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Tesla auto-pilot keeps confusing moon with traffic light then slowing down
- vajrabum 5y agoThere's a possibly or partially apocryphal story about the moonrise causing a false alarm of a Russian ballistic missile attack from the BMEWS system in 1960 when they first turned it on in Thule. Anyway the idea that there are certain kinds of bugs which reoccur from one generation of system to another is amusing or sobering depending on the consequences. http://taihendaro.cynic.net/2010/01/moon-as-soviet-missle-attack.html http://taihendaro.cynic.net/2010/01/moon-as-soviet-missle-at...
- nomrom 5y agoUse lidar, goddamnit.
- SirWart 5y agolidar isn’t able to read the state of traffic lights as far as I know, and I believe lidar based systems detect the location of traffic lights from maps
- chrisfosterelli 5y agoLidar cannot identify the state of a traffic light but it can confirm and understand its physical position.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y agoLidar can't tell a streetlight from a traffic light, so this has to be resolved by vision anyway.
- asdff 5y agoThey look different so it should be able to tell them apart if the model has been trained on these shapes. My robot vacuum uses lidar, the maps it makes of my apartment when it cleans are remarkably accurate where you can identify certain objects pretty clearly.
- diamondlovesyou 5y agoYeah. But that's not what the OG comment is suggesting. The use of Lidar here would rule out a light resembling a traffic signal by virtue of there being no laser reflection of that object: lidar would complement vision to rule out false positives.
- function_seven 5y agoIf you overlay the point cloud with the image you're interpreting, it should become apparent that the "yellow light" has no accompanying red or green lamps, no pole holding it, no shroud around it, and is at some distance exceeding the depth limits of your lidar.
- Tempest1981 5y agoI wonder if the concern is that LiDAR looks "ugly" or nerdy on the front of the car. And a bit more aero drag.
- dpiers 5y agoElon can't afford to put LIDAR on cars and sell them to a large audience. It's still too expensive. So instead, he makes excuses for why they don't do it while rolling out objectively worse perception systems.
- porphyra 5y agoLidar can be embedded in the headlights or on the rear view mirror; there is no need for ugly protrusions.
- leesec 5y agoYeah, then they could never ever ship like every other Lidar company
- hughrr 5y agoI only have two cameras and have never confused the moon with traffic lights.
- jeffbee 5y agoIf your head was in a vice and your eyeballs were superglued into the straight-ahead position you might have more trouble.
- arcticfox 5y agoThat's not a great comparison, since our focal area is different than that of cameras. I'm pretty sure anyone looking at the camera feeds in a Tesla wouldn't be confused either; this is a software problem.
- doublesocket 5y agoSo tesla just needs to make the cameras on their cars swivel around, Thomas the tank engine style?
- dragonwriter 5y agoMy three-year-old has mistaken a streetlight seen through her bedroom window for the moon more than once, but then I don’t let her drive either. EDIT: Though even that isn't a traffic light, and not the other way around.
- SigmundA 5y agoYou also are making posts on the internet describing your abilities, you seem to have a much more advanced intelligence that might be hard for a computer in a car to replicate.
- nr2x 5y agoWhich is why the computer needs a cheat code in the form of LIDAR to compete.
- mertd 5y agoIs it slowing down because it is going 65 on a 55mph zone?
- paulpauper 5y agoThe moon appears white/grey. Traffic lights are red, green, or yellow. Seems easy enough to make a distinction. Additionally the relative size of the moon in the sky does not change.
- jcranmer 5y ago> The moon appears white/grey. Not all the time. I've seen reddish/orangeish moons, especially if it's something near the horizon near sunset or sunrise. It's also reddish during lunar eclipses.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse#Lunar_eclipse_appearance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse#Lunar_eclipse_ap...
- tapoxi 5y agoHow much of this company is smoke and mirrors?
- bpodgursky 5y agoLess than average.
- RaketenStadt 5y agoPosted a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27934539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27934539
- S_A_P 5y agoI get that this is a problem, and if I paid 10 grand for this feature I would be pissed too if it put me in danger. But it also seems that compared with many things they are working on a more solvable problem with more data.
- gerash 5y agoI can't understand why instead of using all the possible senses: vision, auditory, radar, lidar they want to only use vision as if there's some sense of "purity" in doing that.
- soperj 5y agoIt's entirely cost.
- stevenpetryk 5y agoI mean, it's gotta be style and complexity too. LIDAR are quite ugly on test vehicles. Cameras are much simpler and easier to hide among the body.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y agoBecause Tesla lacks money? Their automotive gross margin is 28% (Toyota is at 17.76%). If one automaker could afford LIDAR, it's Tesla.
- soperj 5y agoLIDAR has come down a lot in cost over the last decade, but it would still eat up that whole 28% and more.
- nr2x 5y agoPure cost cutting at expense of safety certainly.
- jliptzin 5y agoHumans do fine with only 2 cameras
- HoDaMoFoDor 5y agoHumans also have GI.
- natvert 5y agoThis is a problem with learning the appropriate context. In the case of a yellow traffic light, there should be a traffic light fixture and two other (unlit) lights. Without this context, it becomes apparent the yellow pixels in a circular shape (representation to the network) are not a traffic light at all. Tesla’s vision/ml systems are amazing. I would love to learn more about how unit testing for this type of error is done. Without some intermediate semantic representation, I don't see how these large, multi-head, end-to-end systems can isolate and regression? System tests are maybe possible, but it's unclear how well a system test would generalize to related, but unseen cases.
- thehoff 5y agoI've definitely driven through places where there is only one light. Blinks red for stop (no stop sign). Many times, for cross traffic you'll have the one light but blinking yellow as a warning at the intersection.
- porphyra 5y agoBut in foggy or dark situations, a yellow light can indeed appear as a floating yellow circle.
- trangus_1985 5y ago> Tesla’s vision/ml systems are amazing More importantly, they're the only ones accessible to the average consumer. Waymo/Zoox/Daimler all have equally if not more impressive systems. A real issue with tesla is that they want to be vision-only, which is going to make getting to level 5 first almost impossible. BTW - knowing where the moon is happens to be an extremely solved problem.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago> knowing where the moon is happens to be an extremely solved problem. It's true... but I don't think that's how Tesla would solve it. Their goal is to create a neural network "driver" which can drive in any place even if it has never seen it before. They'd rather teach their neural network that the moon and stoplights are not to be confused visually. Thought I suppose in searching for training examples they could use the known position of the moon for approximate labeling.
- jmu1234567890 5y agoThat does kind of look like a traffic light in haze or fog
- zigzag312 5y agoWhy it doesn't just calculate moon's position given current date, time of day and coordinates?
- stevenpetryk 5y agoYeah, this is what I do when I drive. Otherwise I think it's a traffic light and I panic.
- zigzag312 5y ago:) That's exactly what Teslas do currently.
- Darmody 5y agoAnd what if the moon is not visible but there's a traffic light where the moon should be?
- neonnoodle 5y ago```recalculating route...driving to: moon```
- dyingkneepad 5y agoSo if I buy a truck and paint a big traffic light on its back and maybe even put a red light there I will be fooling all Teslas? Count me in! Edit: this also reminds me of those Road Runner episodes where Road Runner paints a rock wall like it's the continuation of the road so that Coyote can smack his head on it.
- cma 5y agoAn even harder case: https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-bamboozled-truck-traffic-lights https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-bamboozled-tru...
- athenot 5y agoSeveral European countries have a white or yellow reflective border around traffic lights to help with recognition, especially for those who might be color-blind: with a bright rectangle, it's easier to see the position of which light is lit, rather that only rely on the color. A couple decades later, I'm now noticing some traffic lights in the US starting to gain this feature. I'm sure it will help with machines trying to parse the traffic light state... and also humans.