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Less than a year ago, there was a video of Tesla slo-mo crashing into a parked airplane. To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: th

by mnau 3y ago

Less than a year ago, there was a video of Tesla slo-mo crashing into a parked airplane. To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop. That was in 2022, so 7 years after start of development/announcement. I don't hold by breath. Edit: link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWMSc1TkDAI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWMSc1TkDAI

pi-rat 3y ago
See, it figured out that the fastest route when summoned "from a home in L.A., to Times Square" is via the air. Smart car.
hnbad 3y ago
Given Elon's obsession with "it should see like a human does" i.e. only relying on vision and nothing else, I don't think FSD will ever be feasible and safe tbqh. This would be trivial to avoid if the car had an actual sense of distance other than comparing pixels.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  I am glad that we have invented wheel before Elon, otherwise he would be pushing "it should move like human does"
eschneider 3y ago
> To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop. That turns out to be a harder problem than most people think, and it gets in the way of the 'driving' part. "Are we looking at some big, blank object or are we looking at the sky? It's probably the sky, so we'll just drop it from the model." Which is how Teslas drive into big trucks. :/
- mnau 3y ago
  Even if visuals failed, Tesla has a sonar, radar and Tesla is moving at snail pace. Hell, my vacuum stops moving when it detects it crashed into something (likely torque required to move wheels is larger than expected). Edit: at the end of the day, it doesn't matter why it happened. The result is a crash in a super simple environment and is (to me) quite indicative to the state of things. They are supposed to come up with solutions, not excuses (also, Elon hates lidar, but that is still on Tesla).
  - Anarch157a 3y ago
    Tesla dropped radar, lidar and ultra-sound from their cars a while ago [0]. This was another childish decision by Musk, who personally overruled the engineers [1]. [0] https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision [1] https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-autopilot-engineers-radar-removal/ https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-...
    - yreg 3y ago
      Andrej Karpathy claims to stand by that decision: https://youtu.be/_W1JBAfV4Io?si=QUceD5ZG0j_hclHP&t=39 https://youtu.be/_W1JBAfV4Io?si=QUceD5ZG0j_hclHP&t=39
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        "Did you agree with your egomaniacal boss who thinks he is a brilliant engineer and programmer when he made one of the biggest blunders, or did you know better?"
        valval 3y ago
        0 projection or prejudice being done here, you come across as perfectly rational.
    - doublespanner 3y ago
      They are trialing a radar again in the S, but from their marketing it doesn't look like it's a clear benifit yet
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- numpad0 3y ago
  Problems involved being hard doesn't make it okay to willfully sell an unfinishable product. I know for the fact that making a flying carpet is hard. Doesn't mean you should be greatful for life to be able to pay me $1M for a non-flying flying carpet that sets itself on fire.
- mrpopo 3y ago
  It's not a difficult problem as long as you have radar/lidar and not just computer vision as input. I understand computer vision could be used as primary input, but IMO it should be mandatory to have some kind of proximity sensor as backup input. Proximity sensor senses something, speed vector indicates collision in X seconds => stop
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    It's not a difficult problem for humans with no lidar and 100W operating budget.
    - suoduandao3 3y ago
      Not a computer vision engineer here - do we just not know how the human brain recognizes objects or does it do so in a way that's hard to reproduce in silicon?
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        We don't know how it works, and the parts that we do know are very hard to implement. In particular, our vision is very very tied to our model of the world, and is clearly an evolutionarily derived trait, not something we learn from scratch as children. We are basically born with a model that can augment the raw sensory input with basic physics (object permanence, but also we have an intuition for things like "heavy = large momentum even at slow speeds", and for "what goes up will come down", some basic optics of how objects cast shadows, and others). In addition, we learn to recognize objects and we know their actual sizes from past experience, so we typically estimate distance this way far better than relying on parallax. "Small image of car" is automatically "car far away", even if seen with one eye, because we know what size a car is. In fact, much of our brilliant vision starts going awry immediately in an artifical setting with misleading sized objects.
        jampekka 3y ago
        We don't have much idea of what "our model of the world" is. Probably quite little of it is genetically encoded. E.g. object permanence has to be learned (takes around 7 months). What you describe is largely the classical "cognitivist" model, which is more or less dead in the contemporary tought. We don't even have a very good account of depth estimation, apart from "bunch of things seem to affect it".
- asylteltine 3y ago
  It’s actually not hard, like at all. Every other manufacturer solved it. The problem is that Elon dropped all sane forms of “vision” like lidar because he wants to squeeze out profits at the cost of consumer safety (not to mention Tesla kills motorcyclists hand over fist) He’s hell bent on machine vision which can’t even identify a cyclist for fucks sake! And somehow this is legal to deploy on public roads!
- badpun 3y ago
  Are they just doing object detection, or are they also doing 3d scene reconstruction (visual SLAM)? My bet is on the latter, and the SLAM reconstruction should show them that there's something dangerously close to the car. Of course, vSLAM is notoriously finnicky in corner cases, lighting conditions etc., so it might have just not noticed the plane at all.
meindnoch 3y ago
Ok, but is it worse than a human driver? We can't know for sure until we try how a human behaves in that scenario!
- arlcode 3y ago
  Driving very slowly into a parked giant blue airplane and not even stopping? I think we can be pretty sure that almost all human drivers won't make that mistake and those who do should not be driving on their own just like Teslas software.
Fricken 3y ago
Teslas drive under things on autopilot. The first autopilot fatality in 2016 decapitated Joshua Brown, and a couple later ones were due to what appears to be the same failure. They never even tried to fix it.
mavhc 3y ago
Video says it's on autopilot, but it's not. It's using smart summon, where a person, who can see the car because it's short range, uses their phone to move the car. They can stop it using their phone at any time by removing their finger from the touchscreen, yet weirdly didn't. It's not autopilot, and it's not FSD, and it maxes out at 6 mph. Also they've never updated the code for it, so it's not representative of the current tech in FSD
- blamazon 3y ago
  On top of that, smart summon has been disabled on ‘vision only’ Teslas since they removed radar sensors.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    Wait, for real? I thought Tesla's claim was that the radar was not necessary for FSD on roads. But it's necessary for driving around a parking lot?
- mnau 3y ago
  Makes no difference. Not crashing into big stationary things is the absolute bottom floor of what is required for anything 'car moves without driver behind wheel'. From technical perspective, either they use same stack for environment awareness for summon and driving for shared capabilities and it failed or they do not, which is even worse. Either way, fail.
MarcoZavala 3y ago
[dead]

by mnau 3y ago

pi-rat 3y ago

See, it figured out that the fastest route when summoned "from a home in L.A., to Times Square" is via the air. Smart car.

hnbad 3y ago

Given Elon's obsession with "it should see like a human does" i.e. only relying on vision and nothing else, I don't think FSD will ever be feasible and safe tbqh. This would be trivial to avoid if the car had an actual sense of distance other than comparing pixels.

TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
I am glad that we have invented wheel before Elon, otherwise he would be pushing "it should move like human does"

eschneider 3y ago

> To me, it indicates that they haven't solved even the easiest part: there is something in a static setting, don't crash into it, stop. That turns out to be a harder problem than most people think, and it gets in the way of the 'driving' part. "Are we looking at some big, blank object or are we looking at the sky? It's probably the sky, so we'll just drop it from the model." Which is how Teslas drive into big trucks. :/

mnau 3y ago
Even if visuals failed, Tesla has a sonar, radar and Tesla is moving at snail pace. Hell, my vacuum stops moving when it detects it crashed into something (likely torque required to move wheels is larger than expected). Edit: at the end of the day, it doesn't matter why it happened. The result is a crash in a super simple environment and is (to me) quite indicative to the state of things. They are supposed to come up with solutions, not excuses (also, Elon hates lidar, but that is still on Tesla).
- Anarch157a 3y ago
  Tesla dropped radar, lidar and ultra-sound from their cars a while ago [0]. This was another childish decision by Musk, who personally overruled the engineers [1]. [0] https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision [1] https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-autopilot-engineers-radar-removal/ https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-...
  - yreg 3y ago
    Andrej Karpathy claims to stand by that decision: https://youtu.be/_W1JBAfV4Io?si=QUceD5ZG0j_hclHP&t=39 https://youtu.be/_W1JBAfV4Io?si=QUceD5ZG0j_hclHP&t=39
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      "Did you agree with your egomaniacal boss who thinks he is a brilliant engineer and programmer when he made one of the biggest blunders, or did you know better?"
      - valval 3y ago
        0 projection or prejudice being done here, you come across as perfectly rational.
  - doublespanner 3y ago
    They are trialing a radar again in the S, but from their marketing it doesn't look like it's a clear benifit yet
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
numpad0 3y ago
Problems involved being hard doesn't make it okay to willfully sell an unfinishable product. I know for the fact that making a flying carpet is hard. Doesn't mean you should be greatful for life to be able to pay me $1M for a non-flying flying carpet that sets itself on fire.
mrpopo 3y ago
It's not a difficult problem as long as you have radar/lidar and not just computer vision as input. I understand computer vision could be used as primary input, but IMO it should be mandatory to have some kind of proximity sensor as backup input. Proximity sensor senses something, speed vector indicates collision in X seconds => stop
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  It's not a difficult problem for humans with no lidar and 100W operating budget.
  - suoduandao3 3y ago
    Not a computer vision engineer here - do we just not know how the human brain recognizes objects or does it do so in a way that's hard to reproduce in silicon?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      We don't know how it works, and the parts that we do know are very hard to implement. In particular, our vision is very very tied to our model of the world, and is clearly an evolutionarily derived trait, not something we learn from scratch as children. We are basically born with a model that can augment the raw sensory input with basic physics (object permanence, but also we have an intuition for things like "heavy = large momentum even at slow speeds", and for "what goes up will come down", some basic optics of how objects cast shadows, and others). In addition, we learn to recognize objects and we know their actual sizes from past experience, so we typically estimate distance this way far better than relying on parallax. "Small image of car" is automatically "car far away", even if seen with one eye, because we know what size a car is. In fact, much of our brilliant vision starts going awry immediately in an artifical setting with misleading sized objects.
      - jampekka 3y ago
        We don't have much idea of what "our model of the world" is. Probably quite little of it is genetically encoded. E.g. object permanence has to be learned (takes around 7 months). What you describe is largely the classical "cognitivist" model, which is more or less dead in the contemporary tought. We don't even have a very good account of depth estimation, apart from "bunch of things seem to affect it".
asylteltine 3y ago
It’s actually not hard, like at all. Every other manufacturer solved it. The problem is that Elon dropped all sane forms of “vision” like lidar because he wants to squeeze out profits at the cost of consumer safety (not to mention Tesla kills motorcyclists hand over fist) He’s hell bent on machine vision which can’t even identify a cyclist for fucks sake! And somehow this is legal to deploy on public roads!
badpun 3y ago
Are they just doing object detection, or are they also doing 3d scene reconstruction (visual SLAM)? My bet is on the latter, and the SLAM reconstruction should show them that there's something dangerously close to the car. Of course, vSLAM is notoriously finnicky in corner cases, lighting conditions etc., so it might have just not noticed the plane at all.

meindnoch 3y ago

Ok, but is it worse than a human driver? We can't know for sure until we try how a human behaves in that scenario!

arlcode 3y ago
Driving very slowly into a parked giant blue airplane and not even stopping? I think we can be pretty sure that almost all human drivers won't make that mistake and those who do should not be driving on their own just like Teslas software.

Fricken 3y ago

Teslas drive under things on autopilot. The first autopilot fatality in 2016 decapitated Joshua Brown, and a couple later ones were due to what appears to be the same failure. They never even tried to fix it.

mavhc 3y ago

Video says it's on autopilot, but it's not. It's using smart summon, where a person, who can see the car because it's short range, uses their phone to move the car. They can stop it using their phone at any time by removing their finger from the touchscreen, yet weirdly didn't. It's not autopilot, and it's not FSD, and it maxes out at 6 mph. Also they've never updated the code for it, so it's not representative of the current tech in FSD

blamazon 3y ago
On top of that, smart summon has been disabled on ‘vision only’ Teslas since they removed radar sensors.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Wait, for real? I thought Tesla's claim was that the radar was not necessary for FSD on roads. But it's necessary for driving around a parking lot?
mnau 3y ago
Makes no difference. Not crashing into big stationary things is the absolute bottom floor of what is required for anything 'car moves without driver behind wheel'. From technical perspective, either they use same stack for environment awareness for summon and driving for shared capabilities and it failed or they do not, which is even worse. Either way, fail.

MarcoZavala 3y ago

[dead]