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They had a falling out with MobileEye, who provided the AP 1.0 hardware. It never used LIDAR. Tesla doesn’t use LIDAR because you need to solve vision anyway. A

by leobg 4y ago

They had a falling out with MobileEye, who provided the AP 1.0 hardware. It never used LIDAR. Tesla doesn’t use LIDAR because you need to solve vision anyway. And once you solve that, LIDAR makes no more sense. (You need to solve vision anyway, because for that object, of which LIDAR tells you is exactly 12.327 ft away, you still need to figure out whether it is a trashcan or a child. And if it is a child, whether it is about to jump on the road or walking away from the road. LIDAR does not tell you these things. It can only tell you how far they are away. It is not some magical sensor which Tesla is just too cheap to employ.)

a9h74j 4y ago
IDK. Avoiding crashing into anything 12.327 ft way might be considered a feature.
xaduha 4y ago
> you still need to figure out whether it is a trashcan or a child Why? First of all don't drive into anything that moves, period. Secondly, if you can avoid bumping into anything at all, do that.
cycomanic 4y ago
I'm not sure you know what lidar is. It gives you 3D images while telling you exactly how far away things are. In fact you can much more easily determine what an object is from Lidar data. That is not to say Lidar doesn't have its issues (and there are quite a few), we likely will need a combination of sensors including cameras, lidar and radar.
- lstodd 4y ago
  IDK what Tesla uses, but what difference there is between LIDAR and a SAR, some zeroes on the wavelength?
  - upbeat_general 4y ago
    The wavelength difference has big implications in terms of the detail that can be resolved due to the surface interactions. Tesla doesn’t use their radar anymore in any case. Only monocular cameras.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    The same change, in the other direction, turns LIDAR into a source of lethal ionising radiation that goes straight through a dozen cars without attenuation.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  Some better examples of his point are how do you determine the color of lights (stoplights, blinkers, brake lights, cop car lights, and so on) so as to make legally correct driving decisions with LIDAR? Some other things LIDAR won't give you: the need to read signs (parking legality, stop signs, speed limits, construction crews with flashing detour directions, painted information on the road like lane markers and speed limits, wrong way signs, and so on). In general, you can't, because the sensor doesn't give you enough information - like color - to let you solve the problem. If you have LIDAR, but not vision you literally can't make a legally correct driving decision in the general case, because you lack the relevant data to make that decision.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Nobody is saying it will be LiDAR only. Every self driving car company (except for Tesla) uses both LiDAR and vision. But they all rely on LiDAR for bounding box detection which is exactly the main problem Tesla FSD has.
    - JoshCole 4y ago
      cycomanic is claiming that leobg is ignorant. They do this despite leobg displaying accurate historical knowledge and stating the way that the sensor works in a way which does not fundamentally disagree with the correction that cycomanic implied leobg needed. As a reader of the comment chain, I have to ask why cycomanic thinks leobg is ignorant - he failed to articulate why. It seems to me that the most contentious and debatable claim that leobg made was the claim that full self driving requires solving vision regardless of whether or not you have LiDAR. If this was the reason - maybe it isn't, but if it was, the fact that everyone uses vision isn't evidence for cycomanic's position - it is evidence for leobg's position. You've retreated from this as the reason that leobg is frightfully ignorant on behalf of cycomanic. That means the next most contentious claim is the claim that builds upon the foundation of the first claim - that vision being required makes LiDAR irrelevant. The problem for you though is that when you make the concession that vision is necessary, you run into a problem. The sensor situations under which LiDAR is much better than vision tend to involve a vision failure through a lack of light or due to heavy occlusion. There is definitely and necessarily a cut off point at which leobg's claim becomes somewhat true. This denies the right to call him ignorant, because the law of charity demands that his point be the thing that maximizes the truth of his comments. So the claim of ignorance - which amounts to a character attack - becomes unjustified.
user_named 4y ago
No, Tesla doesn't use lidar because Elon thinks it's too expensive and potentially also not pleasing esthetically.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > not pleasing esthetically Which Luminar has solved for Volvo: https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2021/06/24/next-gen-electric-volvo-flagship-to-feature-luminar-iris-lidar-as-standard-equipment/?sh=3f4e283a5ffa https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2021/06/24/next-g...
  - pnw 4y ago
    But only initially in California on selected highways at “lower speeds” and they haven’t tested it yet in the US. https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/05/volvo-partners-with-luminar-and-zenseact-to-bring-autonomous-driving-feature-to-new-e-suv/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/05/volvo-partners-with-lumina...
    - threeseed 4y ago
      My point was that LiDAR is at least capable of being aesthetically pleasing.
- leobg 4y ago
  This claim is just as false as the one about Tesla having had a falling out with their “LIDAR supplier”. Elon has explained many times why he considers LIDAR, while useful for things like docking to the Space Station, to be a fool’s errand for self driving cars.
  - user_named 4y ago
    Sure, and it doesn't make sense and he's lying.
threeseed 4y ago
> you still need to figure out whether it is a trashcan or a child No you don't. You just need to avoid hitting it. The problem with a vision-only system is that you need to know what an object is to determine the bounding box and thus how to avoid hitting it. Which is the problem we've seen with FSD where if you combine two options e.g. a boat on a truck then it gets confused because it hasn't been trained on it yet.
- leobg 4y ago
  You think a vision system cannot detect that something is there at all unless it can also correctly categorize the object? In other words, you think if the object just happens to be one which the system wasn’t trained on, a vision based system will necessarily report “nothing there”?
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    The big problem for vision systems (in particular if they don't use a lot of cameras) is that it's very difficult for them to determine movement and distance. This becomes exaggerated when objects move perpendicular to camera, one of the reasons is that the distinctive features of cars, trucks, buses are not so clear anymore. There are quite a few examples of hilarious mischaracterisations in these sort of cases.
upbeat_general 4y ago
“Solve vision” is a bit ill-posed. If you can accurately determine the 3D geometry of the scene(e.g. with LiDAR), the 3D object detection task becomes much easier. That being said, most tasks for self-driving such as object detection can be robustly “solved” by LiDAR-only (to the extent that the important actors will be recognized) but adding in cameras obviously helps to distinguish between some classes. Trying to do camera only (specifically monocular) runs into the issue of no 3D ground truth meaning it’s a lot more likely to accidentally not detect something in frame (say a white truck). That’s why you can have LiDAR and partially-“solved” vision but need fully solved vision if it’s the only input.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> whether it is about to jump on the road or walking away from the road Their Ai confuses a dog and a car. If confuses a parked semi and an underpass. It drove into a solid concrete wall on a few occasions. Even when they solve vision, that does not tell you what a pedestrial intends to do - even another human can't always be sure.

by leobg 4y ago

a9h74j 4y ago

IDK. Avoiding crashing into anything 12.327 ft way might be considered a feature.

xaduha 4y ago

> you still need to figure out whether it is a trashcan or a child Why? First of all don't drive into anything that moves, period. Secondly, if you can avoid bumping into anything at all, do that.

cycomanic 4y ago

I'm not sure you know what lidar is. It gives you 3D images while telling you exactly how far away things are. In fact you can much more easily determine what an object is from Lidar data. That is not to say Lidar doesn't have its issues (and there are quite a few), we likely will need a combination of sensors including cameras, lidar and radar.

lstodd 4y ago
IDK what Tesla uses, but what difference there is between LIDAR and a SAR, some zeroes on the wavelength?
- upbeat_general 4y ago
  The wavelength difference has big implications in terms of the detail that can be resolved due to the surface interactions. Tesla doesn’t use their radar anymore in any case. Only monocular cameras.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  The same change, in the other direction, turns LIDAR into a source of lethal ionising radiation that goes straight through a dozen cars without attenuation.
JoshCole 4y ago
Some better examples of his point are how do you determine the color of lights (stoplights, blinkers, brake lights, cop car lights, and so on) so as to make legally correct driving decisions with LIDAR? Some other things LIDAR won't give you: the need to read signs (parking legality, stop signs, speed limits, construction crews with flashing detour directions, painted information on the road like lane markers and speed limits, wrong way signs, and so on). In general, you can't, because the sensor doesn't give you enough information - like color - to let you solve the problem. If you have LIDAR, but not vision you literally can't make a legally correct driving decision in the general case, because you lack the relevant data to make that decision.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Nobody is saying it will be LiDAR only. Every self driving car company (except for Tesla) uses both LiDAR and vision. But they all rely on LiDAR for bounding box detection which is exactly the main problem Tesla FSD has.
  - JoshCole 4y ago
    cycomanic is claiming that leobg is ignorant. They do this despite leobg displaying accurate historical knowledge and stating the way that the sensor works in a way which does not fundamentally disagree with the correction that cycomanic implied leobg needed. As a reader of the comment chain, I have to ask why cycomanic thinks leobg is ignorant - he failed to articulate why. It seems to me that the most contentious and debatable claim that leobg made was the claim that full self driving requires solving vision regardless of whether or not you have LiDAR. If this was the reason - maybe it isn't, but if it was, the fact that everyone uses vision isn't evidence for cycomanic's position - it is evidence for leobg's position. You've retreated from this as the reason that leobg is frightfully ignorant on behalf of cycomanic. That means the next most contentious claim is the claim that builds upon the foundation of the first claim - that vision being required makes LiDAR irrelevant. The problem for you though is that when you make the concession that vision is necessary, you run into a problem. The sensor situations under which LiDAR is much better than vision tend to involve a vision failure through a lack of light or due to heavy occlusion. There is definitely and necessarily a cut off point at which leobg's claim becomes somewhat true. This denies the right to call him ignorant, because the law of charity demands that his point be the thing that maximizes the truth of his comments. So the claim of ignorance - which amounts to a character attack - becomes unjustified.

user_named 4y ago

No, Tesla doesn't use lidar because Elon thinks it's too expensive and potentially also not pleasing esthetically.

threeseed 4y ago
> not pleasing esthetically Which Luminar has solved for Volvo: https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2021/06/24/next-gen-electric-volvo-flagship-to-feature-luminar-iris-lidar-as-standard-equipment/?sh=3f4e283a5ffa https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2021/06/24/next-g...
- pnw 4y ago
  But only initially in California on selected highways at “lower speeds” and they haven’t tested it yet in the US. https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/05/volvo-partners-with-luminar-and-zenseact-to-bring-autonomous-driving-feature-to-new-e-suv/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/05/volvo-partners-with-lumina...
  - threeseed 4y ago
    My point was that LiDAR is at least capable of being aesthetically pleasing.
leobg 4y ago
This claim is just as false as the one about Tesla having had a falling out with their “LIDAR supplier”. Elon has explained many times why he considers LIDAR, while useful for things like docking to the Space Station, to be a fool’s errand for self driving cars.
- user_named 4y ago
  Sure, and it doesn't make sense and he's lying.

threeseed 4y ago

> you still need to figure out whether it is a trashcan or a child No you don't. You just need to avoid hitting it. The problem with a vision-only system is that you need to know what an object is to determine the bounding box and thus how to avoid hitting it. Which is the problem we've seen with FSD where if you combine two options e.g. a boat on a truck then it gets confused because it hasn't been trained on it yet.

leobg 4y ago
You think a vision system cannot detect that something is there at all unless it can also correctly categorize the object? In other words, you think if the object just happens to be one which the system wasn’t trained on, a vision based system will necessarily report “nothing there”?
- cycomanic 4y ago
  The big problem for vision systems (in particular if they don't use a lot of cameras) is that it's very difficult for them to determine movement and distance. This becomes exaggerated when objects move perpendicular to camera, one of the reasons is that the distinctive features of cars, trucks, buses are not so clear anymore. There are quite a few examples of hilarious mischaracterisations in these sort of cases.

upbeat_general 4y ago

“Solve vision” is a bit ill-posed. If you can accurately determine the 3D geometry of the scene(e.g. with LiDAR), the 3D object detection task becomes much easier. That being said, most tasks for self-driving such as object detection can be robustly “solved” by LiDAR-only (to the extent that the important actors will be recognized) but adding in cameras obviously helps to distinguish between some classes. Trying to do camera only (specifically monocular) runs into the issue of no 3D ground truth meaning it’s a lot more likely to accidentally not detect something in frame (say a white truck). That’s why you can have LiDAR and partially-“solved” vision but need fully solved vision if it’s the only input.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> whether it is about to jump on the road or walking away from the road Their Ai confuses a dog and a car. If confuses a parked semi and an underpass. It drove into a solid concrete wall on a few occasions. Even when they solve vision, that does not tell you what a pedestrial intends to do - even another human can't always be sure.