Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#21

Post by raxxorrax »

stevoo wrote: post #7

This not news. This has existed from the first iteration of Tesla Autopilots. That is why there where crashes with stationery vehicles for Tesla. This is shortcoming for using only cameras or any vehicle that has adaptive cruise control. The problem is that the front camera cannot distinguish from the road and a stationery vehicle. For that, they are the same and they ignore stationary obstacles. If they where taken…

Couldn't a secondary camera help more? Matching the images is not trivial and may take a while, but you could extract spatial information. Maybe a laser or a flash projector works better, but I imagine these systems to be susceptible to disturbances like reflections, especially when multiple cars are driving around.

Probably a long way still until we have real self-driving cars...

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#22

Post by Symmetry »

jameskilton wrote: post #6

This has been true for a long time. Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk. Heck, it can get confused with a bridge's shadow on a bright day. Thus autopilot has to be configured to deal with these situations: stop or run into them. The vast majority of the situation you don't want the car to stop, as that will lead to a more dangerous situation and increase the chance of a collision.…

Automotive radar is clearly not up to the task of differentiating stopped cars from signs at a range far enough away to brake safely, it's true. In theory if you could fit a narrow beam phased array radar on a car it could do the job but that isn't something at all in the cards. But self driving cars with lidar have enough precision to deal with this problem even if they do cost more.

Rather than showing a problem with level 4 or level 5 automony I'd argue that this, and the psychology of driving, show that level 2 and level 3 are too dangerous since they require constant driver attention without constant driver engagement. We should just abandon the idea of having those autonomy level for cars and go straight to 4 and 5. That's what Waymo and other responsible self-driving development teams are doing and it looks like it'll work.

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#23

Post by rcxdude »

derekp7 wrote: post #20
stevoo wrote: post #7

This not news. This has existed from the first iteration of Tesla Autopilots. That is why there where crashes with stationery vehicles for Tesla. This is shortcoming for using only cameras or any vehicle that has adaptive cruise control. The problem is that the front camera cannot distinguish from the road and a stationery vehicle. For that, they are the same and they ignore stationary obstacles. If they where taken…

This is something I don't understand. If you have more than 1 camera, you can run an edge detection algorithm on the images from each camera and use simple trig to build up a 3d model of what is in front of the car. This can easily distinguish between a shadow or road kill, vs a large object in the way. Is there a technical reason they don't do this (such as too much processing power required)?

You are trivialising the problem. Getting reliable data from stereo images is still far from solved, especially in realtime. (Also, the best currently available techniques are likely too computationally expensive to run on the compute that Tesla has put in the car).

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#24

Post by Junk_Collector »

tntn wrote: post #18
jameskilton wrote: post #6

This has been true for a long time. Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk. Heck, it can get confused with a bridge's shadow on a bright day. Thus autopilot has to be configured to deal with these situations: stop or run into them. The vast majority of the situation you don't want the car to stop, as that will lead to a more dangerous situation and increase the chance of a collision.…

> Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk "Radar" absolutely can. What can't differentiate between these things is the radar in Teslas that was intended for use in adaptive cruise control. There are any number of not insanely expensive radars that could do this job perfectly fine. Tesla just decided to go "full self driving" with this rather bad radar because "humans can do it with vi…

I don't the specifics of Tesla's radar implementation but what I have seen of the accidents usually seem like a textbook examples of incorrectly implemented clutter filtering. It's not an easy problem to solve in practice (re: cheaply), but known solutions have existed for decades.

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#25

Post by toomuchtodo »

jeremyjh wrote: post #19
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a deficiency in several automatic emergency braking systems [1]. Tesla extracts as much signal from front facing radar as they can, but edge cases abound. Marketplace or Planet Money had a piece a few weeks ago that mentioned the hardest problem was consumer education about these safety systems. People are inherently not interested in learning about the life safety systems in their cars. They expect it to “ju…

Without doubt it is Tesla’s fault, due to how they have named and marketed the feature. Even if they fixed the name, they have created a system that encourages people to disengage when it is not safe to do so. You can’t make a system inherently unsafe and absolve responsibility by adding a warning.

Tesla isn’t responsible for ignorant consumers. The lowest common denominator should not guide product marketing and education.

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#26

Post by kokx »

mikejb wrote: post #17
eastendguy wrote: post #4

Can any other Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) stop in such a case? (Real question, I don't know). My current understanding is that Tesla's TACC is the best on the market. Correct?

> Can any other Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) stop in such a case? (Real question, I don't know). I haven't found conclusive evidence, but the lack of news around other TACCs crashing into stationary objects is an indicator it might be a Autopilot specific issue. > My current understanding is that Tesla's TACC is the best on the market. Correct? Define best. It definitely has a lot of features few or no other s…

> I haven't found conclusive evidence, but the lack of news around other TACCs crashing into stationary objects is an indicator it might be a Autopilot specific issue.

IMO, I think this may actually not be true. Due to Tesla's popularity, and the amount of investors that have stated that they were shorting TSLA, I do think that media have a tendency to report more news about such accidents just because a Tesla was involved. If a Tesla crashes somewhere, the first question probably is "Was Autopilot enabled?", while with most other car crashes, it's just a car crash.

So I don't think that lack of news about other cars with TACC means that they don't suffer from similar issues. (TBH I wouldn't be able to name any other cars with such an advanced TACC either).

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#28

Post by gthtjtkt »

tntn wrote: post #16
gthtjtkt wrote: post #10

What are we going to find out next, water is wet? Every radar cruise control system comes with a warning that it can't detect stopped traffic. This seems like a case of RTFM.

The issue is that tesla packaged up a radar designed for adaptive cruise control as part of their "autopilot." Maybe there is some disclaimer somewhere that says autopilot will happily run into stopped cars, but I don't know that most drivers of Teslas are aware of this.

It's in the manual. In fact, the exact scenario in this video is on page 83 of the Model S manual.

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#29

Post by linkadin »

jameskilton wrote: post #6

This has been true for a long time. Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk. Heck, it can get confused with a bridge's shadow on a bright day. Thus autopilot has to be configured to deal with these situations: stop or run into them. The vast majority of the situation you don't want the car to stop, as that will lead to a more dangerous situation and increase the chance of a collision.…

Can someone with more computer vision knowledge explain why we can't teach a machine learning algorithm to detect stationary cars.

I have seen other Tesla demo videos where it clearly detects stationary cars. It seems ridiculous to say that it is a shortcoming of camera when our own two eyes do it.

Re: Current Tesla autopilot is sometimes blind to stopped cars

#30

Post by tntn »

Junk_Collector wrote: post #24
tntn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Radar can't differentiate between a wall, a stopped car, or a dead skunk "Radar" absolutely can. What can't differentiate between these things is the radar in Teslas that was intended for use in adaptive cruise control. There are any number of not insanely expensive radars that could do this job perfectly fine. Tesla just decided to go "full self driving" with this rather bad radar because "humans can do it with vi…

I don't the specifics of Tesla's radar implementation but what I have seen of the accidents usually seem like a textbook examples of incorrectly implemented clutter filtering. It's not an easy problem to solve in practice (re: cheaply), but known solutions have existed for decades.

The radar module in Teslas uses the same filtering strategy as most adaptive cruise control radar modules, which is "if relative velocity to object is nearly the opposite of the car's velocity, throw it out."

It works pretty much as designed.

Post reply on HN