4 ms·

Lidar is kind of magic. The cost of tech seems to reduce pretty substantially over time. When folks argue that lidar should not be used - other than cost I don'

Lidar is kind of magic. The cost of tech seems to reduce pretty substantially over time. When folks argue that lidar should not be used - other than cost I don't get it, it seems to give you some great added awareness of environment, especially looking at for example Waymo and some others really advancing things in this space. 5 years from now? Going to be pretty slick?

BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
> When folks argue that lidar should not be used This is a strawman. Nobody argues that it should not be used, only that driving is demonstrably possible without it.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  I believe tesla argues this
- snet0 6y ago
  > “Lidar is a fool’s errand,” Elon Musk said. “Anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> Like, one appendix is bad Except that the appendix is a useful organ. Had it been truly useless it would have evolved away long ago, yet we find dinosaurs had them too. I think Musk is also wrong about lidar. It probably does have a place in this problem even if, like his blind spot re the appendix, Musk doesn't currently understand what that place may be. "Evolution Of The Human Appendix: A Biological 'Remnant' No More" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.h...
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      At least one purpose of the appendix has been already been found, a long time ago. It serves as an isolated/safe repository for gut bacteria in case an adverse event wipes out the rest of the population.
- random5634 6y ago
  comma @comma_ai We are so committed to LIDAR being useless that we're dumping our LIDARs for cheap! Buy them and start your own Self Driving Car company! https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344?lang=en https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344?lang... I can find plenty more.
kfarr 6y ago
Yes you could think of an analogous statement being: why do we need lenses? A raw exposed imager is just fine, we can use machine learning to extrapolate what the lens would be providing. And yes that's true but why in the hell would you want to spend time doing that? Self driving is hard enough already.
- random5634 6y ago
  Exactly - cheat freely to start - mapping, lidar, multicam etc. Eventually sure, two camera vision and audio only maybe?
  - redisman 6y ago
    Why would that be optimal? Sounds like you'd just be replicating humans - who are pretty lousy and non-optimal even in cars designed specifically for them!
    - random5634 6y ago
      Not saying optimal, but possible, given humans do it. One note, we do use sound as an aid, I'm surprised more auto companies don't use audio.
m463 6y ago
I think this article touches on some of it: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is-doomed-elon-musk-says/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is... I think it might be like ray tracing. It's the holy grail of graphics, which makes engineers very positive about it. Yet it is slow and expensive and most problems do perfectly fine if not better with "conventional graphics".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
KaiserPro 6y ago
Ego. Lidars are expensive, fairly large, power hungry and depending on what your using them for, noisy. Musk doesn't like them because they are expensive. Not because they don't work. He's spent billions trying to polish the turd that is their monocular depth estimation + radar system. Sure its impressive, but its nowhere near good enough for safe autonomy. (I am sceptical that they ever will with that sensor layout. Thats neatly avoiding the issue that there is no redundancy) If you want ground truth data from a moving vehicle, then there is no real alternative to lidar[1]. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either: 1) an idiot 2) a musk fan 3) trying to sell you something. Now, sure for "autopilot" (cruise control) where there isn't that much to do, radar and basic object detection is good enough. But any sign of danger and it backs off, leaving you no time to unfuck the situation. [1] I work for a mapping company, There are other ways to get to <50cm accuracy point clouds, but its not fast and requires a boat load of GPU (in the order of thousands of hours per km driven)
- andbberger 6y ago
  Wait are you serious Tesla isn't even doing stereo vision? I don't know why I charitably assumed that they were
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    From what I can divine they have a front facing nearfield and a front facing farfield camera. The rest of the cameras are spread all over the car.
HALtheWise 6y ago
The article briefly mentions (but does not do justice) to the fact that identifying small objects at extreme range is something that LIDAR is _also_ really bad at, due to extremely low effective resolutions by camera standards. High-end LIDAR units cap out at ~100 channels (roughly equivalent to vertical pixel size), usually over >100deg vertical field of view, for less than one "pixel" per degree. That's not nearly enough to detect a brick at 100m, and pales in comparison to the angular resultions an HD camera with a decent lens can achieve. In general, it's not yet clear to me whether LIDAR is all that useful for the hard parts of the self-driving car problem. We know it's extremely useful for the easy parts (not hitting curbs, other vehicles, or walls), but it's not clear whether LIDAR helps that much with small objects, vehicle behavior prediction, or object classification (paper bag vs. dog)
sliken 6y ago
I've worked with a researchers who use LIDAR heavily. Amazing technology, but aside from cost/weight/size/expense there's one big disadvantage. LIDAR doesn't work like eyes. So in certain conditions LIDAR can see better than human eyes, like say complete darkness. This could lead to a car behaving differently than a human driver which might well cause an accident. In other conditions LIDAR can see much worse than a human. Depending on the fog, snow, rain, dust, tumbleweeds etc can look more solid to a lidar than a human eye. Which can also cause accidents. A human might recognize a whisp of fog, whose outline and volume look like a fallen tree, but a camera would have a better chance. So even with a magic LIDAR that costs $100, has good range, solid state, etc. it's not clear what LIDAR offers over a pair of cameras, or other cheap sensors like cameras, mm band (60 GHz) radar, and ultrasound. Additionally LIDAR systems need cameras anyways. Is that a ambulance or UPS truck? Schoolbus or city bus? Police car or Camry? Does the police car have it's lights on? Did someone flash their high beams at you? Delivery truck or post office truck? Color is hugely important in predicting what's going to happen. Sure you can add cameras to LIDAR, but then why? Doubly is you have two cameras for distance. So I'd love to be wrong, and indisputably LIDAR is getting better, but seems like pairs of cameras might well be the best fit for driving like a human. Doesn't seem like it could ever be LIDAR, but LIDAR + cameras could compete, but what does LIDAR give you over a pair of cameras?
- random5634 6y ago
  It seems like lidar has a good result in certain safety cases. Is that a parked white truck stopped in front of you? I tractor trailor crossing the road? Is that a highway divider I'll be steering you into? These are just some of the accidents I think of with vision that might have been avoided with lidar. In particular, for pedestrians, bicycles, other vehicles, maybe even children running in street, is the limited resolution enough to still substantially increase safety? Where I got with this - hitting a brick is bad. Hitting a person is much worse. A fair number of never hit type items seem to still be picked up with Lidar. But all good points.
  - sliken 6y ago
    Well inherently cameras have much better angular resolution. So for current level of tech you get more pixels per object for any given distance. Lidar's big advantage was a distance for each "pixel", but that advantage seems to mostly disappear for pairs of cameras, at least for common objects like pedestrians, bicycles, most vehicles, etc. However that does depend on edge detection or enough visual detail to be able to match an object through two different perspectives. A featureless white wall that consumes the entire camera view would result in no distance for a stereo camera, but would still work with lidar. Not sure if that's enough of a limitation to break things with say a large white 18-wheeler crossing the road. I've heard new interest in mm wave (60 GHz or so) radar, but no idea where it falls compared to lidar and stereo cameras as far as distance and angular resolution and sample rate.

BugsJustFindMe 6y ago

> When folks argue that lidar should not be used This is a strawman. Nobody argues that it should not be used, only that driving is demonstrably possible without it.

LegitShady 6y ago
I believe tesla argues this
snet0 6y ago
> “Lidar is a fool’s errand,” Elon Musk said. “Anyone relying on lidar is doomed. Doomed! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.”
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> Like, one appendix is bad Except that the appendix is a useful organ. Had it been truly useless it would have evolved away long ago, yet we find dinosaurs had them too. I think Musk is also wrong about lidar. It probably does have a place in this problem even if, like his blind spot re the appendix, Musk doesn't currently understand what that place may be. "Evolution Of The Human Appendix: A Biological 'Remnant' No More" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090820175901.h...
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    At least one purpose of the appendix has been already been found, a long time ago. It serves as an isolated/safe repository for gut bacteria in case an adverse event wipes out the rest of the population.
random5634 6y ago
comma @comma_ai We are so committed to LIDAR being useless that we're dumping our LIDARs for cheap! Buy them and start your own Self Driving Car company! https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344?lang=en https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344?lang... I can find plenty more.

kfarr 6y ago

Yes you could think of an analogous statement being: why do we need lenses? A raw exposed imager is just fine, we can use machine learning to extrapolate what the lens would be providing. And yes that's true but why in the hell would you want to spend time doing that? Self driving is hard enough already.

random5634 6y ago
Exactly - cheat freely to start - mapping, lidar, multicam etc. Eventually sure, two camera vision and audio only maybe?
- redisman 6y ago
  Why would that be optimal? Sounds like you'd just be replicating humans - who are pretty lousy and non-optimal even in cars designed specifically for them!
  - random5634 6y ago
    Not saying optimal, but possible, given humans do it. One note, we do use sound as an aid, I'm surprised more auto companies don't use audio.

m463 6y ago

I think this article touches on some of it: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is-doomed-elon-musk-says/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is... I think it might be like ray tracing. It's the holy grail of graphics, which makes engineers very positive about it. Yet it is slow and expensive and most problems do perfectly fine if not better with "conventional graphics".

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

KaiserPro 6y ago

Ego. Lidars are expensive, fairly large, power hungry and depending on what your using them for, noisy. Musk doesn't like them because they are expensive. Not because they don't work. He's spent billions trying to polish the turd that is their monocular depth estimation + radar system. Sure its impressive, but its nowhere near good enough for safe autonomy. (I am sceptical that they ever will with that sensor layout. Thats neatly avoiding the issue that there is no redundancy) If you want ground truth data from a moving vehicle, then there is no real alternative to lidar[1]. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either: 1) an idiot 2) a musk fan 3) trying to sell you something. Now, sure for "autopilot" (cruise control) where there isn't that much to do, radar and basic object detection is good enough. But any sign of danger and it backs off, leaving you no time to unfuck the situation. [1] I work for a mapping company, There are other ways to get to <50cm accuracy point clouds, but its not fast and requires a boat load of GPU (in the order of thousands of hours per km driven)

andbberger 6y ago
Wait are you serious Tesla isn't even doing stereo vision? I don't know why I charitably assumed that they were
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  From what I can divine they have a front facing nearfield and a front facing farfield camera. The rest of the cameras are spread all over the car.

HALtheWise 6y ago

The article briefly mentions (but does not do justice) to the fact that identifying small objects at extreme range is something that LIDAR is _also_ really bad at, due to extremely low effective resolutions by camera standards. High-end LIDAR units cap out at ~100 channels (roughly equivalent to vertical pixel size), usually over >100deg vertical field of view, for less than one "pixel" per degree. That's not nearly enough to detect a brick at 100m, and pales in comparison to the angular resultions an HD camera with a decent lens can achieve. In general, it's not yet clear to me whether LIDAR is all that useful for the hard parts of the self-driving car problem. We know it's extremely useful for the easy parts (not hitting curbs, other vehicles, or walls), but it's not clear whether LIDAR helps that much with small objects, vehicle behavior prediction, or object classification (paper bag vs. dog)

sliken 6y ago

I've worked with a researchers who use LIDAR heavily. Amazing technology, but aside from cost/weight/size/expense there's one big disadvantage. LIDAR doesn't work like eyes. So in certain conditions LIDAR can see better than human eyes, like say complete darkness. This could lead to a car behaving differently than a human driver which might well cause an accident. In other conditions LIDAR can see much worse than a human. Depending on the fog, snow, rain, dust, tumbleweeds etc can look more solid to a lidar than a human eye. Which can also cause accidents. A human might recognize a whisp of fog, whose outline and volume look like a fallen tree, but a camera would have a better chance. So even with a magic LIDAR that costs $100, has good range, solid state, etc. it's not clear what LIDAR offers over a pair of cameras, or other cheap sensors like cameras, mm band (60 GHz) radar, and ultrasound. Additionally LIDAR systems need cameras anyways. Is that a ambulance or UPS truck? Schoolbus or city bus? Police car or Camry? Does the police car have it's lights on? Did someone flash their high beams at you? Delivery truck or post office truck? Color is hugely important in predicting what's going to happen. Sure you can add cameras to LIDAR, but then why? Doubly is you have two cameras for distance. So I'd love to be wrong, and indisputably LIDAR is getting better, but seems like pairs of cameras might well be the best fit for driving like a human. Doesn't seem like it could ever be LIDAR, but LIDAR + cameras could compete, but what does LIDAR give you over a pair of cameras?

random5634 6y ago
It seems like lidar has a good result in certain safety cases. Is that a parked white truck stopped in front of you? I tractor trailor crossing the road? Is that a highway divider I'll be steering you into? These are just some of the accidents I think of with vision that might have been avoided with lidar. In particular, for pedestrians, bicycles, other vehicles, maybe even children running in street, is the limited resolution enough to still substantially increase safety? Where I got with this - hitting a brick is bad. Hitting a person is much worse. A fair number of never hit type items seem to still be picked up with Lidar. But all good points.
- sliken 6y ago
  Well inherently cameras have much better angular resolution. So for current level of tech you get more pixels per object for any given distance. Lidar's big advantage was a distance for each "pixel", but that advantage seems to mostly disappear for pairs of cameras, at least for common objects like pedestrians, bicycles, most vehicles, etc. However that does depend on edge detection or enough visual detail to be able to match an object through two different perspectives. A featureless white wall that consumes the entire camera view would result in no distance for a stereo camera, but would still work with lidar. Not sure if that's enough of a limitation to break things with say a large white 18-wheeler crossing the road. I've heard new interest in mm wave (60 GHz or so) radar, but no idea where it falls compared to lidar and stereo cameras as far as distance and angular resolution and sample rate.