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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]

#21

Post by diskzero »

bekantan wrote: post #16

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.

I am a principal engineer for a major autonomous vehicle company. You can break this statement down into two components:

Adding more sensors slows his team now more than it improves system performance

I'll take his word on this. It is a lot of work to incorporate multiple sensors.

All necessary information is already in the pixel-space.

I hate to disagree with someone as distinguished as Karpathy, but this is simply not what I have observed from all of that data that we have access to. Given my knowledge of the various stacks deployed today, I would never ever ever get into a vehicle using a vision only stack and expect it to perform in some of the challenging environments encountered during testing.

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

#22

Post by 6stringmerc »

bekantan wrote: post #16

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.

I have driven in extreme rain flash flood conditions in north Texas and I consider this a specific challenge, natural, that would defeat his system.

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

#23

Post by diskzero »

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?

As someone working in the field, I would never choose to eliminate the information provided by radar, lidar and any other sensor technology. Depending only on camera information would be too limiting.

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

#24

Post by a-dub »

i'm not sure if i buy his argument that the "delta is not big enough." i have some experience with realtime ai systems and i've noticed something interesting about them.

they have a non-smooth capability curve, where they can demonstrate proficiency in activities that in regular computer programs or people would imply a complete and continuous path of capability that has been mastered to achieve the demonstration, but ai systems are weird in that can do amazing things, but have loads of little holes and failure modes along the way.

for example: gpt-3 can write you a shell script that will emit a c program that prints a poem about people you know, but will fail at very basic logic, sometimes.

in light of that, having additional support data like radar or lidar seems like the right move for plugging all those little holes in capability that turn up in real ai systems.

because at the end of the day, when you're driving a car in the real world and lives are at stake, simply interpolating or averaging over uncertainty seems awfully deadly and the only way to ameliorate that uncertainty seems to have multiple redundant sensory systems that can stand in for each other as conditions change. just like us!

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

#25

Post by snovv_crash »

01100011 wrote: post #19

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.

The amount of compute that sensor fusion uses is miniscule compared to running a NN or computing stereo depth maps. Sensor fusion runs in the background of your phone the whole time to power things like [0] for example.

0. https://sensor-js.xyz/demo.html

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

#26

Post by pclmulqdq »

latchkey wrote: post #12
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hell, even in the northeast US (particularly the cities) this isn't true. Self-driving cars today seem to have a dogmatic focus on California-style driving.

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

#27

Post by pclmulqdq »

6stringmerc wrote: post #22
bekantan wrote: post #16

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.

I have driven in extreme rain flash flood conditions in north Texas and I consider this a specific challenge, natural, that would defeat his system.

Any amount of snow would do this too. It severely reduces the color space of road features.
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