger loss in terms of human years. Personalized arbitrary point to point mechanized transportation is so insanely valuable that it's well worth that kind of death/injury rate, or for that matter one vastly higher (as it was in previous decades before modern safety standards), but there is also no reason to use it as a benchmark for "acceptable" if the opportunity exists to do better. And in particular there is no reason to limit autonomous systems to human visual spectrum for information input. That doesn't cut it for a lot of adverse weather conditions, or even just for humans along the road or animals jumping across the road at night for that matter. A big part of the pitch shouldn't be to match humans, it should be to exceed them and by a sizable margin as well. ---- 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/traffic-deaths-continue-climb-worldwide-per-capita-rate-has-stabilized-who-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/tra...
- pnutjam 8y ago
  There's no guarantee that computers will do better. We don't have the data. They currently do worse. Some people claim that they won't make the same mistake twice, but how many times have you seen the same bug crop up after it was fixed in previous updates? I would also posit that the existing statistics provide a "good enough" floor. If a million people currently die, the software will be good enough when it has the same level of fatalities. There is no incentive to make it better, at least not in our Capitalistic system. Investments would be better spent on differentiating widgets that dazzle the occupants, not protecting non-customers outside the vehicle.
itwas10pm 8y ago
It was 10pm in the evening. I drove home in my hyundai but the tank was empty. I probably couldn't make it if I went full speed at 130km/h so I drove carefully at 80km/h. Nothing eventful happened on the highway and I got off safely. 5 minutes later I am roughly 100m away from home. I have to take a right turn uphill which meant that my car slowed down to slightly less than 20km/h and then I have to turn left to get to the parking lot. As you can guess it was dark and I was primarily paying attention to the sidewalk because pedestrians are hard to see. As I turn left suddenly BAM. A bicycle with a small hard to see light has crashed into the rear door on the right side at a pace of possibly more than 30km/h as it was going downhill. The car door and the front of bicycle were completely trashed. Luckily the cyclist didn't sustain any serious injuries. I was obviously protected in a huge cage of steel (compared to american one's its still tiny) but I slowly started to hate driving, especially at night. All the bullshit speeding tickets, the annoying maintenance and now accidents are adding up to a miserable experience. If I had 360° night vision this wouldn't have happened. I can't trust my own two eyes. I wouldn't trust anyone's two eyes for that matter to drive a car safely. They weren't good enough last year and they won't be enough next year. Replicating humans will just replicate their weaknesses. I'll take all the crutches I can get.
- deleted 8y ago
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bluGill 8y ago
Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. I constantly have to take my eyes off the road to check mirrors. I hope while checking what is behind me that nothing happens in front. I hope while looking in front of me nothing I need to worry about from the sides/back of me matter. Of course most of the danger is in front of me so I spend most of the time looking there, but there are times when things not in front of me are dangerous to me. By giving a car more than two eyes it has the potential to become a better driver than me because it can watch more. By adding more than just visible light cameras it can see things that I would never see. I want my next car to be safer, the big limit is not seat belts, brakes, crumple zones, airbags, and such - the big limit is the limited human in control. There is potential to make some of the above obsolete if the control system is enough better.
- Spivak 8y ago
  > Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. This isn't really the point, it's that humans are able to successfully build an accurate-enough model of the world to navigate terrain with only camera like vision -- and a really bad one at that. There is, of course, no problem with giving cars more sensory abilities to make them safer but what they mean by a crutch is that the CS breakthrough that will make self-driving cars compete with humans will function about as well with two crappy cameras mounted on the drivers seat as it would with an array of high-precision sensors.
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    Pretty good vision, all told. Though the constant scanning motions of the eyes as opposed to fixed cameras mean they may have at least as much in common with LIDAR.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    (tongue firmly in cheek) Material science breakthrough could result in aircraft that flap wings that could compete with condors too, but what would be the point? Naturally evolved mechanism are not the gold standard; they developed under completely different constraints.
jsight 8y ago
I feel like I have been somewhere in the middle on this. I feel like to reach level 5 autonomy, the vehicles are going to have to have really good image processing from conventional cameras. In fact, they might need it to be so good that the lidars themselves become redundant. But there are a lot of possibilities between zero autonomy and level 5 autonomy that might almost require lidar too in the short term.

gpm 8y ago

I'm pretty sure a crutch isn't a crutch-crutch but a body-crutch. Ducttape is a crutch-crutch when applied correctly.

trixie_ 8y ago

Lidar can create a great 3d representation of an environment, but then you're back to the same problem as cameras. You need some sort of AI to identify objects in the data. So the question is how much of an advantage does lidar give you in object identification? It's hard enough to identify objects with confidence in 2d images. Where is the confidence level at for identifying and/or discerning 3d objects with AI?

sliken 8y ago
Sure, lidar gives you way less resolution. Take the velodyn alpha puck for instance, 300k points/sec. If you are moving at 60 mph once second = 88 fps. So the puck spreads 300k points over 88 feet of highway. The tesla system has 10 cameras, but I believe only two of them look forward. I believe they are 1280x960 @ 30 FPS or 36M pixels/sec. But there's two of them, 73M pixels/sec. Each pixel is in color (lidar is just a distance). So the tesla system has WAY more information about the environment, granted distance has to be inferred, but it also had radar to help with that. Additionally being inherently more similar to eye sight, a car using cameras is likely to get along with human drivers better. Slowing down when it's foggy or rainy, seeing at similar ranges to humans, and being able to use color for additional context. Is that a UPS truck or an ambulance? Is that a reflection of a police car with it's light on or just a window reflection? Is that a boulder or a wind filled trash bag?
- yokaze 8y ago
  > So the tesla system has WAY more information about the environment, granted distance has to be inferred, but it also had radar to help with that. I'd argue the contrary. Intelligence is primarily not about the amount of data, but the amount _and_ quality of data you receive. If I would have a magic sensor giving me obstacles in a segmented form, that would be couple of KB, and it would beat any other sensor on the market. Inferring the distance from stereo images has its own failure-modes and are not easy to account for as in LiDAR. LiDAR also gives you reflectivity, so you will be able to differentiate between a UPS truck and an ambulance. > Is that a reflection of a police car with its light on or just a window reflection? Fun thing, to my knowledge reflections are a major unsolved problem for vision. It is easier for LiDAR, as you can rely on the distance measurement and will have an object somewhere outside of any reasonable position (e.g underground, behind a wall). Depending on the lidar, the glass might even register as a second (actually primary) return. Yes, you need cameras (likely color) to be able recognise any light based signalling (traffic lights, ambulance/police lights...), so LiDAR is not the panacea. But having the lidar telling you that there is a window and that police is behind it is likely vastly more robust with lidar. Also, the difficulty is that you have to see arbitrary objects, on the road and possibly stop for them. As long it is larger than maybe a couple of centimeters (or an inch), it will show on the LiDAR, with stereo vision, you need a couple of pixel texture to infer it.

pauljurczak 8y ago

He is right about lidar being a crutch, but he is wrong about the amount of time needed to develop machine vision software good enough to make lidar unnecessary.

s17n 8y ago
Lidar will get cheap before this happens, at which point it won't be question of whether it is "necessary" but whether it is useful.

cameldrv 8y ago

Maybe Lidar is a crutch. For a lot of things, a crutch is an adequate substitute for a non-broken leg. The trouble with crutches is that if you want to dance, or play baseball, or ride a bike, you can't do it. I can tell you how I've gotten a much bigger annotated dataset, and if I keep collecting, soon I'll be as fast as a normal person at walking down the sidewalk, but people want to do more than just walk down the sidewalk.

close04 8y ago
Just because it's a crutch doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. It means you should use it until you have a tool that can do better (your healed leg?). As far as I can tell Musk insists walking unassisted with a broken leg is better than using a crutch because a good leg is better than a crutch. Sure, but he's not providing a good leg, he's providing a broken one. It's like telling people to drag their broken leg today because 3 months from now it will be better than a crutch. And he's not taking this route because today's cars do better with normal cameras than with LIDAR (future cars might though what good is that today?) but because it's cheaper while still allowing big claims. Use the right tool at the right time. In the meantime develop the next tool and start using it when it becomes appropriate.

deleted 8y ago

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iabacu 8y ago

Not using lidar for self driving cars is a giant premature optimization (just like premature automation, etc)

sliken 8y ago
Maybe, but where are all the lidar cars that drive significantly better than a Tesla?
- raihansaputra 8y ago
  Well, all of them are still in extensive testing with bug reports from small-event disengagement, not in customer bought cars involved in fatal crashes.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Except for the lidar equipped uber that killed a woman you mean? Sure, watching a Disney movie while a Telsa drives is stupid and got someone killed. Seems like a pretty poor proof that lidar is superior. Not to mention Tesla hardware and software has some pretty far since then.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      The lidar detected the woman. However, the car was programmed not to brake... The problem was the software, not the hardware.
      - gnulinux 8y ago
        How's this a good argument? The entire point in favor of lidar is that the hardware gives more data to software which can in turn be used to make decisions. There is no hardware/software distinction here. Nobody claims that lidar isn't capable of detecting objects. (Note that this is not a comment against lidar, I agree with you but I don't think your argument is sufficient)

sbr464 8y ago

I'm sure this is being considered, but I'm curious what the strategy is for handling signal/laser interference in dense traffic situations, in the future when all cars have 3d lidar installed. For example, assuming 3 lidar units on the front of each car, in a large intersection, say two lanes of cars turning in front of 4 lanes of cars pointed at them, waiting at a red light. That would be hundreds of potential reflection/collisions per second. The user manual for an older Hokuyo lidar with a single scanning plane (for example, mounted on a forklift to avoid hitting a wall) mentions to offset the mounting/angle slightly across the fleet to avoid interference.

taneq 8y ago
I've always wondered this about LIDAR. It's all peachy with one car wandering down the road on its own, but a busy freeway with half a dozen cars all busily scanning everything is a different situation. Not to mention issues with sun glare dazzling sensors etc. Nobody talks about it so maybe it's not an issue in practice, but my own experience with sensors of all sorts is that they're never as good as you'd hope they are.
deleted 8y ago
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etrautmann 8y ago
current state of the art LIDAR systems have unbelievably tight windows in terms of space, time, frequency, and pulse coding which collectively allow for excellent background rejection. In practice, this actually isn't that much of an issue. Sunlight and retro reflectors are more difficult challenges to deal with than other LIDARS causing interference. More specifically, each detector is looking through a soda straw at a tiny spot in space, and rejecting anything that doesn't arrive within a narrow range of time, which also has to have the right light frequency and something like a pseudorandom code sequence which gets match filtered against itself. In practice, you'd have to send the right wavelength of light to the right 1cm circle in space, send it during just the right few hundred nanoseconds, send it with the right pulse sequence (which one could determine but would be unlikely to happen by chance). Even if it happens once, it would have to happen many times at the imaging rate of the sensor to cause major issues...

ecpottinger 8y ago

Personally, I don't think Lidar is needed to make self-driving cars. Otherwise we have a problem since humans do not come with them to date. The problem I have with the article is he said Lidar will never come done in costs to that of a headlight. Tech marches on and headlights are not really that cheap, in the future I would not be surprised with mass production that Lidar does get that cheap. How much did the first Kim-1 computers cost? How does that compare to a simple Arduino with a hundred times the power and memory cost today?

bluGill 8y ago
Humans are not safe drivers. If Lidar makes the autonomous care safer than humans I want lidar.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  > Humans are not safe drivers I see this repeated over and over in this thread, elsewhere on HN, and in many other places on the web. But no one explains what they mean by a safe driver. There are other factors at work than mere human-ness. For instance the US has more than double the number of fatalities per unit vehicle distance than the UK, more than triple per head of population. In both countries the driver is a human yet the disparity in outcome is huge. Perhaps whatever it is that causes this sort of difference should be addressed rather than insisting on a new an inherently unproven technology. Or, at least, give us some numbers so that we can tell what you mean by safe. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Even in the UK there are deaths. Yes the US should work on whatever it is that makes UK drivers safer, but UK drivers still kill people and are thus unsafe. You have just given numbers: when autonomous cars beat those numbers they are better. Until then we should be careful.
KaiserPro 8y ago

ijafri 8y ago

I didn't get the Uber reference, have not they given up on driverless cars, at least for the near future? after the sensor / lidar failure resulting in a fatal crash.

googlemike 8y ago
What makes you think that?
darkpuma 8y ago
Uber stopped for a few months after killing a woman, but resumed testing a month ago: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/uber-self-driving-car-testing-resumes-pittsburgh/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/uber-self-driving-car-test...
JshWright 8y ago
It wasn't a sensor failure. Multiple sensors (including the lidar) detected the woman with plenty of time to stop.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  It was a management failure. The car had a perfectly ordinary radar based emergency braking function factory fitted by Volvo but Uber disabled it, presumably to avoid interference with the cars autonomous driving functions (if I recall correctly).

baybal2 8y ago

Mr. Musk is wrong, and behind his error is, perhaps, his lack of technical aptitude. > Musk and almost everyone else in the business recognize self-driving cars and trucks as the future of automotive transportation. Those people in their prime majority think that some kind of "AI" program will be somehow think over the inputs and tell where to drive. They all have too much expectations for technology coming under the word "AI" these days They all do so without understanding what those "AIs" actually are, and not realising that such programs can't make any "cognition." Until that change, any talk of "self-driving" is premature. This does not preclude however the coming improvements in cruise control, and computerised collision avoidance.

iknowstuff 8y ago
Elon Musk does not know what AIs are? Are you serious?
- baybal2 8y ago
  I am, he did not make an impression of a that much smart person. The man began his career as a so so game dev, and been going from one random businesses to another (this is a part of his career he doesn't like to be public about) before Paypal "happened upon him." He has no substantial CS or technical background. He dropped out of his physics masters. Give him an evaluation.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    He dropped out of a PhD program in Physics. Also, he has a startup on AI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI even if you think he's not proficient in technical aspects of AI, he definitely has a lot of ideas about social implications of AI.
  - oldprogrammer2 8y ago
    From Wikipedia: He left in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor's degree in physics. After leaving Penn, Elon Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Education

panic 8y ago

I'm looking forward to lidar in human-driven cars. Imagine how cool it would be to see the 3D point cloud on your dashboard or reflected on your windshield as a heads-up display.

elihu 8y ago
...or rendered on your head-mounted virtual reality headset as you drive around town in your windowless car with perfect visibility.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  I imagine it will be illegal for an actual human to drive on public roads by the time we get to this point, but it would be so cool to drive my car in third person camera like in racing games.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    I'm not against humans driving if the car will take over as required to keep everything safe.
  - elihu 8y ago
    I think banning human drivers will be unpopular in most areas as long as we have a significant proportion of the population who has grown up in a society where the ability to drive a personal car is viewed almost as a constitutional right. Technology can change quickly, but people's attitudes change much slower. What I expect in the next couple of decades is that we'll have certain individual roads and neighborhoods where human-drivers are banned, and maybe certain roads and neighborhoods where AI-driven cars are banned. Most roads will allow either, because it's not practical in most cases to maintain two separate road networks. Being able to drive a windowless car by head-mounted-display is something we could accomplish with maybe some minor tweaks to current technology. I doubt such a system would be safe or legal, though, because a software failure could be fatal and we're really bad at making complex software that is also reliable.
dmitriid 8y ago

01100011 8y ago

What's wrong with hyperspectral imaging? Active IR systems work just fine at night. Passive night vision systems aren't exactly cheap but can probably allow optical navigation using ambient starlight. Throw thermal imaging in the mix and you have a ton of data to infer objects from.

dmitriid 8y ago
What about the sun which never rises above, let's say 10 degrees in winter in the Nordics?
- JshWright 8y ago
  Self driving cars will have to solve the problem of "snow" long before they have to worry about that...

sethbannon 8y ago

Interesting counter argument: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/why-our-companys-trucks-wont-carry-lidar https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...

Animats 8y ago

Todd Neff is the author of "The Laser That’s Changing the World", a history of lidar. It's a PR piece for his book. The terahertz radar people are slowly making progress. Good resolution, almost as good as LIDAR. Better behavior in rain. Beam steering with no moving parts. Plus you can tell who's carrying a gun. Musk is in trouble. No way is Tesla close to real automatic driving. Does Tesla even have reliable detection of stationary obstacles in a lane yet? Their track record on partial lane obstructions is terrible. So far, Teslas on autopilot have driven into a street sweeper, a stalled van, a fire truck, a crossing semitrailer, a lane divider....

ec109685 8y ago

That Darpa reference in the article is weak. Because in 2007 the state of the art needed Lidar, that means that it's still a necessary crutch in 2019? Image recognition has made unbelievable strides in the interim. As I watch Tesla's "Autopilot" do its thing, it seems its limitations are less about object recognition and more about what do with the data it has. Lidar won't help it intelligently handle a merge of two lanes into one, or seeing a turn signal and slowing down to let the person in, or seeing a red light and knowing to start slowing down before it recognizes the car in front of it slowing down, or knowing exactly what lane to enter on the other side of a tricky intersection without a car in front of it, or knowing that car X is actually turning right so you shouldn't start following it if you're going straight, or having the car see a clear path ahead and having it accelerate to the speed limit when all other cars are stopped or going much slower in adjacent lanes, or moving to the left to allow a motorcycle to lane split, etc., etc. It's still great, but there are a ton of things to learn. Maybe once there is no human in the driver's seat, you'll need the extra precision that lidar provide, but there are big gaps before even we get there.

KaiserPro 8y ago
A lidar sensor will almost certainly _always_ be lower latency than any sort of image processing engine. A lidar gives you a stream of 3d points in the order of megavertices a second. The processing pipeline for any visual system is at least frame rate of the camera (the faster the camera, the less light it can get) plus the GPU transfer time(if you are using AI) then processing. this means you are looking at ~200ms latency before you know where things are. Lidar is a brilliant sensor. Maybe it will be supplanted by some sexy beamforming Thz radar, but not in the near future.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Cameras built using dedicated hardware similar to what lidar systems are using would not have that sort of latency. You don't have to receive a full frame of data before it can be processed if you're not using generic COTS cameras.
  - 8y ago

rwallace 8y ago

> In daylight, cameras can do that, too, but not so much in the dark Why not? We've been seeing TV footage of cameras seeing perfectly well in the dark for decades. Why is there a problems with using them for automatic driving at night?

Aser 8y ago

> For many, owning a car to commute will make as much sense as owning a cell tower to scroll Instagram. This is total rubbish. I don't believe for a second that taking a self-driving uber to work and back everyday will be cheaper than driving my own car.

nathan_long 8y ago
Why not? Suppose your commute occupies the car for 1/24th of the hours of the day. In theory you could pay for only that usage. There would be some markup so the owning company has a profit margin, but the higher the price is, the greater the incentive for competitors to exist, which would exert downward pressure. So maybe you'd end up paying 1/20 the price of owning a car. If you don't agree, why not?
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  Most of the cost of operating a car is directly proportional to the usage of said car. Some costs per unit distance go down, some go up. In the end, if you need a car daily there is almost no way a service will work out cheaper.
- wil421 8y ago
  Eventually you will own the car and the costs will decrease dramatically. My wife’s corolla is 14 years old, gets 30 miles a gallon, and costs about $250 a year due to failing sensors and a MAF replacement. If I used Uber every time I’ve used her corolla in the past 10 years it would far outweigh the cost of gas, insurance, and fixing the car.
  - bronco21016 8y ago
    You’ve completely left out the cost of the car though. Even over a 14 year period if you bought the car new for $15k (2005 MSRP Corolla LE) you’re still at roughly $90/month. Factor in insurance, gas, and continued maintenance and you’re at a couple hundred a month. Of course that number continues to fall but eventually you buy a new car. If ride sharing moves to a subscription model of just a straight $200-300/mo I think it completely obliterates the market for individually owned small cars used primarily for commuting.

offtheradar 8y ago

I'm not sure that he meant lidar is a crutch in the way that this article represents. Those tiny wavelengths that allow lidar to provide tremendous detail also make it unreliable in rain and snow. Until that problem is solved, and I haven't heard that it has been, lidar dependent cars either 1) can't drive in the rain or 2) must be able to operate reliably in the rain using technology other than lidar. Believe it or not, cars will need to be able to drive in the rain, so if you're going to eventually need to build a car that will work reliably without lidar then why not build that to begin with? It looks like most SDC companies are going with lidar because it is faster and easier, but if it only covers 90% of use cases then that does sound like a "crutch".