3 ms·

I might be completely wrong here, but hasn’t their collision incidents often been with weird things in the road such as sideways 18 wheelers and yellow lines he

I might be completely wrong here, but hasn’t their collision incidents often been with weird things in the road such as sideways 18 wheelers and yellow lines heading into barricades? They’ve put lots of effort into tracking some pedestrian waaaaay over on the side passing behind trees, and that is really really impressive. But it seems to me the only reason it doesn’t hit a car in front on the road is because the neural net has tagged it as a “car”. I would like to see some system that also doesn’t collide into any sort of random object directly in front. Along these lines, I read about the ditching of the radar, and I understand the technical limitations with the phantom stops under overpasses. But could someone help me understand why Teslas don’t just have the run of the mill Camry collision braking as a secondary measure independently?

MontyCarloHall 5y ago
> I would like to see some system that also doesn’t collide into any sort of random object directly in front. The flip side of this is false positives: you don’t want a car slamming on the brakes because of a plastic shopping bag or other soft piece of trash lying in the road. This is a hard problem, regardless of technology employed. On the other hand, you need the car to distinguish a mattress lying in the road from road markings. This is an easy problem if you have depth sensors, which brings me to my next point: > But could someone help me understand why Teslas don’t just have the run of the mill Camry collision braking as a secondary measure independently? Because for whatever reason (hubris?) Tesla insists on eschewing LIDAR/RADAR for 100% camera based systems. Not being able to explicitly sense depth is really kneecapping their system’s abilities.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  > Because for whatever reason (hubris?) Tesla insists on eschewing LIDAR/RADAR for 100% camera based systems. It's a retrofit problem. The moment you admit that you need LIDAR/RADAR, every Tesla on the road loses value unless you're willing to retrofit them all. Comma.ai has sidetracked this issue by basically using the built-in sensors on the vehicles, and there's rumors of a camera-only version for those without radar coming in the future. This would allow any car that has fly by wire with steering control to use it for "level 2 autonomy"
  - ajross 5y ago
    > Comma.ai has sidetracked this issue by basically using the built-in sensors on the vehicles Comma/OpenPilot doesn't work with Lidar anywhere I'm aware of...
    - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
      I'm not sure about that, it's supposedly radar but I'm not aware of any cars on the road that use lidar.
- tw04 5y ago
  >The flip side of this is false positives: you don’t want a car slamming on the brakes because of a plastic shopping bag or other soft piece of trash lying in the road. This is a hard problem, regardless of technology employed. Is this really a problem with current vehicles? I've had ford, gm, and dodge/ram vehicles over the last ~8 years with forward collision sensors and automatic braking and never once had any of them slam on the brakes due to a plastic shopping bag or other piece of soft trash lying in the road. I honestly haven't even had them give warning from one of those items being in the road (or any item that wasn't a car to be honest).
  - ajross 5y ago
    Radar isn't going to signal on a shopping bag, but I bet you it would for a mylar baloon. Existing radar-based collision sensors really aren't that accurate anyway. They are quite late with detection in most cases, precisely because they have to be tuned not to brake on false positives. They want a good strong signal, at which point the best they can do is reduce the speed of an inevitable collision.
  - ipsum2 5y ago
    This is because those cars are using radar (a plastic bag probably would show up as a small blip), but Tesla is removing radar from their cars to rely solely on cameras.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  > The flip side of this is false positives: you don’t want a car slamming on the brakes because of a plastic shopping bag or other soft piece of trash lying in the road. This is a hard problem, regardless of technology employed. Driving is hard. I totalled* a car trying to avoid what ended up being a black trash bag full of foam rubber on an on ramp at night. * By insurance standards, it was perfectly drivable.

MontyCarloHall 5y ago

> I would like to see some system that also doesn’t collide into any sort of random object directly in front. The flip side of this is false positives: you don’t want a car slamming on the brakes because of a plastic shopping bag or other soft piece of trash lying in the road. This is a hard problem, regardless of technology employed. On the other hand, you need the car to distinguish a mattress lying in the road from road markings. This is an easy problem if you have depth sensors, which brings me to my next point: > But could someone help me understand why Teslas don’t just have the run of the mill Camry collision braking as a secondary measure independently? Because for whatever reason (hubris?) Tesla insists on eschewing LIDAR/RADAR for 100% camera based systems. Not being able to explicitly sense depth is really kneecapping their system’s abilities.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
> Because for whatever reason (hubris?) Tesla insists on eschewing LIDAR/RADAR for 100% camera based systems. It's a retrofit problem. The moment you admit that you need LIDAR/RADAR, every Tesla on the road loses value unless you're willing to retrofit them all. Comma.ai has sidetracked this issue by basically using the built-in sensors on the vehicles, and there's rumors of a camera-only version for those without radar coming in the future. This would allow any car that has fly by wire with steering control to use it for "level 2 autonomy"
- ajross 5y ago
  > Comma.ai has sidetracked this issue by basically using the built-in sensors on the vehicles Comma/OpenPilot doesn't work with Lidar anywhere I'm aware of...
  - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that, it's supposedly radar but I'm not aware of any cars on the road that use lidar.
tw04 5y ago
>The flip side of this is false positives: you don’t want a car slamming on the brakes because of a plastic shopping bag or other soft piece of trash lying in the road. This is a hard problem, regardless of technology employed. Is this really a problem with current vehicles? I've had ford, gm, and dodge/ram vehicles over the last ~8 years with forward collision sensors and automatic braking and never once had any of them slam on the brakes due to a plastic shopping bag or other piece of soft trash lying in the road. I honestly haven't even had them give warning from one of those items being in the road (or any item that wasn't a car to be honest).
- ajross 5y ago
  Radar isn't going to signal on a shopping bag, but I bet you it would for a mylar baloon. Existing radar-based collision sensors really aren't that accurate anyway. They are quite late with detection in most cases, precisely because they have to be tuned not to brake on false positives. They want a good strong signal, at which point the best they can do is reduce the speed of an inevitable collision.
- ipsum2 5y ago
  This is because those cars are using radar (a plastic bag probably would show up as a small blip), but Tesla is removing radar from their cars to rely solely on cameras.
cptskippy 5y ago
> The flip side of this is false positives: you don’t want a car slamming on the brakes because of a plastic shopping bag or other soft piece of trash lying in the road. This is a hard problem, regardless of technology employed. Driving is hard. I totalled* a car trying to avoid what ended up being a black trash bag full of foam rubber on an on ramp at night. * By insurance standards, it was perfectly drivable.