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Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

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Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#11

Post by CharlesW »

I thought it was telling that Andrej immediately "reframed" the question because Lex asked the "wrong question". This is a classic evasion technique one learns from experience and/or media training. Lex's comment immediately after was a clever and gentle dig at Andrej's response.

It seemed like all the "full cost" negatives Andrej mentioned were related to Tesla's ability to execute, and not what would actually produce better results. Tesla would have to be able to reliably procure parts, write reliable firmware, create designs and processes that won't increase unexpected assembly line stops, etc.

Regarding results, the best Andrej can do is, "In this case, we looked at using it and not using it, and the delta was not massive." In other words, the results are better, but not enough to make up for the fact that Telsa can't support additional sensors without incurring a prohibitive amount of additional risk to Tesla. Risk to passengers doesn't appear to be a consideration.

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#12

Post by latchkey »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #9
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #2

This whole question about the vision boils down to "humans don't need it so cars should not need it too" the problem with this statement is that humans does not have wheels to move around, they have legs, but wheels are ridiculously simple compared to 4 legs tapping 160km/h on a highway. Same for birds - they also does not need jet engines to fly around, but imagine Airbus A380 flapping its wings and what kind of com…

soooo... you're agreeeing that non-vision isn't necessary since the control domain is so much simpler? I personally think they should use as much data inputs as possible: radar, IR, LIDAR, mesh networks, fixed route information. Where tesla went particularly wrong IMO is ignoring some sort of route-based chunk information which is how humans navigate. IIRC Elon said something to the effect of just having an algorithm…

> Humans use the basic algorithm "stay in lane, drive forward"

If you've ever driven in Vietnam, that is so not true.

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#13

Post by justapassenger »

throwntoday wrote: post #8
eachro wrote: post #4

So the key question is how much of an improvement does radar/sensors/etc give you over just using computer vision?

If we're to trust what Elon and the team said during the last few AI day, none. They stated that the ultrasonic and radar sensors were actually performing worse than their pure vision stack.

Real life performance of vision only stack doesn’t agree with it.

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#14

Post by ajross »

elteto wrote: post #6
ajross wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the question at hand is system control, not locomotion! You're not asking the automation to walk (well, I mean someday we will, but Teslas have wheels), nor the aircraft to flap. We want the automation to do what a human pilot would do. And that works with eyes. No, I think this argument is largely correct. And frankly settled: anyone who's driven recent FSD beta versions knows very well that the cars "see just f…

> The LIDAR folks were wrong, basically. This is far, far from settled at this point.

No, it's over. Look, the LIDAR value proposition was necessarily "Yes, we're outrageously expensive and involve major tradeoffs in physical design of the vehicle, but vision can simply never do what we do". And... vision does. It does, every day. On hundreds of thousands of cars.

In point of fact FSD beta vehicles are out there every day in environments where LIDAR has never been deployed, nor likely ever tested. And we're not seeing clear "it can't do this" failures. Anywhere.

The closest you're going to get to evidence against vision are things like that "It Hit A Kid!" stunt from a few months back that turned out to be basically faked[1].

[1] At least the perps went silent and no one was ever able to reproduce. I mean the whole idea was ridiculous: my car twitches at pedestrians, including kids, including my kids, every day. It literally draws them on the screen.

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#15

Post by latchkey »

CharlesW wrote: post #11

I thought it was telling that Andrej immediately "reframed" the question because Lex asked the "wrong question". This is a classic evasion technique one learns from experience and/or media training. Lex's comment immediately after was a clever and gentle dig at Andrej's response. It seemed like all the "full cost" negatives Andrej mentioned were related to Tesla's ability to execute, and not what would actually produ…

Not just risk to passengers, risk to any thing in proximity to the vehicle while it is in motion.

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#16

Post by bekantan »

He explains it quite well: all necessary information is already in the pixel-space and adding more sensors slows team down more than it improves the system performance. My understanding is that major blockers are not in perception area anyways, would be great if someone with relevant experience could comment if this is indeed the case.

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#17

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #14
elteto wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LIDAR folks were wrong, basically. This is far, far from settled at this point.

No, it's over. Look, the LIDAR value proposition was necessarily "Yes, we're outrageously expensive and involve major tradeoffs in physical design of the vehicle, but vision can simply never do what we do". And... vision does. It does, every day. On hundreds of thousands of cars. In point of fact FSD beta vehicles are out there every day in environments where LIDAR has never been deployed, nor likely ever tested. And…

[deleted]

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#18

Post by enragedcacti »

ajross wrote: post #3
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #2

This whole question about the vision boils down to "humans don't need it so cars should not need it too" the problem with this statement is that humans does not have wheels to move around, they have legs, but wheels are ridiculously simple compared to 4 legs tapping 160km/h on a highway. Same for birds - they also does not need jet engines to fly around, but imagine Airbus A380 flapping its wings and what kind of com…

But the question at hand is system control, not locomotion! You're not asking the automation to walk (well, I mean someday we will, but Teslas have wheels), nor the aircraft to flap. We want the automation to do what a human pilot would do. And that works with eyes. No, I think this argument is largely correct. And frankly settled: anyone who's driven recent FSD beta versions knows very well that the cars "see just f…

> No, I think this argument is largely correct. And frankly settled: anyone who's driven recent FSD beta versions knows very well that the cars "see just fine". They don't hit anything, they see and avoid obstacles.

Only if you ignore times where intervention stopped it from hitting something, times where it did actually hit something, massive amounts of jitter and popping in the visual output, phantom braking, etc.

Unless of course "recent" means n+1 where n is the version that crashed into something.

Collision with bollard in Feb 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbSDsbDQjSU

attempts to plow through cyclist Feb 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5wkENwrp_k

almost crashes into tram (can't gauge speed or direction?) Jun 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxX4tDkSc_g

Crashes into curb Aug 2022: https://youtube.com/shorts/8Mh1GjejdsI

Phantom brake Sep 2022: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5v6j_oL7S-g

Almost colliding with bridge pillar 2 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CMYkDWaqn0

Crashes into various objects in testing 2 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDxqEzV5Zc

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#19

Post by 01100011 »

I still suspect it's because they need to preserve compute resources for vision processing. Sensor fusion is likely eating up too much of their current HW and limiting their progress in other areas. I suspect Tesla will have to admit they need to upgrade the current HW before they ever 'solve' FSD.

Re: Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]

#20

Post by 3apo »

CharlesW wrote: post #11

I thought it was telling that Andrej immediately "reframed" the question because Lex asked the "wrong question". This is a classic evasion technique one learns from experience and/or media training. Lex's comment immediately after was a clever and gentle dig at Andrej's response. It seemed like all the "full cost" negatives Andrej mentioned were related to Tesla's ability to execute, and not what would actually produ…

I feel the other reason is that Tesla has not figured out a way to put Radar into their ML pipeline. If you take the Range-Doppler Map from the radar as the 'pixel' map, that data is inherently very dependent on the scenario and the radar sensor intrinsic parameters. This variability in what the radar sees in the RD space is what makes this a challenge for ML/AI pipelines. If Tesla were to 'fuse' information from these sensors in the object track level - I believe they will be less susceptible to this variability.
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