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Lidar I believe can be heavily affected by weather and might also require a lot of expensive sensors. It works great for VFX work when you need a precise model

Lidar I believe can be heavily affected by weather and might also require a lot of expensive sensors. It works great for VFX work when you need a precise model of an area. But I would guess the refresh rate is also not amazing. I live near Waymo and see the cars all the time - they do have huge things on top but the weather in Santa Monica is also very good. Not sure if I have seen them ever driving in the rain?

zxexz 4y ago
Interesting. I’ve used a Velodyne VLP-32 in reasonably heavy rain with reasonable performance after some error correction. I was on foot and not driving, and probably only for a few hours total. But it seems to me that a big company with serious engineering talent should be able to make it work.
- throwbadubadu 4y ago
  Yes.. any other car manufacturer I know of (likely not complete) is considering also Lidar sensors... they are still pricey and huge, but there are also MEMS-like improvements (likely incorrect terminology) and also costs get continously lower. At the same time advancements also happen at the multi-model side, not fusing different deep learning outputs afterwards but right in the one model (not judging if that is a good idea... but the steps taking currently seem to get bigger and better). Lastly, also camera has degraded performance under certain weather conditions.. some even say our eyes can be prone to that! :D So that's just all the challenges that need to be taken. Yes, humans can drive with their eyes only, but is that perfect? Sometimes we e.g. would also benefit greatly from radar/lidar, as e.g. in dark conditions our judgement of distances is really flawed. Refresh rate of some of this already aged car lidars was like 10 Hz, good enough I'd say? And it is truly amazing what details one can get out of those when getting close and move around in those point clouds.
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    It's been a bit since I've been out of touch with the autonomous driving space. Was there significant progress the last 3 years? What are the current challenges?

zxexz 4y ago

Interesting. I’ve used a Velodyne VLP-32 in reasonably heavy rain with reasonable performance after some error correction. I was on foot and not driving, and probably only for a few hours total. But it seems to me that a big company with serious engineering talent should be able to make it work.

throwbadubadu 4y ago
Yes.. any other car manufacturer I know of (likely not complete) is considering also Lidar sensors... they are still pricey and huge, but there are also MEMS-like improvements (likely incorrect terminology) and also costs get continously lower. At the same time advancements also happen at the multi-model side, not fusing different deep learning outputs afterwards but right in the one model (not judging if that is a good idea... but the steps taking currently seem to get bigger and better). Lastly, also camera has degraded performance under certain weather conditions.. some even say our eyes can be prone to that! :D So that's just all the challenges that need to be taken. Yes, humans can drive with their eyes only, but is that perfect? Sometimes we e.g. would also benefit greatly from radar/lidar, as e.g. in dark conditions our judgement of distances is really flawed. Refresh rate of some of this already aged car lidars was like 10 Hz, good enough I'd say? And it is truly amazing what details one can get out of those when getting close and move around in those point clouds.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  It's been a bit since I've been out of touch with the autonomous driving space. Was there significant progress the last 3 years? What are the current challenges?