9 ms·

The monorail posts and planters would be trivially handled by LIDAR. Tesla's aversion to time of flight sensors often strikes me a premature given our level of

The monorail posts and planters would be trivially handled by LIDAR. Tesla's aversion to time of flight sensors often strikes me a premature given our level of planning/perception technology.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
They should be trivially handled by stereopsis and structure from motion as well. Stereo+time photogrammetry has been solved well enough to not steer directly towards large obstacles for decades. Overreliance on machine learning pixel models to classify everything in view is the real problem.
- flowerlad 5y ago
  Why not have redundant sensors and crosscheck them? Boeing 737 Max had only one AOA sensor [1], and that wasn't a great idea. https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-max-faa/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-ma...
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    No great reason not to _plan_ to use them. I mean, lidar is still kinda not great right now, but I'm sure it will be great at some point. But they could already be doing better with just cameras than they're currently doing, so why not fix that?
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    Right, so what happens when one says wall, and one says clear air? You brake? That is what happens now with phantom braking. Approaching a bridge? camera sees air, radar sees wall, slam on brakes. You want the best sensor type over a high-fidelity sensor and a lower fidelity sensor. The Tesla system has 8 cameras (3 forward), so they def have overlap between what they are considering better cameras. Time will prove which approach wins.
    - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
      The post I was responding to said lidar, not radar. But if you want to switch to radar, we can talk about that too. > camera sees air, radar sees wall, slam on brakes Seeing bridges as walls is not a fundamental property of radar. That's an implementation problem. If cars are doing radar poorly, maybe the fix is to start doing it less poorly instead of throwing it away entirely.
      - brianwawok 5y ago
        Well, that was specifically about blending two different sensors with different characteristics. For you walking, it would be like blending your eyes with your nose. If your eyes tells you the floor is safe, and your nose smells something bad, do you stop? Anytime you have two different sensors with different characteristics, you want "the best". Your body uses your eyes to see where to walk, and your nose to test if pizza is rotten. Blending multiple sensor types is tricky. So back to LIDAR.. same difference. Camera and LIDAR have different profiles. I think it's fine to use either, but I think trying to blend the two is a sub-optimal solution to the problem. Again, this is my guess from what I know. I could be wrong, and the winning technology could use 12 different sensors (vision + radar + lidar + smell + microphones), and blend them all to drive. Cool if someone pulls it off! But if I had to do it myself or place a bet, I would put it on a single sensor type.
        BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
        Unfortunately your example is inapt because the center of your vision and your peripheral vision may as well be entirely separate systems that don't overlap, and the way brains apply focus doesn't translate to how cameras work. Your scenario is closer to asking about the center of your focus saying the path in front of you is clear and your peripheral vision detecting inbound motion from the side. Peripheral motion detection overrides the clear forward view, but it's because they aren't trying to record the same information. Here's why: > If your eyes tells you the floor is safe, and your nose smells something bad, do you stop? Absolutely, yes, if the bad smell smells like dog shit or vomit or something else that I definitely don't want to step in. If I'm walking, I'm very unlikely to be looking directly at my feet and much more likely to be looking ahead to do predictive path planning. I definitely do stop at least transiently in your scenario and then apply extra visual focus to the ground right in front of my feet so that I don't step on dog shit. The center of my vision is great at discerning details, but peripheral vision is terrible for that. Anyway, the obvious answer to your inquiry based on my explanation here is to use confidence weighting and adaptive focus. If I think something might be happening somewhere, I focus my available resources directly at the problem.
  - bumby 5y ago
    >Boeing 737 Max had only one AOA sensor Just a small nit-pick but it makes the case against Boeing worse. The airframe had multiple AOA sensors but the base software only used one sensor reading. Note the image in [1] shows readings from both a "left" and "right" AOA. From your link: >software design for relying on data from a single AOA sensor Boeing sold a software upgrade to read both AOA devices. (This still leaves the problem that if the two AOAs disagree there might be cases where you don't know which is bad). The fact that they listed MCAS as 'hazardous' rather than 'catastrophic' means it was allowed to have a single point of failure. It also means they may not have fully understood their own design.[1] [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/black-box-data-reveals-lion-air-pilots-struggle-against-boeings-737-max-flight-control-system/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/black...
    - pas 5y ago
      The high level problem was the whole mess that Boeing and the FAA forced themselves into by lying to pilots about the plane being like the old plane. This motivated Boeing to solve everything in a sort of clandestine way, which meant there was no proper error handling, and Boeing simply covered their asses by pointing to the runaway stabilizer checklist, which they claimed was sufficient to handle MCAS problems. This should never have been greenlighted, approved, manufactured, designed. This went against a culture of safety (least surprise, etc) at every level.
      - bumby 5y ago
        It's the unfortunate case that they succumbed to schedule pressure. This is similar to the Space Shuttle Challenger decision that led to catastrophe. I think "lying" may be too strong of a word, but they were certainly incentivized to believe it was just a modification of an existing airframe. If I remember correctly, Boeing was essentially told by an airline that if they don't come up with a design quickly the airline would instead move their business to airbus. Certifying a modification to an existing design is much faster than certifying a brand new design, so every management decision was made with that lens. Add to it the political side where the competitor is a non-US company and it gets more complicated. Add to that the FAA is likely too understaffed to provide adequate oversight so they instead delegate it to the manufacturer. This will be another case study in misaligned incentives and the tradeoffs of engineering decisions under uncertainty of both business and design risk.
- marvin 5y ago
  If it's so easy, there must be a reason why Tesla's team hasn't accomplished it. They're not idiots.
  - avereveard 5y ago
    they aren't idiots but they are working with one hand tied their back from the overpromising boss negating them things like radar, lidar and stereo cameras (as the triple camera are just different zoom levels).
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Stereopsis doesn't work for these columns because the car only has a single camera seeing them. Structure from motion gets bad results from textureless solids where the edges might be a moving shadow.
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    > the car only has a single camera seeing them. The view diagrams on https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot seem to indicate that two cameras would have had the columns in view. But if you're right, there's no good reason for it to be the case and perfectly demonstrates gross overreliance on single frame ML.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
I feel like the Xbox Kinect from 2010 would be a better vision solution than what they’ve got here, at least for the 20 feet ahead of you.
- schmorptron 5y ago
  Until you have multiple cars trying to project multiple arrays of infrared dots onto objects 20 meters away in bright sunlight and then getting an accurate reading on which of the array kerfuffle is theirs.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Does radar have this crosstalk problem as well?
  - amluto 5y ago
    A very quickly pulsed projector and a correspondingly short exposure would strongly decrease the chance of observing someone else’s dots. It would improve performance in bright light as well.
    - schmorptron 5y ago
      Good point!
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    If I remember right, the Kinect actually still handled this reasonably well for a couple of overlapping sensors. In a driving scenario other cars' lightfields should also be blurred.
CyanLite2 5y ago
Even simple highway-mapping that GM/Ford does would've caught this. Every few months they send a LIDAR-equipped van to pre-map highways and common roads and send out OTA updates for their Level2 driving systems. Sounds low-tech but GM/Ford cars aren't driving into concrete posts.
- TheParkShark 5y ago
  Those obstacles wouldn’t even be on the highway so whats your point?

The monorail posts and planters would be trivially handled by LIDAR. Tesla's aversion to time of flight sensors often strikes me a premature given our level of planning/perception technology.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago

They should be trivially handled by stereopsis and structure from motion as well. Stereo+time photogrammetry has been solved well enough to not steer directly towards large obstacles for decades. Overreliance on machine learning pixel models to classify everything in view is the real problem.

flowerlad 5y ago
Why not have redundant sensors and crosscheck them? Boeing 737 Max had only one AOA sensor [1], and that wasn't a great idea. https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-max-faa/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-ma...
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  No great reason not to _plan_ to use them. I mean, lidar is still kinda not great right now, but I'm sure it will be great at some point. But they could already be doing better with just cameras than they're currently doing, so why not fix that?
- brianwawok 5y ago
  Right, so what happens when one says wall, and one says clear air? You brake? That is what happens now with phantom braking. Approaching a bridge? camera sees air, radar sees wall, slam on brakes. You want the best sensor type over a high-fidelity sensor and a lower fidelity sensor. The Tesla system has 8 cameras (3 forward), so they def have overlap between what they are considering better cameras. Time will prove which approach wins.
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    The post I was responding to said lidar, not radar. But if you want to switch to radar, we can talk about that too. > camera sees air, radar sees wall, slam on brakes Seeing bridges as walls is not a fundamental property of radar. That's an implementation problem. If cars are doing radar poorly, maybe the fix is to start doing it less poorly instead of throwing it away entirely.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      Well, that was specifically about blending two different sensors with different characteristics. For you walking, it would be like blending your eyes with your nose. If your eyes tells you the floor is safe, and your nose smells something bad, do you stop? Anytime you have two different sensors with different characteristics, you want "the best". Your body uses your eyes to see where to walk, and your nose to test if pizza is rotten. Blending multiple sensor types is tricky. So back to LIDAR.. same difference. Camera and LIDAR have different profiles. I think it's fine to use either, but I think trying to blend the two is a sub-optimal solution to the problem. Again, this is my guess from what I know. I could be wrong, and the winning technology could use 12 different sensors (vision + radar + lidar + smell + microphones), and blend them all to drive. Cool if someone pulls it off! But if I had to do it myself or place a bet, I would put it on a single sensor type.
      - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
        Unfortunately your example is inapt because the center of your vision and your peripheral vision may as well be entirely separate systems that don't overlap, and the way brains apply focus doesn't translate to how cameras work. Your scenario is closer to asking about the center of your focus saying the path in front of you is clear and your peripheral vision detecting inbound motion from the side. Peripheral motion detection overrides the clear forward view, but it's because they aren't trying to record the same information. Here's why: > If your eyes tells you the floor is safe, and your nose smells something bad, do you stop? Absolutely, yes, if the bad smell smells like dog shit or vomit or something else that I definitely don't want to step in. If I'm walking, I'm very unlikely to be looking directly at my feet and much more likely to be looking ahead to do predictive path planning. I definitely do stop at least transiently in your scenario and then apply extra visual focus to the ground right in front of my feet so that I don't step on dog shit. The center of my vision is great at discerning details, but peripheral vision is terrible for that. Anyway, the obvious answer to your inquiry based on my explanation here is to use confidence weighting and adaptive focus. If I think something might be happening somewhere, I focus my available resources directly at the problem.
- bumby 5y ago
  >Boeing 737 Max had only one AOA sensor Just a small nit-pick but it makes the case against Boeing worse. The airframe had multiple AOA sensors but the base software only used one sensor reading. Note the image in [1] shows readings from both a "left" and "right" AOA. From your link: >software design for relying on data from a single AOA sensor Boeing sold a software upgrade to read both AOA devices. (This still leaves the problem that if the two AOAs disagree there might be cases where you don't know which is bad). The fact that they listed MCAS as 'hazardous' rather than 'catastrophic' means it was allowed to have a single point of failure. It also means they may not have fully understood their own design.[1] [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/black-box-data-reveals-lion-air-pilots-struggle-against-boeings-737-max-flight-control-system/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/black...
  - pas 5y ago
    The high level problem was the whole mess that Boeing and the FAA forced themselves into by lying to pilots about the plane being like the old plane. This motivated Boeing to solve everything in a sort of clandestine way, which meant there was no proper error handling, and Boeing simply covered their asses by pointing to the runaway stabilizer checklist, which they claimed was sufficient to handle MCAS problems. This should never have been greenlighted, approved, manufactured, designed. This went against a culture of safety (least surprise, etc) at every level.
    - bumby 5y ago
      It's the unfortunate case that they succumbed to schedule pressure. This is similar to the Space Shuttle Challenger decision that led to catastrophe. I think "lying" may be too strong of a word, but they were certainly incentivized to believe it was just a modification of an existing airframe. If I remember correctly, Boeing was essentially told by an airline that if they don't come up with a design quickly the airline would instead move their business to airbus. Certifying a modification to an existing design is much faster than certifying a brand new design, so every management decision was made with that lens. Add to it the political side where the competitor is a non-US company and it gets more complicated. Add to that the FAA is likely too understaffed to provide adequate oversight so they instead delegate it to the manufacturer. This will be another case study in misaligned incentives and the tradeoffs of engineering decisions under uncertainty of both business and design risk.
marvin 5y ago
If it's so easy, there must be a reason why Tesla's team hasn't accomplished it. They're not idiots.
- avereveard 5y ago
  they aren't idiots but they are working with one hand tied their back from the overpromising boss negating them things like radar, lidar and stereo cameras (as the triple camera are just different zoom levels).
londons_explore 5y ago
Stereopsis doesn't work for these columns because the car only has a single camera seeing them. Structure from motion gets bad results from textureless solids where the edges might be a moving shadow.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  > the car only has a single camera seeing them. The view diagrams on https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot seem to indicate that two cameras would have had the columns in view. But if you're right, there's no good reason for it to be the case and perfectly demonstrates gross overreliance on single frame ML.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

I feel like the Xbox Kinect from 2010 would be a better vision solution than what they’ve got here, at least for the 20 feet ahead of you.

schmorptron 5y ago
Until you have multiple cars trying to project multiple arrays of infrared dots onto objects 20 meters away in bright sunlight and then getting an accurate reading on which of the array kerfuffle is theirs.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Does radar have this crosstalk problem as well?
- amluto 5y ago
  A very quickly pulsed projector and a correspondingly short exposure would strongly decrease the chance of observing someone else’s dots. It would improve performance in bright light as well.
  - schmorptron 5y ago
    Good point!
- nitrogen 5y ago
  If I remember right, the Kinect actually still handled this reasonably well for a couple of overlapping sensors. In a driving scenario other cars' lightfields should also be blurred.

CyanLite2 5y ago

Even simple highway-mapping that GM/Ford does would've caught this. Every few months they send a LIDAR-equipped van to pre-map highways and common roads and send out OTA updates for their Level2 driving systems. Sounds low-tech but GM/Ford cars aren't driving into concrete posts.

TheParkShark 5y ago
Those obstacles wouldn’t even be on the highway so whats your point?