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A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
- kayson 2y agoRelated: https://www.viksnewsletter.com/p/teslas-big-bet-cameras-over-lidar https://www.viksnewsletter.com/p/teslas-big-bet-cameras-over...
- Animats 2y agoWaymo tried cameras-only recently as a research project.[1][2] They seem to do about as well as Tesla, which they don't consider good enough. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/10/30/waymo-builds-a-vision-based-end-to-end-driving-model-like-teslawayve/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/10/30/waymo-... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23262 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23262
- xnx 2y agoOne of the cool thing about the Waymo Driver is that it can be configured to work with different degrees of quality depending on the sensors available. In a low risk environment (e.g. closed to humans) like operating forklifts in an autonomous warehouse, it would work fine with just cameras. Waymo hasn't been very boastful to date, but some of the capabilities are hinted at in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE
- MaxPock 2y agoFantastic tech that Musk hates
- quonn 2y agoIt‘s not just Musk. Most automobile manufacturers have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap and pretty sensors.
- juliushuijnk 2y ago> have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap If the goal is to make roads safer. Aiming for cheap is good, it means aiming for more people who can afford that safer car. If it's not safer than humans, it should not be on the road in the first place.
- tgaj 2y agoTheoretically if a human can drive a car using a pair of eyes connected to brain, it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit.
- fragmede 2y agoIf we want the sell driving computer to be only possibly as good as a human. I can't see in the dark, can't see through fog, and have trouble with rain. Why is human visibility the bar to meet here?
- fragmede 2y agoOh and the sun. I get blinded when the sun is in my eyes at sunrise and sunset.
- tgaj 2y agoAnd how many car accidents did you cause in your life? Probably still no a lot even with your flawed vision.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoBecause we allow humans to drive, therefore if something can perform as well as a human it should be allowed. The bar is a floor, not a ceiling.
- itishappy 2y agoIn theory. In practice neither the cameras nor processors available in cars function anywhere near human level.
- r17n 2y agoSo there's a video of him addressing this - he doesn't hate the tech. He mentions that it's wildly expensive for cars. But, they use it heavily for SpaceX
- threeseed 2y agoThe issue isn't that it's wildly expensive for cars. But rather for Tesla. Because the company has promised that existing Tesla owners would be able to use FSD. Having to retrofit them to add LiDAR sensors would be cost-prohibitive.
- stormfather 2y agoAlso he wants to reuse the foundational machine vision tech in Optimus bot, which probably won't have lidar.
- threeseed 2y agoBased on presentations we've seen what sets Tesla apart are its datasets not the core technology. And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.
- stormfather 2y agoI think they will though, I think the enormous corpus of video data and the supercluster that powers self driving development are the machine vision analog of internet scale text data that gave rise to LLMs. We'll see the same moment for vision models that text prediction models had once the data is there, where an enormous foundation model becomes much much better, especially at zero-shot tasks.
- threeseed 2y agoFSD is already using the fruits of this today with their end to end NN. And based on what we've seen the results haven't improved enough to put them close to Waymo.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kieranmaine 2y agoIn a recent No Priors podcast with the Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, he talks about how they evaluated just driving with cameras and how it isn't good enough for full autonomy and doesn't meet their bar for safety [1]. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s
- jaimex2 2y agoThey went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.
- bobsomers 2y agoThat's a bold claim. Care to justify it?
- jaimex2 2y agoYeah, it only works in extremely controlled environments driving really slowly. The design is also flawed as it has to work with cameras anyway. The last thing you want is two systems arguing over what they see.
- Infinitesimus 2y agoIt doesn't have to be an argument. You know what each system is good at and prioritize inputs accordingly.
- ra7 2y agoExtremely controlled environments like the entire city of San Francisco? Sensor fusion is a thing. There are no two systems that “argue with each other”. I can’t believe the same old ignorant tropes are still making rounds.
- coolspot 2y agoWaymos don’t drive slowly, I don’t know where you’re getting this from. If anything, they drive too fast for a thing without a driver.
- jaimex2 2y agoMusk has said several times Lidar is great. It's just a stupid idea for automotive use and he's not wrong. There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.
- itishappy 2y agoTime of flight ranging is used in nature by bats and whales/dolphins.
- fragmede 2y agoand humans! https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-echolocate https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-echolocate
- password4321 2y ago2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160071 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334
- maxbond 2y agoMy back of the napkin estimate is that a human using time of flight ranging would be unable to distinguish between an object directly in front of their face and 8.6 meters away[1]. I think human echolocation uses a different mechanism (presumably relating to amplitude)? Skimming the Wikipedia article[2], it seems like animals do use time of flight, but also Doppler shifting. (As a side note, some animals have apparently evolved active countermeasures to echolocation!? It seems obvious in retrospect but incredibly cool.) There's interesting research into the mechanisms of human echolocation [3], but it was over my head. My impression was that the jury is out as far as the precise mechanisms involved but that there's a lot of evidence to be considered, I'm sure someone with a better background would get more out of it than I did. (I'm just curious about the mechanism, I agree that LIDAR has natural analogs.) [1] Speed of sound * 25ms, 25ms being the rule of thumb I've memorized for the minimum interval for two sounds to register as distinct from each other. This is just folk wisdom I've picked up hacking on audio, so perhaps I'm mistaken. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation [3] https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/19632.pdf https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/1963...
- UltraSane 2y agoBecause Musk thinks is much much smarter than he actually is and refuses to listen to anyone. And between how many people he fired at Twitter, Tesla, and soon the US Federal Government I think he gets off on it.
- rightbyte 2y ago"Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can." Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers. A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples? I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects, where as radars flatten the view.
- lupusreal 2y agoVery high tech radars can generate amazing imagery, but they'll never top what lidar can do. Conceptually they're both doing the same sort of thing using EM radiation, but lidar uses a much smaller wavelength which gives it an intrinsic resolution advantage. Particularly at distances and with hardware sized relevant to cars.
- ender7 2y agoThe issue isn't one of fixed vs rotation, it's that radar can't fundamentally achieve the resolution necessary to distinguish important features in the environment. It's easily fooled by oddly-shaped objects, especially concave features like corners, and so while it's great for answer the question of "am I close to something" it's not reliable for telling you what that something is, especially at longer ranges.
- xnx 2y agoI believe automotive radar has a cone of sensitivity that is read as a single "pixel" worth of data. Even if the radar spun like lidar, the radar cone of sensitivity is thousands of times wider than the lidar beam so you can't make much of a picture with radar.
- 0_____0 2y agoIIRC the data coming out of the Conti radars was preprocessed to give bearing, distance, and size of an object in the FOV of the unit. I don't know if I ever saw the true raw data out of one of them, but I'm curious what it looks like.
- Animats 2y agoThat's a reasonable basic overview. I'm surprised that rotating scanners are still used. It's been twenty years since Velodyne built their first one. They work OK, but cost too much. I was expecting flash LIDAR or MEMS mirrors to take over. Continental, the auto parts company, bought the leading flash LIDAR company over a decade ago, but the volume market a big parts company needs never appeared. Waymo is still using rotating LIDARs even for the little ones at the vehicle corners. Those need less range. There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things. The location is too vulnerable. Maybe millimeter phased array radar mounted behind Fiberglas body panels. Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York. The LIDAR on top may not be a problem. Insisting that it has to go away to "look like a car" is like insisting that cars had to have the form factor of horse-propelled buggies. Early cars looked like buggies, but that didn't last. One big advantage of pulsed LIDAR over continuous is that the interference problem between identical units is much less. The duty cycle is tiny. Data from one pulse round trip is collected in less than a microsecond. Just put some randomization in the pulse timing and getting multiple conflicts in a row goes away.
- xnx 2y ago> They work OK, but cost too much. Costs have dropped dramatically in the past 20 years and continue to do so. > There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things. Why? Corners are the optimal mounting position for maximum visibility. It allows the car to -in-effect- see around corners in ways no centrally mounted sensor can. > Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York. What? Because of vandalism?
- aftbit 2y agoHave you ever seen the corners of a car that has been parked in a big East-coast city? They will sustain damage during the course of normal operation and storage, and many people will not stop and leave their insurance information, especially if the damage is perceived as minor and happens while the car is parked and the owner not present. Currently, the corners of a car are relatively non-critical to its function and usually not too expensive to repair. If both of those change, we'll see more expensive damage that is more challenging to repair as well as less likely to be handled by the responsible party. Also, having the sensors stick out from the corners makes the car's collision box and turning radius bigger. That doesn't help in any tight situation, but I imagine that's not that different between e.g. SF and New York. What is different is the sheer volume of cars and pedestrian activity.
- atomic128 2y agoHere's an interesting "lidar gem" from Hacker News a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679 Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years. The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements. The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing. This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
- hammock 2y agoAre LIDAR dangerous to the eyes of other drivers or pedestrians?
- itishappy 2y agoThey should not be. In theory they can be, but there are strict regulations to prevent that.
- hammock 2y agoWhat are the regulations and who are the relevant regulatory bodies? I could not find with a google search
- AlotOfReading 2y agoThey fall under the same regulations as lasers.
- hnisoss 2y agoThose can be gamed easily.
- itishappy 2y agoPlease explain!
- hnisoss 2y agoLaser damage is notoriously difficult to predict due to a statistical nature of thresholds. There are many tricks and non-trivial ideas that can make the device certified eye safe, even if it emits a high laser power. These obviously wont be discussed willy-nilly on random forums.
- itishappy 2y agoGood question! You're right, this is surprisingly hard to Google. It looks like the FDA is responsible. I would not have guessed that! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) would have been my guess, but I'm not finding much there. They have a spec for LIDAR speed measurement devices, and one for the required sensors in vehicles, but nothing on the the output of said sensors. > For manufacturers of laser products, the standard of principal importance is the regulation of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which regulates product performance. All laser products sold in the USA since August 1976 must be certified by the manufacturer as meeting certain product performance (safety) standards, and each laser must bear a label indicating compliance with the standard and denoting the laser hazard classification. https://www.lia.org/resources/laser-safety-information/laser-safety-standards https://www.lia.org/resources/laser-safety-information/laser... https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/home-business-and-entertainment-products/laser-products-and-instruments https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/home-busines... https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-organization/center-devices-and-radiological-health https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-organization/center-device...
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoIs there a lidar unit I can take home and scan my house at high resolution (than iphone)?
- beeburrt 2y agoI was wondering this too, although for a different use-case. A couple years ago I was walking through a field/vacant lot not far from Centralia, WA and I came across what I think is a grave. The (supposed) "grave" was roughly human-sized and human-shaped, the ground was concave, sunken in and deepest at the center, and it was encircled with stones that were slightly larger than grapefruit. The reason I suspect it's a grave is because I stumbled upon a very similar-looking thing at a historical site in Tooele county Utah named Mercur cemetery. With Lidar I could prove/disprove my grave theory, correct?
- edm0nd 2y agoI think Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) would be better usage for this grave scenario vs LIDAR.
- twelvechairs 2y agoYou can, they are just expensive (other than iphone). Maybe 8k for a handheld basic one (e.g. Trion P1), $15k for a drone attachment (e.g. DJI Zenmuse L1) - more for the ones surveyors use proper including the tripod-mount ones. At the consumer end photogrammetry tends to just be so much cheaper that its preferred unless you really need defined accuracy at a high level of detail. Lidar tends to work currently much better in an industrial/professional context because its more accurate. Whether Lidar will make the jump to lower cost / consumer level is the big open question (and basically the same issue as for cars here)
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoiphone has actual lidar not photogrammetry right?
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- slt2021 2y agoLIDARs can be blinded by consumer grade laser pointers, I wonder if there are systems that protect LIDARs against adversarial attacks or DOS attacks
- elictronic 2y agoDrivers can also be blinded by consumer grade laser pointers. If someone starts attacking safety systems physically I would expect they will get quite a bit of jail time.
- rightbyte 2y agoMessing with machines have a way lower ethical threshold for most people. Like fooling vending machines to give you soda. Nothing 'my teenage friend' lost sleep over.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Messing with machines have a way lower ethical threshold for most people We’re in the regime of throwing rocks at a freeway from a bridge to cutting brake lines as a prank. The attack surface here isn’t new and isn’t difficult to think through. Someone who can’t is going to be equally dangerous, machine or man.
- rightbyte 2y agoI don't think e.g. 'kids' will see it like cutting a brake line. I agree, as a former ECU programmer, though. I am terrified of drive by wire. More like making the Google computer do silly things. More comparable would be the prank of tying some soda tin cans in a string to the exhaust etc, in how I believe my scapegoat kids would see it.
- denysvitali 2y agoThere are also (stupid) people who like to point laser pointers to helicopter pilots...
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- synthos 2y agoI worked on an automotive FMCW LiDAR that didn't quite make it to market. Cool technology but it was difficult to scale the cost down, which is pretty important for automotive. Margins are very low in that market
- bastloing 2y agoWhy is lidar so expensive? And still needs to be miniaturized. But time should solve those problems, there's enough engineering effort.
- kube-system 2y agoWhen you're measuring something as precise as the time it takes light to bounce off something in front of you, you need really precise optics and electronics. Also, automotive lidar is still in the realm of low-volume specialty equipment, so there are little to no economies of scale in manufacturing this stuff.