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It's pretty impressive that we have self-driving cars that takes us this far with Just cameras. But it probably won't get any better than this without a revamp.

It's pretty impressive that we have self-driving cars that takes us this far with Just cameras. But it probably won't get any better than this without a revamp. That said, what if we make these self driving tools fully available to drivers. Drivers are pretty good at driving already with with relatively short training. Give them the superpowers of teslas like 360 view, predictive object path, and object detection and you have super drivers.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
I don’t know why everyone says “just cameras.” Are people imagining they are using some algorithm to detect some object and come up with a distance measure? I’m imagining they are just having the cameras autofocus and determining the focal distance which seems about the same as banking on a good lidar reflection to me.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  Consider how long it takes your camera to autofocus, and how sometimes it gets it wrong. Then consider how fast your car moves. In the time it takes your camera to autofocus, how far do you think a car can travel, and what happens to all the blurry things in its path that it can't see?
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    A camera that is slow to autofocus is the result of market compromises to reach a price segment in a platform that is within the confines of a camera body dimension. That is not reflective of the state of the art however.
    - ModernMech 2y ago
      Still, the whole rationale behind the camera-only approach is that cameras are cheaply sources, and therefore more suitable for mass production vehicles, unlike LiDAR which are more expensive and not as widespread. If you're now shifting to the idea we need to use state-of-the art sophisticated camera technologies instead of the commodity stuff, now you're back to paying LiDAR prices, so why not just use that? And anyway, Teslas sold today and for a long time now are supposed to have been sold with cameras sufficient to solve full self driving (not beta). If state of the art cameras are needed, I've got bad news for all those Tesla customers.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

I don’t know why everyone says “just cameras.” Are people imagining they are using some algorithm to detect some object and come up with a distance measure? I’m imagining they are just having the cameras autofocus and determining the focal distance which seems about the same as banking on a good lidar reflection to me.

ModernMech 2y ago
Consider how long it takes your camera to autofocus, and how sometimes it gets it wrong. Then consider how fast your car moves. In the time it takes your camera to autofocus, how far do you think a car can travel, and what happens to all the blurry things in its path that it can't see?
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  A camera that is slow to autofocus is the result of market compromises to reach a price segment in a platform that is within the confines of a camera body dimension. That is not reflective of the state of the art however.
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    Still, the whole rationale behind the camera-only approach is that cameras are cheaply sources, and therefore more suitable for mass production vehicles, unlike LiDAR which are more expensive and not as widespread. If you're now shifting to the idea we need to use state-of-the art sophisticated camera technologies instead of the commodity stuff, now you're back to paying LiDAR prices, so why not just use that? And anyway, Teslas sold today and for a long time now are supposed to have been sold with cameras sufficient to solve full self driving (not beta). If state of the art cameras are needed, I've got bad news for all those Tesla customers.