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But why LIDAR though? Humans proved that for current level driving two not particularly high-resolution cameras are sufficient. Seems like pushing in this dire

by vl 12y ago

But why LIDAR though? Humans proved that for current level driving two not particularly high-resolution cameras are sufficient. Seems like pushing in this direction will remove this expensive component?

tomp 12y ago
While driving, humans assume that the road ahead is OK (at least without significant potholes, and in sunny hot weather no ice-patches). We would expect better of robots (i.e. if a human crashes because of an oil patch, (s)he's a bad driver; if a computer crashes, it's a million-dollar lawsuit). Edit: a better solution would be to observe the behaviour of other drivers; if there is someone driving ahead of you, you can assume that the road between you and them is OK; if there's noone ahead of you, you need to drive slower and be more careful (that's how I drive at night). Once there's a critical mass of cars with cameras, cars could communicate road conditions automatically.
- agateau 12y ago
  > Once there's a critical mass of cars with cameras, cars could communicate road conditions automatically. I would be frightened to trust the data coming from a random car in front of me. Inferring road condition from another car behavior sounds reasonable, using data supplied from it, not so much.
  - __P 12y ago
    The internet works that way, and you seem to be fine with that. :\ Is it the "saftey issue"? i.e the internet can't crash you into a wall, it can only send you to rotton or steal your credit card...
    - sp332 12y ago
      Wow, no. I don't trust the internet to give me real facts about elephants, let alone anything life-threatening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Other_Tripling_Elephants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Other_T... If the equipment had some built-in tamper detection, and Google's sensors digitally signed data if they didn't detect tampering, then I might trust it enough to drive with.
  - etimberg 12y ago
    You'll love this talk then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEYCU62yeYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEYCU62yeYk
  - danielweber 12y ago
    You shouldn't and wouldn't rely unfailingly on what other cars merely report. If the car in front of you insists its maintaining speed while your own readings indicate its slamming on its brakes, you should assume it's slamming on its brakes. However, if the car three cars in front of you just broadcast "I'm doing an emergency stop right now", that's really valuable data. The human in your car won't know anything is wrong for at least a second. The human driver behind you would know about it before the human driver in front of you.
    - ryan-c 12y ago
      > However, if the car three cars in front of you just broadcast "I'm doing an emergency stop right now", that's really valuable data. Until some asshat implements a button that sends this message for "lulz", though that would probably constitute a crime under existing law.
      - danielweber 12y ago
        That will be the most common failure mode for computer-driven cars: how easy they are to bring to a stop. (And, yes, that's probably criminal behavior.) A computer-driven car, though, wouldn't (shouldn't) just immediately slam on the brakes because of that signal. It would tighten seat belts and start slowing down, but it also would want to avoid getting rammed by the car behind it. It can make very accurate estimates about its stopping distance and use all of it.
- babo 12y ago
  So if a car, driving right ahead of me, leaking oil when cornering...
Ygg2 12y ago
Humans, also posses a listening system, balance system, a highly advance pattern recognition system filled with auto complete from a huge database of pictures (which to this date hasn't been replicated - face recognition doesn't count it needs to recognize cars, signs, people, animals, pavement, trees, obstacles, etc.), not to mention knowledge of various possible scenarios, various models of how their body/car/traffic works, etc. You get to use worse hardware, but you need several order magnitude better software.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  I would guess that the processing power is all that matters. It's not difficult or particularly dangerous to drive without being able to hear. I would guess that people driving remote controlled cars with 360-degree views but no other cues would perform very nearly as well as real drivers.
  - markbao 12y ago
    I think the key point is that it is very difficult for software to parse view-from-windshield images like this: http://blogs.bootsnall.com/chaskaconrow/files/2006/02/Chaska%20064.jpg http://blogs.bootsnall.com/chaskaconrow/files/2006/02/Chaska... The human eye can instantly recognize the available driving paths, the motorcyclist ahead, and project where people will walk. Software would have to parse out where the open roads are, how far that motorcyclist is and whether he can clear the intersection before the car reaches it, and what that sign on the right-hand side is—using the same information, but it has to parse it first whereas we do that almost instantly. It's a totally different game.
    - x1798DE 12y ago
      Yes, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying the other sensors the parent post mentioned weren't actually important with regards to driving, just our ability to parse the visual data into a meaningful model of the world around us.
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    I think hearing is also useful, from time to time. It's not AS critical as sight, but if nothing it allows drivers to share their emotional state in a very primitive way and to gauge how their engine is performing.
eksith 12y ago
"Seeing" and "Perceiving" are likely very different. Yes, we only have binocular visual input, but the excess in processing in the brain takes perception to another level. However, machines have trouble with the perception part and so have to make up for it by seeing in excess. That's just my theory on it.
JulianMorrison 12y ago
Humans fail, it's called "crashing".
lawlessone 12y ago
Maybe we should add LIDAR to humans too.
iandanforth 12y ago
FYI human eyesight is near 24MP equivalent. Its actually pretty high res.
- vl 12y ago
  Well, it's already in consumer-level (ok, "prosumer") cameras. Also we know that "fps" is of an eye is around 60 Hz - since it's the minimum that monitors looks OK.
Symmetry 12y ago
Human eyes are actually equivalent to very high end video cameras, and the image process that you can do in your squishy grey 10 watt processor is still way better than anything we can do with computers. You need your navigation system to be able to directly sense in 3 dimensions for it to be competitive.
- vl 12y ago
  Not really: we have hi dpi (and in focus) resolution only in the narrow field of view in the middle, everything else is not that good. We compensate for this by having ability to quickly move eyes and refocus.
mikeash 12y ago
When you can fit an exaflop electronic computer into a car, then maybe two cameras would be sufficient. Right now, we have to make do with less, and better sensors can make up the difference.
- vl 12y ago
  There is no exaflop computer in the human though - we just don't have enough energy to power it inside us.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    That's a rough estimate of how much computing power is in the human brain. It's extremely efficient energy-wise, but massively parallel and weirdly put together so not entirely comparable to an electronic computer. Still, the computing resources available to process the images from the human eye are enormous.
robotresearcher 12y ago
> But why LIDAR though? The simple answer is that we don't know how to do it with stereo vision alone yet. Getting range reliably is hard, and your brain uses lots of tricks to do it. The second answer is that we need better-than-human performance if this is to take off. So using human-type sensing might not be good enough anyway. Lots of researchers are pushing on vision-based driving, though.

by vl 12y ago

tomp 12y ago

While driving, humans assume that the road ahead is OK (at least without significant potholes, and in sunny hot weather no ice-patches). We would expect better of robots (i.e. if a human crashes because of an oil patch, (s)he's a bad driver; if a computer crashes, it's a million-dollar lawsuit). Edit: a better solution would be to observe the behaviour of other drivers; if there is someone driving ahead of you, you can assume that the road between you and them is OK; if there's noone ahead of you, you need to drive slower and be more careful (that's how I drive at night). Once there's a critical mass of cars with cameras, cars could communicate road conditions automatically.

agateau 12y ago
> Once there's a critical mass of cars with cameras, cars could communicate road conditions automatically. I would be frightened to trust the data coming from a random car in front of me. Inferring road condition from another car behavior sounds reasonable, using data supplied from it, not so much.
- __P 12y ago
  The internet works that way, and you seem to be fine with that. :\ Is it the "saftey issue"? i.e the internet can't crash you into a wall, it can only send you to rotton or steal your credit card...
  - sp332 12y ago
    Wow, no. I don't trust the internet to give me real facts about elephants, let alone anything life-threatening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Other_Tripling_Elephants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Other_T... If the equipment had some built-in tamper detection, and Google's sensors digitally signed data if they didn't detect tampering, then I might trust it enough to drive with.
- etimberg 12y ago
  You'll love this talk then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEYCU62yeYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEYCU62yeYk
- danielweber 12y ago
  You shouldn't and wouldn't rely unfailingly on what other cars merely report. If the car in front of you insists its maintaining speed while your own readings indicate its slamming on its brakes, you should assume it's slamming on its brakes. However, if the car three cars in front of you just broadcast "I'm doing an emergency stop right now", that's really valuable data. The human in your car won't know anything is wrong for at least a second. The human driver behind you would know about it before the human driver in front of you.
  - ryan-c 12y ago
    > However, if the car three cars in front of you just broadcast "I'm doing an emergency stop right now", that's really valuable data. Until some asshat implements a button that sends this message for "lulz", though that would probably constitute a crime under existing law.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      That will be the most common failure mode for computer-driven cars: how easy they are to bring to a stop. (And, yes, that's probably criminal behavior.) A computer-driven car, though, wouldn't (shouldn't) just immediately slam on the brakes because of that signal. It would tighten seat belts and start slowing down, but it also would want to avoid getting rammed by the car behind it. It can make very accurate estimates about its stopping distance and use all of it.
babo 12y ago
So if a car, driving right ahead of me, leaking oil when cornering...

Ygg2 12y ago

Humans, also posses a listening system, balance system, a highly advance pattern recognition system filled with auto complete from a huge database of pictures (which to this date hasn't been replicated - face recognition doesn't count it needs to recognize cars, signs, people, animals, pavement, trees, obstacles, etc.), not to mention knowledge of various possible scenarios, various models of how their body/car/traffic works, etc. You get to use worse hardware, but you need several order magnitude better software.

x1798DE 12y ago
I would guess that the processing power is all that matters. It's not difficult or particularly dangerous to drive without being able to hear. I would guess that people driving remote controlled cars with 360-degree views but no other cues would perform very nearly as well as real drivers.
- markbao 12y ago
  I think the key point is that it is very difficult for software to parse view-from-windshield images like this: http://blogs.bootsnall.com/chaskaconrow/files/2006/02/Chaska%20064.jpg http://blogs.bootsnall.com/chaskaconrow/files/2006/02/Chaska... The human eye can instantly recognize the available driving paths, the motorcyclist ahead, and project where people will walk. Software would have to parse out where the open roads are, how far that motorcyclist is and whether he can clear the intersection before the car reaches it, and what that sign on the right-hand side is—using the same information, but it has to parse it first whereas we do that almost instantly. It's a totally different game.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    Yes, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying the other sensors the parent post mentioned weren't actually important with regards to driving, just our ability to parse the visual data into a meaningful model of the world around us.
- Ygg2 12y ago
  I think hearing is also useful, from time to time. It's not AS critical as sight, but if nothing it allows drivers to share their emotional state in a very primitive way and to gauge how their engine is performing.

eksith 12y ago

"Seeing" and "Perceiving" are likely very different. Yes, we only have binocular visual input, but the excess in processing in the brain takes perception to another level. However, machines have trouble with the perception part and so have to make up for it by seeing in excess. That's just my theory on it.

JulianMorrison 12y ago

Humans fail, it's called "crashing".

lawlessone 12y ago

Maybe we should add LIDAR to humans too.

iandanforth 12y ago

FYI human eyesight is near 24MP equivalent. Its actually pretty high res.

vl 12y ago
Well, it's already in consumer-level (ok, "prosumer") cameras. Also we know that "fps" is of an eye is around 60 Hz - since it's the minimum that monitors looks OK.

Symmetry 12y ago

Human eyes are actually equivalent to very high end video cameras, and the image process that you can do in your squishy grey 10 watt processor is still way better than anything we can do with computers. You need your navigation system to be able to directly sense in 3 dimensions for it to be competitive.

vl 12y ago
Not really: we have hi dpi (and in focus) resolution only in the narrow field of view in the middle, everything else is not that good. We compensate for this by having ability to quickly move eyes and refocus.

mikeash 12y ago

When you can fit an exaflop electronic computer into a car, then maybe two cameras would be sufficient. Right now, we have to make do with less, and better sensors can make up the difference.

vl 12y ago
There is no exaflop computer in the human though - we just don't have enough energy to power it inside us.
- mikeash 12y ago
  That's a rough estimate of how much computing power is in the human brain. It's extremely efficient energy-wise, but massively parallel and weirdly put together so not entirely comparable to an electronic computer. Still, the computing resources available to process the images from the human eye are enormous.

robotresearcher 12y ago

> But why LIDAR though? The simple answer is that we don't know how to do it with stereo vision alone yet. Getting range reliably is hard, and your brain uses lots of tricks to do it. The second answer is that we need better-than-human performance if this is to take off. So using human-type sensing might not be good enough anyway. Lots of researchers are pushing on vision-based driving, though.