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This an explanation from a layman on the auto side. Tesla has focused on attempting to solve all cases using vision and generalize it as much as possible. The
by infecto 2y ago
This an explanation from a layman on the auto side.
Tesla has focused on attempting to solve all cases using vision and generalize it as much as possible. The pro is you would be able to drop FSD capabilities anywhere in the US and it will work. The con is the tail of edge cases take significantly more effort then the first 80%.
Waymo instead of being generalized, works off of a detailed map for each region they drive in. They have a complete expectation of every detail on those roads and so then only need to account for the dynamic unknowns on the road. The pro is that they are getting to hands off driving sooner. The con is that anywhere its deployed needs detailed mapping and for that mapping to be kept up to date.
Time will tell which strategy pays off.
- borg16 2y agoif i am interested in reading more about this, can you point me to some resources?
- RivieraKid 2y agoGoogle "waymo dolgov" on YouTube, there's a recent lecture and a recent interview by Dmitri Dolgov. In the lecture, he talks about their architecture.
- jowday 2y agoI’d advise you to ignore lay explanations of the space - outside of the industry most of the discourse about self driving cars is poisoned by Elon’s deceptive presentations and his followers who parrot what he says. If you want a grounded explanation of how Tesla’s stack works, follow @greentheonly on twitter. He’s a Tesla reverse engineer who regularly posts about the software that’s actually running on the car. If you want an explanation about how real AV companies stacks work, I’d read Sebastian Thrun’s robotics textbook - then imagine what’s outlined in that book but with ML plugged in to a ton of spaces throughout the stack. This is also similar to how Tesla’s stack works, btw - greens just good to follow because a lot of people refuse to believe Tesla isn’t running some kind of “LLM but for driving” fully end to end black box model. Tesla won’t launch a robotaxi anytime soon because they can’t use remote support or HD maps - although I think they’ve been stepping up their mapping efforts. Even the demo at Universal studios a few weeks ago was HD mapped - per @greentheonlys twitter. I worked in the space for years and have seen the internal of both a traditional robotaxi company’s stack and Tesla’s.
- infecto 2y agoUnfortunately the industry like many others are poisoned on many ends. I would caution taking anyone's opinion too strongly including this one.
- fragmede 2y agoFor reference, Sebastian Thrun led the Stanford team that won the Darpa (self driving car) Grand Challenge in 2005, and then joined Google to lead Waymo (then called the Google Self-Driving Car Project), among other accomplishments.
- hindsightbias 2y agoNOVA episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCRrXQRvC_I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCRrXQRvC_I
- kumarvvr 2y agoI don't see it as a significant dis-advantage for Waymo. With modern drones and UAV, getting millimeter level details on infrastructure should be easy and cheap. I would expect such maps for every corner of the world in next 5 to 10 years.
- joeyo 2y agoThe other pro is cost: cameras are much, much cheaper than LiDAR. Tesla is making the bet that they can close the performance gap between cameras and LiDAR faster than the cost of LiDAR will come down.
- echoangle 2y agoI wonder if this will ever be a significant factor. How much can a LiDAR setup cost? 4k? Maybe 2k if built in-house at car manufacturer scale in the long term? Is that significant when buying a whole car?
- ra7 2y ago> Waymo instead of being generalized, works off of a detailed map for each region they drive in. They have a complete expectation of every detail on those roads and so then only need to account for the dynamic unknowns on the road. This isn't entirely true. Everything at Waymo is built to be generalizable. Engineers and execs at Waymo have said to multiple times, as recently as yesterday [1]. They are able to drive just fine without up-to-date maps as well. It's an assumption built in to the system. The cars are also self-mapping. Ultimately, maps are just another input to the general driving software. The same driving software is deployed across all their cities. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE
- minwcnt5 2y agoA map is really just a data cache, I've been surprised so many technical people see it as a flaw. It seems like an important feature to me!
- ra7 2y agoA cache is exactly how I explain maps to people. They are saving precious compute cycles not computing the same static objects over and over again, by N number of vehicles.
- infecto 2y agoA con does not have to be a flaw. But I would see it as a tradeoff. With all of these companies its hard to sometimes see beneath the curtain of what they promote.
- infecto 2y agoAre they deployed into any cities where they are not actively mapping?
- ra7 2y agoThey test in many cities (Buffalo, Tahoe, Bellevue, NYC) . But they won't deploy to any cities which they haven't mapped because they consider it critical to safety.
- arkmm 2y agoObtaining a detailed map doesn't seem difficult. This is the same company that created Street View. E.g. SF has ~1000 miles of streets [1], that would only take 50 hours of paying for manual driving to map all of SF at 20mph. 1. https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Miles-Of-Streets/5s76-j52p/data_preview https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Miles-Of-Streets/...
- infecto 2y agoNever said it was difficult but that their driving fleet relies on a lidar map of the region it serves. Its a definite trade-off so I would list it as a con but it does not mean one is better than the other.
- gitaarik 2y agoAnd probably because of this strategy, by the time their system is successfully deployed in several cities, the technology to make fully self driving has become much more accessible and they can relatively easily add that incrementally.
- pier25 2y agoElon said a couple of days ago Tesla cars might never be able to self drive. https://futurism.com/elon-musk-realizes-all-teslas-self-driving-computers https://futurism.com/elon-musk-realizes-all-teslas-self-driv...