3 ms·
The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is
by jandrewrogers 10mo ago
The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors.
For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be assumed to remain the case forever.
- consumer451 10mo agoI am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0] What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
- wongarsu 10mo agoBut optical illusions are much less of an issue because humans understand them and also suffer from them. That makes them easier to detect, easier to debug, and much less scary to the average driver. Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift
- consumer451 10mo ago> and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift Is this a joke? Graffiti is now punishable and enforced by whom exactly? Who decides what constitutes an illegal image? How do you catch them? What if vision-only FSD sees a city-sanctioned brick building's mural as an actual sunset? So you agree that all we need is AGI and human-equal sensors for Tesla-style FSD, but wait... plus some "swift" enforcement force for illegal murals? I love this, I have had heath issues recently, and I have not laughed this hard for a while. Thank you. Hell, at the last "Tesla AI Day," Musk himself said ~"FSD basically requires AGI" - so he is well aware.
- wongarsu 10mo agoIntentionally trying to create traffic accidents is illegal. This isn't an FSD-thing. If you try to intentionally get humans to crash their cars you are going to get into trouble. I don't see how this suddenly becomes OK when done to competent FSD (not that I'd count Tesla among them)
- consumer451 10mo agoIf I understand your argument correctly, then posting a sign that it is incorrect.. like a wrong way highway on-ramp sign, would be illegal? That sounds correct. But what if your city hired you to paint a sunset mural on a wall, and then a vision-only system killed a family of four by driving into it, during some "edge case" lighting situation? I would like to think that we would apply "security is an onion" to our physical safety as well. Stereo vision + lidar + radar + ultrasonic? Would that not be the least that we could do as technologists?
- wongarsu 10mo agoI did only talk about malicious attempts being punished, and the sunset mural would not be malicious
- dham 10mo agoThat was autopilot not FSD. Autopilot is a simple ADAS system similar to Toyota Safety sense or all the other garbage ADAS systems from Honda, Kia, Toyota, GM etc. FSD passed this test with flying colors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZhIsGFL6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZhIsGFL6g
- solumunus 10mo agoWhy isn’t the solution a combination of both?
- ycui1986 10mo agoeveryone uses cellphone that transmit on the same frequency. they don't seem to cause interference. once enough lidar enters real word use. there will be regulation to make them work with each other.
- jandrewrogers 10mo agoCompletely different problem domains. A mobile phone is interacting with a fixed point (i.e. cell tower) that coordinates and manages traffic across cell phones to minimize interference. LIDAR is like wifi, a commons that can be polluted at will by arbitrary actors. LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.
- CamperBob2 10mo agoNo, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. Look at how dozens of GPS satellites share the same frequency without stepping on each others' toes, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly have easier ways to do it.
- addaon 10mo ago> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard.
- tim333 10mo agoI hadn't heard that criticism. You can get multiple Waymos near each other without them crashing into things.
- vachina 10mo agoWhen I see Waymos fail they usually fail together
- catgirlinspace 10mo agoDoesn’t mean they’re failing because of interfering lidar though. If it’s something like them failing due to the road being blocked or something, it makes sense they’d fail together. Assuming they’re on the same OS, why would one know how to handle that situation and another not?