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Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

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Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#521

Post by rohit2412 »

shafyy wrote: post #458
rohit2412 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting tired of saying this. Why is it one or the other? Why only a human driver or a robot driver? Could you have a human driver in charge with an accident preventing robot, getting the best of both worlds? If the human falls asleep, the robot can do trivial driving, and the human still makes the more difficult driving decisions. The question isn't if robot car is better than an average car being driven by a hu…

Watch Lex Fridman's interview with Musk ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI ), where they discuss exactly this topic. Basically, Musk's point is that if self-driving cars are statistically safer than humans, then allowing humans to drive will make cars less safe again. Furthermore (regarding some other children here), the study that Lex and his team has done show that drivers are not less engaged while Auto…

> if self-driving cars are statistically safer than humans, then allowing humans to drive will make cars less safe again.

You mean "if driverless cars are statistically safer than humans". It shouldn't be a surprise that driver assistance decrease accidents. But Autopilot isn't a driverless system, and neither is there satisfactory proof that it is safer than a human.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#522

Post by rohit2412 »

MarkMc wrote: post #467
rohit2412 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting tired of saying this. Why is it one or the other? Why only a human driver or a robot driver? Could you have a human driver in charge with an accident preventing robot, getting the best of both worlds? If the human falls asleep, the robot can do trivial driving, and the human still makes the more difficult driving decisions. The question isn't if robot car is better than an average car being driven by a hu…

> Could you have a human driver in charge with an accident preventing robot, getting the best of both worlds? I'm not sure that human+robot would be better than robot alone. Eg. The human is in control and starts moving close to the adjacent lane without indicating. Does the robot (a) assume the human driver is changing lanes and so turns on the indicator light; (b) take control of the car and move it back to the cen…

That's a fair argument to hold, that's why I limited the robot to only intervene when accident is imminent.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#523

Post by rohit2412 »

throwaway34241 wrote: post #437
rohit2412 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting tired of saying this. Why is it one or the other? Why only a human driver or a robot driver? Could you have a human driver in charge with an accident preventing robot, getting the best of both worlds? If the human falls asleep, the robot can do trivial driving, and the human still makes the more difficult driving decisions. The question isn't if robot car is better than an average car being driven by a hu…

Sure, the way I'm imagining it is some sort of collision avoidance system, where the person drives but the computer can also put on the brake? It seems like that could be safer (although it could still cause an accident by braking in certain situations like in an intersection). If the self-driving system does other things to reduce accidents like leaving greater margins of safety for other drivers (by stopping less s…

> Do you think self driving cars should be prohibited as long as they are less safe than the standard set by human+collision avoidance cars?

If having a human in the car reduces the accident rate, then I propose making it necessary for the human to be in the car. Are you advocating that we make roads unsafe so that disabled people be able to take taxis more?

> I don't see why the safety standard should be even higher for self-driving cars.

I see it as the opposite. The advocates for driverless cars are advocating lowering standards. For me the standard is simple. If the same car is as safe driving itself as it is assisting a human driving it, then it can drive itself. You can only remove the human if the human adds no safety in the same car. Please do not compare to "the average car on the road".

I see there are positive externalities to cheaper taxis. There are really negative externalities too, in terms of traffic, urban sprawl, and carbon emissions. But I don't think we should deviate from the topic of safety for those externalities

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#524

Post by Gys »

lnanek2 wrote: post #510
RivieraKid wrote: post #270

I watch Tesla fairly closely from both the bull and bear sides. In short, I don't believe Tesla is anywhere close to Waymo. They won't achieve FSD in 2020. It's important to see this event in the context of their significant demand and cash problems. Even enthusiastic Tesla investors like Galileo Russell suggested that Tesla is in a cash crunch and should raise money. Which hints at the main mystery about Tesla, why…

Tesla needs to use Lidars too and frequently crashes into things Lidars would save them from (white trucks that loook like the sky, etc.). Unfortunately, Tesla promised that the cars they were shipping had all the equipment needed for self driving, so they can't say that publicly. Lidars would also bump up their cost by thousands, resulting in fewer sales.

You clearly did not watch the video stream

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#525

Post by pedrocr »

ajross wrote: post #404
naikrovek wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that, ultimately, vision and some IMUs will be all that's needed for an as-perfect-as-possible self-driving cars. Your statement on phone cameras being better than the human eye isn't true today, though. The human eye has FAR better dynamic range than any camera built to date, at any price point. This matters a great deal on sunny, cloudless days in a city with tall buildings casting dark shadows, for example…

> The human eye has FAR better dynamic range than any camera built to date, at any price point. Not at all true. All you need to do is take your camera into a dark room for proof. It can take useful pictures in environments you can't see. And with some manual control and safety precautions (seriously, don't actually do this) you'll note you can shoot useful photos of things that are very near bright sources like the…

You're swapping dynamic range and exposure control. Your examples of dark rooms and bright light sources are examples of great exposure control, not dynamic range. Dynamic range is the difference in light intensity from pure black to pure white in your sensor. Modern sensors are also extremely good at dynamic range though, much better than film and apparently much better than our eyes as well. From a quick search our eyes are at 10 stops of range (2^10 ratio from white to black) and modern sensors have gone past 15 stops and are pushing on 20 apparently, which is just amazing.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#526

Post by AsyncAwait »

rohit2412 wrote: post #293
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument misses the forest for the trees. Even level 5 autopilot will sometimes crash into objects that are clearly visible to most humans, as will lidar-based solutions. But if the robot fleet is an order of magnitude safer than the human fleet, then it makes rational sense to prefer a robot driver to a human.

I'm getting tired of saying this. Why is it one or the other? Why only a human driver or a robot driver? Could you have a human driver in charge with an accident preventing robot, getting the best of both worlds? If the human falls asleep, the robot can do trivial driving, and the human still makes the more difficult driving decisions. The question isn't if robot car is better than an average car being driven by a hu…

Not that it's relevant, but as someone who can't drive due to a disability, nothing short of Level 5 autonomy basically doesn't change the calculus for me at all.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#527

Post by pedrocr »

naikrovek wrote: post #414
ajross wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The human eye has FAR better dynamic range than any camera built to date, at any price point. Not at all true. All you need to do is take your camera into a dark room for proof. It can take useful pictures in environments you can't see. And with some manual control and safety precautions (seriously, don't actually do this) you'll note you can shoot useful photos of things that are very near bright sources like the…

Dynamic range is the ability to see things in both direct sunlight AND in dark shadows at the same time. You need to be able to see pedestrians that are both directly lit by the sun and in the darkest shadows in the same frame of video. No long exposures, no multiple exposures with varying exposure -- a single frame. I don't know of any 24-32-bit per channel sensors, and that's what you'd need. We agree on vision pro…

> I don't know of any 24-32-bit per channel sensors, and that's what you'd need.

Dynamic range doesn't require bit depth. You can have an 8 bit sensor with 20 stops of dynamic range. You'll lose color/luminance resolution of course but as long as 255 is capturing a light that's 2^20 times stronger than 0 that's 20 stops of dynamic range.

But more than that theoretical point there are already sensors pushing well beyond what humans can do in terms of dynamic range. Apparently humans have a respectable 10 stops and sensors are already in the 15 to 20 stop range and pushing beyond it:

https://www.eoshd.com/2014/11/new-sony-sensor-21-stops-dynam...

To map it into 16bit values you can just use a curve to distribute the bit depth unevenly across the dynamic range. Older DSLRs did that to get perfectly usable images with just 10 bits per channel.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#528

Post by pedrocr »

eanzenberg wrote: post #428
ajross wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you... actually tried that? Night shots with a decent camera sensor work much better than your eyes. You're probably being fooled by the exposure control on your junky consumer phone app. Grab one with manual control over exposure/iso and sample rate, you'll be shocked. It's not even a secret. Light capture in a phototransistor[1] is a basically direct process without a whole lot of loss or wasted surface area.…

How are you arguing that ccd’s are better than human eyes? Take video at night and compare. Why do you think hollywood, with their 100k+ camera rigs, still need to add artificial light everywhere especially night scenes? Eyes are incredible at dynamic range, resolution, and response rate. They have to be due to evolution.

If you want to see how consumer cameras can take night video much better than your eyes look up Sony A7S video. Modern cameras have such clean output at high ISO that you can turn night into day with great quality.

Modern consumer cameras have far surpassed what our eyes can do in all the metrics you describe (dynamic range, resolution, response rate) and many others. It's not even close.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#529

Post by breakyerself »

cjhopman wrote: post #479
breakyerself wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is SpaceX a bad example? They've managed to undercut everyone in the space launch sector while bringing in a larger profit per launch.

SpaceX isn't public or open about their financials, but there's a lot of evidence that they are simply losing money. Ex. they were raising a lot of money last year, profitable companies don't do that. Also read https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18129539/spacex-falcon-9-...

Yeah that article seems like a lot of tea leaf reading to me. All evidence points to SpaceX building orbital rockets cheaper than just about anyone else before reuse, but even if not reuse should drop their costs well below anyone else until blue origin comes online or until ULA decides to shake off the crust of old age. It's not at all surprising that investors are told not to expect to take a profit for 15 years because SpaceX is focused on growth and development. I wouldn't expect them to reinvest any less than 100% of their profits at this time. It makes just as much sense to assume they raised money to keep development moving at the pace they want which wasn't fast enough using profits alone.

Despite the fact that I own a Model 3 and own shares in Tesla I often find the critics make good points and just hope for the best anyways because I want electric cars to take over and I want self driving cars to develop sooner than later because driving is dangerous and tedious.

The SpaceX hate seems much less justified to me. SpaceX has been building launching, landing, and reusing rockets for years now. They've ushered in a new lower cost space age.

Re: Tesla Live Stream – Autonomy Day [video]

#530

Post by derpherp »

je42 wrote: post #509
derpherp wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I indeed watched the entire stream and not once do I recall Musk mentioning sensor fusion. Instead, he just focussed on the drawbacks that LIDAR had, which can be corrected if feeds from LIDAR and camera were to be combined. This is why every other AV company uses sensor fusion. No one uses LIDAR just by itself and Tesla should not use vision just by itself.

i guess the main question is why humans can do it without lidar ? or the other way put: why would a lidar bridge the gap between a current vision-based system and human level performance ?

Humans are able to perceive the world due to a bunch of monocular and binocular vision cues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception). Out of these cues, cameras are not able to offer a few. For example, cameras can't offer accommodation as they can't mimic changing focal distances like a human does. Tesla also does not seem to have cameras that focus on different focal lengths as the human eye can.

In addition, even if we can get all the cues, current computer vision techniques are nowhere near as smart to figure out a lot of stuff that the brain can. There is no general AI that can learn from one instance of a test case as the human brain can. Even stuff that is simple to the human brain can trick computer vision (https://globalnews.ca/news/3654164/altered-stop-signs-fool-s...). There is a lot of catching up to do in terms of computer vision.

A LIDAR can help with these cases a lot. It's an extra input that generates a 3D point cloud of the surroundings around it. LIDARs have their own failures but can be combined with computer vision to compensate. This is the central idea behind sensor fusion. Not able to detect if an object is indeed a few feet in front of you due to confusing parallax? LIDAR can help. Looking at a new object that you have no idea what it is cause you have never seen it before? LIDAR can at least tell you how far away it is and it's shape in addition to how fast it is moving.

Now, LIDAR is not a panacea that comes to the rescue of computer vision's failings and solves all of AV's problems but it definitely furthers what a self-driving car can perceive and deliver a higher amount of safety to the end user.

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