14 ms·

Musk's point has always been to combine vision with radar, instead of Lidar. I'm amazed that this combination is usually overlooked in discussions of Tesla/Lida

Musk's point has always been to combine vision with radar, instead of Lidar. I'm amazed that this combination is usually overlooked in discussions of Tesla/Lidar

ztjio 7y ago
That wouldn't be very good click bait
llbowers 7y ago
I’m sure this is a dumb question to anyone with knowledge in this field but is there any reason to not use all three together?
- AndrewBissell 7y ago
  Currently, LIDAR is very expensive, certainly too expensive to build into every Tesla being manufactured. So Musk would not be able to sell a "full FSD capability" option on his cars if he acknowledged LIDAR is useful/necessary to autonomous driving. The number one link if you search "Tesla" on HN is "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware." It's been an extraordinarily effective marketing gimmick.
  - thecupisblue 7y ago
    LIDAR prices have declined and are going way low-budget now.
    - robocat 7y ago
      For example these guys suggesting $500: https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-reality/ https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-re...
  - GuB-42 7y ago
    There is a $300 vacuum cleaner robot by Xaomi that uses a LIDAR. The part can be found for $70 on AliExpress. Obviously not the same specs as Waymo's LIDAR but at least, it proves that it doesn't have to be that expensive.
- tareqak 7y ago
  I have no knowledge in the field, but maybe the expense becomes high?
- threeseed 7y ago
  It would make sense to use all three. Lidar used for long range. Vision used for things like colour recognition e.g. is a traffic light green/red or is an ambulance sirens on. Radar used for reversing etc where Lidar given its location might not be able to see that close.
  - liability 7y ago
    I suspect that optical will also supplement LIDAR in cases where very precise angular resolution is needed, such as human gesture and posture recognition (which is necessary if only because sometimes humans direct traffic, but also for things like profiling pedestrians to anticipate which is likely to jump into the road without looking.) Being able to detect which way a human head is facing will at the very least be necessary, and while you might be able to read faces with LIDAR from a distance, my gut says that optical will give you better data for that.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  expensive large and heavy
- danepowell 7y ago
  Price. I worked briefly with teams building self driving cars in the past. Their budget for sensors far exceeded the cost of the car itself.
  - stefco_ 7y ago
    Of course, they were presumably using a mostly-stock car with custom niche sensor products, so that comparison would be a bit more favorable in production.
  - robocat 7y ago
    Latest projected price for the lidar unit is $500 to $1000 e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-reality/ https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-re... No-one is expecting to use experimental $75000 Velodyne units in production.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Most of the non-Tesla systems do. Waymo uses lidar, radar, and cameras. The cruise vehicles I see around have lidar and radar as well, and I just assume everyone has cameras because they're cheap and easy to stick somewhere. To be specific about waymo (to be clear I work at Google, but don't actually have any special info on this), look at the photo in [0]. The cone thing on top is a lidar, but also has cameras in the larger part under the cone. The spinny thing on the front is also probably a lidar. The fin that looks like an extra mirror on the back, and the two on the front have radar. There's also probably a forward facing radar mounted on the nose somewhere near the grille. [0]: https://waymo.com/ https://waymo.com/
  - dmix 7y ago
    So self driving cars are basically going to be really expensive for the first while as the sensors take time to reduce in price plus the computer in the back and less distance from the battery. Sounds like a reasonable trade off. No one needs to own these cars just rent them on demand. Plus some wealthy people in the early adoption curve.
- kjksf 7y ago
  According to a recent interview with pony.ai (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VcpZnIg3M0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VcpZnIg3M0) the cost to retrofit a car with all necessary sensors is $75k. A Lidar is a significant part of that. If $40k Tesla can do as well as $40k car + $75k of sensors (including lidar) it's economical game over. Tesla wins by a wide margin. The $75k will drop in time, but the battle will likely happen before the price of lidars drop significantly enough.
  - new_realist 7y ago
    If self driving becomes a reality robotaxis will retail for several hundred thousand dollars.
    - marvin 7y ago
      They will certainly have an economic value of multiple hundred thousand dollars, but that applies to all manufacturers. So if a manufacturer is able to produce non-LIDAR self-driving cars and sells those cars to consumers for $100,000 less than the competition, you can bet that they’ll still capture the robotaxi rental value that is there, through an app store-like agreement. Leaving the money on the table would obviously not happen, unless it was intended to drive the competition out of business. There would probably be room for both these models (direct sales that capture much of the self-driving value and leasing), but regardless there are obviously strong incentives for a 5- or 6-figure reduction in costs.
threeseed 7y ago
Actually there was a presentation given by one of their Lead Data Scientists describing their ML architecture. At no point was radar mentioned. They are purely relying on vision to identity cars, obstacles, traffic lights etc with dozens of models each focused on one particular 'type'. Radar by the sounds of it is being used purely as a fallback. The question is if the vision systems fail to recognise an obstacle at high speed is the radar long range enough to compensate in time. Presentation: https://slideslive.com/38917690/multitask-learning-in-the-wilderness https://slideslive.com/38917690/multitask-learning-in-the-wi...
- kjksf 7y ago
  Actually, they did mention radar during Autonomy Investor Day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE). Also, https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot says: "A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength that is able to see through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead." So it's rather bizarre that you would speculate about how they're not using radar when they explicitly say they do.
  - new_realist 7y ago
    There is zero chance a radar will recognize a traffic light. It is prone to false positives, to boot. Its only use is tracking large metal objects: cars and trucks, for the purpose of adaptive cruise control.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    Elon Musk or the actual Data Scientist working on it. I wonder who to trust.
liability 7y ago
Musk badly wants for you to not realize that nobody is proposing LIDAR-only, but are rather proposing LIDAR+optical+radar. Musk argues against straw men. (Also the radar Telsa is using has jack-shit for angular resolution. It can't tell the difference between a tree next to the road and a fire truck parked right across it. Consequently that radar has very limited utility.)
- kjksf 7y ago
  More accurately, Musk doesn't care what others think is needed for self-driving, so your aspersions about Musk badly wanting us to think one way or another are not supported by facts. Neither Tesla nor Musk make a big deal of lack of lidar. The only reason his views on the subject are public (and so hotly discussed) is because during Autonomy Investor Day he was asked by an investor why Tesla doesn't use a lidar. So he answered the question. You might not agree with his reasoning but he's not on some "NO LIDAR" publicity tour, trying to change your mind. Here's the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE Watch the whole thing. The first time Musk mentions lack of lidar is after being asked.
  - new_realist 7y ago
    He should care what experts think. Whenever someone probes Musk in their own area of expertise, they find his knowledge is that of a stubborn, overconfident dilettante.
    - vinceguidry 7y ago
      I think any expert is going to be able to outshine Musk in their area of expertise, but where Musk is great is in seeing the bigger picture. Musk simply doesn't have the time to become an expert in everything, he has to execute now.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - 7y ago
BluSyn 7y ago
Exactly. What is rarely mentioned is his exact quote on the reasoning for radar vs. lidar: “If you’re going to use active photon generation, don’t use visible wavelength, because with passive optical you’ve taken care of all visible wavelength stuff. You want to use a wavelength that’s occlusion-penetrating like radar. LIDAR is just active photon generation in the visible spectrum.” This article is still missing the point when talking about redundancies. LIDAR only works in essentially perfect weather ("not occlusion-penetrating"). Even if it serves only as a "redundancy" there's no advantage in relying on a sensor suite that operates in a less-safe mode in the most adverse road conditions. So basically if you are driving in snow or fog, your LIDAR-based AV has to fall back to Radar+Cameras. If that system can pass all the safety tests in the worst-case road condition then there is no value in the additional sensors that add expense but no safety margin. What's even more overlooked is power consumption. LIDAR is far more power intensive, especially when we're talking about multiple packages per vehicle. In the future world of Autonomous Electric Vehicle Fleets, the vehicles using LIDAR will get significantly less range efficiency than their radar counterparts and cost significantly more to build. In a fleet scenario where every margin counts this will result in a significant economic pressure to ditch LIDAR. So in the end I think Elon will be proved right. Those currently investing in LIDAR-based systems will eventually ditch it for purely practical economic reasons. Those that don't will be completely destroyed in the open market. The real competitive advantage for AEV's is in the software, not hardware. LIDAR is a crutch for bad software that reaches a theoretical maximum far short of what is needed for economically-viable LVL5 autonomy. I'll restate this clearly: there's simply no economic or technological advantage to using LIDAR for AEV's.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Lidar doesn't use visible spectrum light. They're usually infrared, so Musk's quote makes no sense. You're making a lot of strong assumptions to draw your conclusions: that commodity cameras and radar can compete on measurement accuracy with lidar systems, and that lidar costs won't decrease with additional investment (we've already seen costs decrease, by like a factor of 10x in less than a decade). The power questions also aren't cut and dry: if you need extra in-vehicle GPUs to support the radar+camera approach, you may well be using more power than a lidar based approach. There's also no real requirement that AVs operate in snow or dense fog. Those are only considerations in certain climates in certain seasons. You don't actually need the safety system to pass the safety tests (that don't currently exist) in worst case conditions if the vehicle works anyway. Why optimize for the worst case first? I'll respond clearly: We're multiple computer vision leaps forward away from what Elon needs for success. They're easily half a decade behind Lidar based systems. And people die as a consequence of putting those systems on the road.

Musk's point has always been to combine vision with radar, instead of Lidar. I'm amazed that this combination is usually overlooked in discussions of Tesla/Lidar

ztjio 7y ago

That wouldn't be very good click bait

llbowers 7y ago

I’m sure this is a dumb question to anyone with knowledge in this field but is there any reason to not use all three together?

AndrewBissell 7y ago
Currently, LIDAR is very expensive, certainly too expensive to build into every Tesla being manufactured. So Musk would not be able to sell a "full FSD capability" option on his cars if he acknowledged LIDAR is useful/necessary to autonomous driving. The number one link if you search "Tesla" on HN is "All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware." It's been an extraordinarily effective marketing gimmick.
- thecupisblue 7y ago
  LIDAR prices have declined and are going way low-budget now.
  - robocat 7y ago
    For example these guys suggesting $500: https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-reality/ https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-re...
- GuB-42 7y ago
  There is a $300 vacuum cleaner robot by Xaomi that uses a LIDAR. The part can be found for $70 on AliExpress. Obviously not the same specs as Waymo's LIDAR but at least, it proves that it doesn't have to be that expensive.
tareqak 7y ago
I have no knowledge in the field, but maybe the expense becomes high?
threeseed 7y ago
It would make sense to use all three. Lidar used for long range. Vision used for things like colour recognition e.g. is a traffic light green/red or is an ambulance sirens on. Radar used for reversing etc where Lidar given its location might not be able to see that close.
- liability 7y ago
  I suspect that optical will also supplement LIDAR in cases where very precise angular resolution is needed, such as human gesture and posture recognition (which is necessary if only because sometimes humans direct traffic, but also for things like profiling pedestrians to anticipate which is likely to jump into the road without looking.) Being able to detect which way a human head is facing will at the very least be necessary, and while you might be able to read faces with LIDAR from a distance, my gut says that optical will give you better data for that.
gameswithgo 7y ago
expensive large and heavy
danepowell 7y ago
Price. I worked briefly with teams building self driving cars in the past. Their budget for sensors far exceeded the cost of the car itself.
- stefco_ 7y ago
  Of course, they were presumably using a mostly-stock car with custom niche sensor products, so that comparison would be a bit more favorable in production.
- robocat 7y ago
  Latest projected price for the lidar unit is $500 to $1000 e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-reality/ https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-cheap-make-self-driving-re... No-one is expecting to use experimental $75000 Velodyne units in production.
joshuamorton 7y ago
Most of the non-Tesla systems do. Waymo uses lidar, radar, and cameras. The cruise vehicles I see around have lidar and radar as well, and I just assume everyone has cameras because they're cheap and easy to stick somewhere. To be specific about waymo (to be clear I work at Google, but don't actually have any special info on this), look at the photo in [0]. The cone thing on top is a lidar, but also has cameras in the larger part under the cone. The spinny thing on the front is also probably a lidar. The fin that looks like an extra mirror on the back, and the two on the front have radar. There's also probably a forward facing radar mounted on the nose somewhere near the grille. [0]: https://waymo.com/ https://waymo.com/
- dmix 7y ago
  So self driving cars are basically going to be really expensive for the first while as the sensors take time to reduce in price plus the computer in the back and less distance from the battery. Sounds like a reasonable trade off. No one needs to own these cars just rent them on demand. Plus some wealthy people in the early adoption curve.
kjksf 7y ago
According to a recent interview with pony.ai (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VcpZnIg3M0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VcpZnIg3M0) the cost to retrofit a car with all necessary sensors is $75k. A Lidar is a significant part of that. If $40k Tesla can do as well as $40k car + $75k of sensors (including lidar) it's economical game over. Tesla wins by a wide margin. The $75k will drop in time, but the battle will likely happen before the price of lidars drop significantly enough.
- new_realist 7y ago
  If self driving becomes a reality robotaxis will retail for several hundred thousand dollars.
  - marvin 7y ago
    They will certainly have an economic value of multiple hundred thousand dollars, but that applies to all manufacturers. So if a manufacturer is able to produce non-LIDAR self-driving cars and sells those cars to consumers for $100,000 less than the competition, you can bet that they’ll still capture the robotaxi rental value that is there, through an app store-like agreement. Leaving the money on the table would obviously not happen, unless it was intended to drive the competition out of business. There would probably be room for both these models (direct sales that capture much of the self-driving value and leasing), but regardless there are obviously strong incentives for a 5- or 6-figure reduction in costs.

threeseed 7y ago

Actually there was a presentation given by one of their Lead Data Scientists describing their ML architecture. At no point was radar mentioned. They are purely relying on vision to identity cars, obstacles, traffic lights etc with dozens of models each focused on one particular 'type'. Radar by the sounds of it is being used purely as a fallback. The question is if the vision systems fail to recognise an obstacle at high speed is the radar long range enough to compensate in time. Presentation: https://slideslive.com/38917690/multitask-learning-in-the-wilderness https://slideslive.com/38917690/multitask-learning-in-the-wi...

kjksf 7y ago
Actually, they did mention radar during Autonomy Investor Day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE). Also, https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot says: "A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength that is able to see through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead." So it's rather bizarre that you would speculate about how they're not using radar when they explicitly say they do.
- new_realist 7y ago
  There is zero chance a radar will recognize a traffic light. It is prone to false positives, to boot. Its only use is tracking large metal objects: cars and trucks, for the purpose of adaptive cruise control.
- threeseed 7y ago
  Elon Musk or the actual Data Scientist working on it. I wonder who to trust.

liability 7y ago

Musk badly wants for you to not realize that nobody is proposing LIDAR-only, but are rather proposing LIDAR+optical+radar. Musk argues against straw men. (Also the radar Telsa is using has jack-shit for angular resolution. It can't tell the difference between a tree next to the road and a fire truck parked right across it. Consequently that radar has very limited utility.)

kjksf 7y ago
More accurately, Musk doesn't care what others think is needed for self-driving, so your aspersions about Musk badly wanting us to think one way or another are not supported by facts. Neither Tesla nor Musk make a big deal of lack of lidar. The only reason his views on the subject are public (and so hotly discussed) is because during Autonomy Investor Day he was asked by an investor why Tesla doesn't use a lidar. So he answered the question. You might not agree with his reasoning but he's not on some "NO LIDAR" publicity tour, trying to change your mind. Here's the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE Watch the whole thing. The first time Musk mentions lack of lidar is after being asked.
- new_realist 7y ago
  He should care what experts think. Whenever someone probes Musk in their own area of expertise, they find his knowledge is that of a stubborn, overconfident dilettante.
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    I think any expert is going to be able to outshine Musk in their area of expertise, but where Musk is great is in seeing the bigger picture. Musk simply doesn't have the time to become an expert in everything, he has to execute now.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- 7y ago

BluSyn 7y ago

Exactly. What is rarely mentioned is his exact quote on the reasoning for radar vs. lidar: “If you’re going to use active photon generation, don’t use visible wavelength, because with passive optical you’ve taken care of all visible wavelength stuff. You want to use a wavelength that’s occlusion-penetrating like radar. LIDAR is just active photon generation in the visible spectrum.” This article is still missing the point when talking about redundancies. LIDAR only works in essentially perfect weather ("not occlusion-penetrating"). Even if it serves only as a "redundancy" there's no advantage in relying on a sensor suite that operates in a less-safe mode in the most adverse road conditions. So basically if you are driving in snow or fog, your LIDAR-based AV has to fall back to Radar+Cameras. If that system can pass all the safety tests in the worst-case road condition then there is no value in the additional sensors that add expense but no safety margin. What's even more overlooked is power consumption. LIDAR is far more power intensive, especially when we're talking about multiple packages per vehicle. In the future world of Autonomous Electric Vehicle Fleets, the vehicles using LIDAR will get significantly less range efficiency than their radar counterparts and cost significantly more to build. In a fleet scenario where every margin counts this will result in a significant economic pressure to ditch LIDAR. So in the end I think Elon will be proved right. Those currently investing in LIDAR-based systems will eventually ditch it for purely practical economic reasons. Those that don't will be completely destroyed in the open market. The real competitive advantage for AEV's is in the software, not hardware. LIDAR is a crutch for bad software that reaches a theoretical maximum far short of what is needed for economically-viable LVL5 autonomy. I'll restate this clearly: there's simply no economic or technological advantage to using LIDAR for AEV's.

joshuamorton 7y ago
Lidar doesn't use visible spectrum light. They're usually infrared, so Musk's quote makes no sense. You're making a lot of strong assumptions to draw your conclusions: that commodity cameras and radar can compete on measurement accuracy with lidar systems, and that lidar costs won't decrease with additional investment (we've already seen costs decrease, by like a factor of 10x in less than a decade). The power questions also aren't cut and dry: if you need extra in-vehicle GPUs to support the radar+camera approach, you may well be using more power than a lidar based approach. There's also no real requirement that AVs operate in snow or dense fog. Those are only considerations in certain climates in certain seasons. You don't actually need the safety system to pass the safety tests (that don't currently exist) in worst case conditions if the vehicle works anyway. Why optimize for the worst case first? I'll respond clearly: We're multiple computer vision leaps forward away from what Elon needs for success. They're easily half a decade behind Lidar based systems. And people die as a consequence of putting those systems on the road.