8 ms·

I don't think any one is doing this. This is the point Karpathy is making. Vision is essential and needs to be perfect and also has all the information to recre

• michaelt 7y ago
  lidar is not required and is expensive. Given that the only the company claiming that is the one whose cars sometimes hit (or even swerve into) clearly visible stationary concrete barriers in broad daylight [1, 2, 3, 4], I consider that claim far from proven. [1] 2019 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tesla-steering-toward-lane-divider-again/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tes... [2] 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16772748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16772748 [3] 2017 https://bgr.com/2017/03/02/tesla-crash-video-texas/ https://bgr.com/2017/03/02/tesla-crash-video-texas/ [4] 2016 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1402992/tesla-self-driving-car-involved-in-another-crash-as-gallery-owners-model-x-flips-in-collision-with-concrete-barrier/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1402992/tesla-self-driving-car...
  • SheinhardtWigCo 7y ago
    This argument misses the forest for the trees. Even level 5 autopilot will sometimes crash into objects that are clearly visible to most humans, as will lidar-based solutions. But if the robot fleet is an order of magnitude safer than the human fleet, then it makes rational sense to prefer a robot driver to a human.
    • michaelt 7y ago
      I think you might have replied to the wrong post here? I didn't say anything about humans vs self-driving cars. I'm arguing about self-driving cars with LIDAR vs those without.
      • SheinhardtWigCo 7y ago
        Your post suggested that missing any obvious obstacles casts doubt on Tesla's claim that lidar isn't necessary, but I'm saying their claim will indeed be proven true if the overall safety level of vision-and-radar autonomy is far better than that of humans, even if they sometimes crash in ways that seem obviously avoidable to humans.
      • AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > I didn't say anything about humans vs self-driving cars. I'm arguing about self-driving cars with LIDAR vs those without. The status quo is humans so the first question is whether it can do at least as well as humans even without LIDAR. It seems to be doing that, even if the things it does get wrong are different things than the things the humans get wrong. The question of LIDAR vs. not is a separate issue which is purely cost/benefit. Even if LIDAR has some value, it remains to be seen whether that value is ultimately more than its costs, in the same way that we know how to make cars safer by making them weigh 8000 pounds and yet in general we don't do that because the cost is more than the benefit.
    • threeseed 7y ago
      Problem with Tesla is that it is crashing into objects no human would crash into. And doing so at high speed.
      • FireBeyond 7y ago
        If not actively accelerating at them, like it did in San Francisco.
      • karakot 7y ago
        really? just google/bing something like "car crashed into a wall/barrier"
      • hermitdev 7y ago
        My car (not a Tesla) has a collision warning system but no automatic breaking, and I wouldn't want it to with the number of false warnings I receive. The public road right before the drive to my house has an s-turn in it. The CWS goes off about half the time I go through that series of turns just hundreds of feet from my turn. I can see the turn in the road and the guard rail ahead, the car sees a stationary object I'm driving straight towards at around 45mph. If it automatically braked with its current awareness, I might never get home or get rear-ended by people following.
      • naikrovek 7y ago
        I dunno. I've seen perfectly sober, intelligent humans drive into some extremely stupid "situations".
        • threeseed 7y ago
          We aren't trying to build another human. We are trying to build a car that doesn't crash.
          • Robotbeat 7y ago
            No, we're trying to build a car that crashes less than humans. If you want a car that doesn't crash, never build the car let alone drive it. Then it'll never crash. The point is both reduction in fatalities and increase in human quality of life. Not an impossible perfection.
    • rohit2412 7y ago
      I'm getting tired of saying this. Why is it one or the other? Why only a human driver or a robot driver? Could you have a human driver in charge with an accident preventing robot, getting the best of both worlds? If the human falls asleep, the robot can do trivial driving, and the human still makes the more difficult driving decisions. The question isn't if robot car is better than an average car being driven by a human. It's if the same robot car would be safer if the human was driving it, and the robot in accident prevention mode. And I don't think that is going to be true in any near future.
      • gthtjtkt 7y ago
        > Could you have a human driver in charge with an accident preventing robot, getting the best of both worlds? We already have this and we've had it for years. What do you think automatic emergency braking is? Adaptive cruise control? Lane keeping assist? > The question isn't if robot car is better than an average car being driven by a human. It's if the same robot car would be safer if the human was driving it, and the robot in accident prevention mode. And I don't think that is going to be true in any near future. No clue what you're trying to say here. Driver assist features don't improve safety?
        • rohit2412 7y ago
          So call them driver assists. I am tired of seeing driver assists being sold as driverless systems.
          • SheinhardtWigCo 7y ago
            Do you think people buying cars with autopilot believe they are getting fully driverless systems?
            • rohit2412 7y ago
              People buying current cars were just told that their cars will earn them 30k$ a year. Is fsd driver assistance or driverless?
  • ribosometronome 7y ago
    Are there any other vehicles being driven autonomously at the same scale? It seems like it may be an unfair comparison.
    • naikrovek 7y ago
      It is very much an unfair comparison. There is very little (if any) mention of the number of times AutoPilot has prevented an accident amongst self-driving skeptics.
    • lozenge 7y ago
      Yes, many other cars have lane following features and adaptive cruise control, they just don't call them "autopilot".
• Fricken 7y ago
  Vision is probablistic. You can improve your probabilities with more data and deeper nets, but the probability is never 100%. Inferring depth using triangulation of extracted features using vision is also probabilistic. Lidar gives you very rudimentary depth and positional data, but it is precise, and reliable, and the false positives are low. Lidar is not seeing the world as a series of probabilistic phantasms that may or may not be a pedestrian, or a jersey barrier, or whatever. Elon said: "Lidar is lame! Lidar is Lame! lame lame lame lame." But then he later said: "We've gone over this multiple times. Are we sure we have the right sensor suite? Are we sure we have everything we need?.... No." Lidar is a crutch and we'll see how hard Tesla is limping in a couple years when Elon is claiming They're going to have Robotaxis. To Tesla's credit, it is theoretically possible to develop a fully autonomous vehicle without needing Lidar, but before you can deploy, you need to integrate Lidar, and it can be retrofitted as a largely independent system, necessary for it's enhanced redundancy, but not needed for informing the planner, except when the Lidar is seeing things the vision system isn't. The presentation was a pretty good run down on various techniques and methods that are being utilized by different autonomy developers. The downside is that everything is framed as a rationalization as to why Tesla has some kind of secret weapon, when they're mostly doing conventional things, and not all the conventional things you need to build a complete autonomous vehicle. I was waiting for Elon or Karpathy to trot out the magic pixie dust that will have Tesla's driving empty in a couple years, but that was nowhere to be found.
  • maccam94 7y ago
    I believe he claimed that they did have all of the sensors they need with hardware v2, and they had no need for LIDAR. We'll see if that's true. One thing that stood out to me is that he said they only need radar in front because you're only moving fast in that direction. Does that mean the cars will be susceptible to T-bone accidents?
    • Fricken 7y ago
      I don't know, I guess it will be born out in the data, but I hope they aren't seriously planning to drive people through busy intersections where T-bones are likely to happen under the auspices that what they've got is a level 3/4 system. Waymo's safetly critical disengagements are at 1 every 11,000 miles. Fender benders happen about once every 100,000 miles, so just on that Waymo is off by an order of magnitude, and Waymo spares no expense on compute or sensors.
• obastani 7y ago
  Waymo is almost certainly using a ton of computer vision in its cars. Vision is needed to classify objects on the road, predict the behaviors of pedestrians, bikers and other drivers, read road signs and traffic lights, etc. As far as I can tell, LIDAR makes a lot of prediction tasks much easier (since you have both images and LIDAR point clouds), and is also a backup for obstacle detection to ensure that your self-driving car doesn't crash.
• threeseed 7y ago
  Vision is not perfect though. It is impaired during night time and difficult conditions and can be obscured if dust/dirt gets on the camera. And not sure who you are but I trust all of the other companies who are doing this a lot more. And they are all using LIDAR.
  • XorNot 7y ago
    Dirt and dust can also impair LIDAR (it's just light, remember?) as can adverse weather (there's a big question over how well any California-based company will perform in a non-California climate. I suppose my country - Australia - is going to be a big beneficiary of all this). It's a mistake to think LIDAR doesn't have these drawbacks - its an optical system at its core.
    • derpherp 7y ago
      Yes, LIDAR has drawbacks too. That's why almost all autonomous vehicle systems "fuse" LIDAR and vision data together. The debate here should be LIDAR + camera vs only camera. Musk has turned the conversation to LIDAR vs camera.
      • natch 7y ago
        Wow you are commenting, but you didn’t watch the event I guess because that’s not what Musk said.
        • derpherp 7y ago
          I'm sorry you feel that way. I indeed watched the entire stream and not once do I recall Musk mentioning sensor fusion. Instead, he just focussed on the drawbacks that LIDAR had, which can be corrected if feeds from LIDAR and camera were to be combined. This is why every other AV company uses sensor fusion. No one uses LIDAR just by itself and Tesla should not use vision just by itself.
          • je42 7y ago
• Someone 7y ago
  I agree with the essential bit, but “has to be perfect”? Do you know how bad human vision is at estimating distances, speeds, angles, etc? I don’t think you need perfect vision to implement the first law of autonomous driving (“Avoid hitting stuff”) It also doesn’t have all the information to recreate the 3d environment. There’s all kinds of inferences that human drivers make that require a good model of the world, to start with. For example, a car shouldn’t brake for a small object that moves with the wind, even if it looks like it’s made of concrete, or looks like a child.