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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]

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was hilarious. Basically (unless this needs a reframing/realignment/repositioning/reorienting): Q: "are less sensors less safe/effective?" A: "well more sensors are costly to the organization and add more tech debt so safety is orthogonal and not worth answering".

Munro’s cost breakdown is much more informative in just how much it’ll save in terms of parts/labor. https://youtu.be/LS3Vk0NPFDE In general the ‘harm to consumers’ is really just making it more likely they damage the car in a parking lot or their garage, which tells you where their priorities are (sales, Automotive gross profit). Assuming occupancy network works, the only real blind spot left is if something in fron…

This thread is unhelpfully mixing radar and ultrasonic sensors. Ultrasonic sensors, as your video explains, are primarily used as a parking aid; they are tuned for too low a distance to be helpful in just about any kind of driving scenario at speed.

Meanwhile, radar is the principal sensor used in systems like automatic emergency braking across the industry. It has no intersection with any of the parking stuff because it generally has to ignore stationary objects to be useful (hence the whole "Teslas crashing full speed into stopped vehicles" thing).

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity doesn’t know how to solve this yet, so it’s hard to say whether it is helping or not.

We already have the solution. LiDAR.

If you could use LiDAR well enough then it would solve the problem. Of course, if you could use vision well enough it would solve the problem too.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some experience with LiDAR, they fail easily if a water droplet is on the cover or if signs are too bright. It’s a whole different technology challenge.

Why is LiDAR still expensive enough for the cost to be a problem for anyone? Why have large numbers not driven these down to commodity devices at this point? Or maybe similar tech at another frequency like spread spectrum microwave with phased array semiconductor antennae?

It is now cheap enough for GM and Volkswagen:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-25/lidar-sen...

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

#145
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…

> We want the automation to do what a human pilot would do. And that works with eyes. Humans can’t really turn senses off, so they have coffee when driving. Touch and hearing are quite important to “read the road”. Equilibrium too.

Humans work with much more than just eyes. We subconsciously move our heads in case of uncertainty in the stereo vision algorithm and have pretty good IMUs. And yet, everyone has the experience of wrongly focusing on a repeating vertical pattern (vertical blinds or coiled cord for example) and getting disoriented. And every experienced driver has experienced at least some of the following: a moment of glare from a wet road, driving into a sunset, snowy road with curves in flat lighting conditions, dirty windshield/headlights/backup camera.

All of those are challenging for humans and and probably even more challenging for computer vision with cameras only. But except for the last point, all are obviously improved by lidar.

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

#146
post #20

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 the…

Exactly. Radar gives you direct range data; camera pixels need to be processed by ML to infer range data, and the latter is never going to be as close to ground truth as the former, so the former should be prioritized.

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

#147

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…

Tesla hasn't proven itself to be a capable major car manufacturer (they probably lead the minor category, at least in deliveries) in all but one: their de-prioritizing of human life.

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

#148
post #33

I didn't find his answers particularly convincing. His answer focused on costs mainly, and how "the best part is no part". We have already seen multiple accidents caused by camera's limitations [1] which would not have happened if Tesla used Lidars. Cameras have poor dynamic range and can be easily blinded by bright surfaces. While it is true that humans do fine with only eyes, our eyes are significantly better than…

Not to mention waymo works well with LiDAR, cameras and radars. If you’re argument is it’s too hard to deal with that much data, it’s definitely the wrong answer.

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

#149

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…

Tesla hasn't proven itself to be a capable major car manufacturer (they probably lead the minor category, at least in deliveries) in all but one: their de-prioritizing of human life.

Is there hard data on how deadly they are vs. other auto manufacturers? There is definitely a narrative that the cars are dangerous, but I'd like to see that quantified.

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

#150
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video has a more reasonable answer. The sensors are unreliable and expensive in terms of R&D. Having marginal parts which takes money from a finite R&D budget can easily result in a worse product. “They contribute noise and entropy into everything.” … “you’re investing fully into that [vision] and you can make that extremely good. You only have a finite amount of spend of focus across different facets of the syst…

> Having marginal parts which takes money from a finite R&D budget can easily result in a worse product. "Less sensors can be more safe/effective if that allows us to focus on making effective use of the sensor information we do have, which is the result we're aiming for with this descision." would be a reasonable answer (if true), but that doesn't seem like a fair interpretation of what he actually said.

Isn’t that his point though? Where exactly is he not saying that?

I listened to his answer three times and I’m not able to come up with a different interpretation than that.

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