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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]

#221

Post by oxplot »

Here's the summary (mixed with observations from Munro and past Tesla presentations):

- Costs money: the physical sensors (a dozen of them), wiring it up, assembling it, maintain inventory, code it, etc.

- Time spent on maintaining, improving software stack for the non-vision sensors as well as efforts needed to fuse the data with vision, takes away from focusing on vision alone. It also holds back vision in relevant areas.

- Existing non-vision sensors used by Tesla are orders of magnitude lower fidelity than vision. It has historically (as the case with radar) led to vision essentially having to overriding radar because vision just performed much better (see AI day 2021).

My take:

As with any new tech, it likely sucks at the start (think HDD and SSDs, and how a mechanical thing with lots of moving parts was way more reliable than SSDs at the start). However, by essentially moving past the local maxima, you get to innovate better, faster in the future.

In case of ultrasonic sensors, they are for low speed cases anyway and most people are fine without them. Majority of fatalities and injuries happen at higher speeds.

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

#222

Post by krapht »

et2o wrote: post #193
syntaxing wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh highest accuracy and bandwidth for what? You can have a camera that can see piece of steak at 100K resolution at 1000 FPS but doesn’t mean you can use a camera to replace a thermometer. Blows my mind how people eat up that cameras can replace every sensor in existence without even entertaining basic physics. ML is not omnipotent.

For the specific task of (for example) cooking a steak it’s not hard to envision a computer vision algorithm coupled with a model with a some basic knowledge of the system (ambient temperature, oven/stove temperature, time cooking, etc.) doing an excellent job.

No, I can't envision this. Surface texture alone will not tell you if meat is cooked. There is no getting around the temperature probe.

Now, simple color matching models are used in some fancy toasters on white bread to determine brownness. That's the most I've ever seen in appliances...

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

#223

Post by rootusrootus »

oxplot wrote: post #221

Here's the summary (mixed with observations from Munro and past Tesla presentations): - Costs money: the physical sensors (a dozen of them), wiring it up, assembling it, maintain inventory, code it, etc. - Time spent on maintaining, improving software stack for the non-vision sensors as well as efforts needed to fuse the data with vision, takes away from focusing on vision alone. It also holds back vision in relevant…

That's great for them. But when I'm shopping for a car, I get to choose between a manufacturer that installs the extra sensors and seems to be able to get them to work, and Tesla.

Used to be that Tesla was blazing a trail and if you wanted a good EV, that was what you got. Now, if you want the best EV, it's usually not going to be a Tesla. And I don't see that they're making any decisions that will regain them that title. The incumbent manufacturers are quickly proceeding to eat their lunch, just like many of us predicted would happen. Turns out the hard part of making a successful car isn't the drivetrain.

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

#224

Post by nicbou »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #35
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?

Vision systems don't work at all in fog or heavy rain/snow.

Any more or less than the human equivalent?

I'm not following the news, but I haven't seen any videos set in what Canada looks like 4 months per year.

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

#226

Post by xodjmk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #211
xodjmk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of comments surrounding stereo-camera/lidar questions have a ridiculously simplified idea of the problem. It's obviously the case that 'more sensor good, less sensor bad'. This is frankenstein's monster level technical analysis. Why don't the majority of large-brained animals have many eyes, and many different antannea appendages processing an array of diverse sensory input? You don't just automatically…

> Why don't the majority of large-brained animals have many eyes Because of the cost of additional eyes. If Tesla is optimizing for cost against safety, that's sort of the point. I don't believe that's totally the case. Andrej later makes a better argument regarding limited R&D bandwidth, noise and entropy. But the "I would almost reframe the question" evasion was disconcerting. It's a textbook media trained tactic f…

Everyone has limited R&D and processing bandwidth. It's not just Andrej saying this, but anyone working on engineering autonomous vehicles. It has nothing to do with the cost of additional eyes. This is over-simplifying the problem. Our eyes don't work that way. The data coming from eyes and image sensors is very crude and relies on either your brain or very sophisticated post-sensor processing to construct a 3D approximation of the actual environment. The sensors themselves don't provide this information. They don't distinguish distinct objects, corners, shadows vs. changes in color, or all sorts of phenomena that doesn't actually exist in the sensor data. This has to be inferred later by a brain or processing that relies on prior assumptions and 'training' by previous experiences with 3D environments. I don't really care what Tesla is doing vs. what other companies are doing, but these 'cost cutting' arguments don't matter. I would suspect that the R&D invested into the Machine Learning infrastructure, and the custom IC, and the software engineering out-weighs whatever amount they could save by removing a small sensor. And I don't believe that this guy Andrej is conspiring to squeeze a few bucks out of his customers at the expense of degrading his life's work. He is not trying to sell mops.

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

#227

Post by dmix »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #217
dmix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though the risks are high the outcomes will always keep them honest. Whether they like it or not. This isn't like Facebook continually releasing a product that sucks but people will use anyway. Tesla is constantly working against the clock and everything they do has real world consequences. There are multiple gov agencies watching over it at all times. Of course there's lots of people with far higher risk tolera…

Outcomes have to be truly and utterly fucked for "new" types of problems to be noticed in the automotive industry. Take the Toyota Unintended Acceleration case, where completely negligent software quality took over a decade and at least 89 lives to be noticed and (partially) rectified. Regulators have keen noses for very particular types of issues and rely heavily on manufacturer judgements on a lot of the rest. Issu…

I’ve read into the Toyota case in the past and it doesn’t seem like it was that obvious of a regulatory failure, where you could come to such a conclusion.

Did I miss some good article covering it? Because everything I’ve read with the benefit of retrospect has been pretty critical of a lot the alleged ‘cases’ reported in that 89 number.

Are you sure that’s the example you want to use for pre-emptive regulatory failure? And do you think Tesla could demonstrated failures at a similar rate (assuming they were legit) and get away with it? Because I dont

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

#228

Post by xodjmk »

wonnage wrote: post #207
xodjmk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of comments surrounding stereo-camera/lidar questions have a ridiculously simplified idea of the problem. It's obviously the case that 'more sensor good, less sensor bad'. This is frankenstein's monster level technical analysis. Why don't the majority of large-brained animals have many eyes, and many different antannea appendages processing an array of diverse sensory input? You don't just automatically…

The issue here is trying to infer distance based on complex image processing or just… measuring the damn distances.

No, that is over simplification. It's not simply distances, you have to detect objects, motion, shadows, corners and all sorts of phenomena.

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

#229

Post by gnicholas »

How does it make sense to not even have sensors for parking? If you think they don't help during normal-speed driving, that's one thing. But they obviously help during parking, since (IIRC) they've had to disable certain autonomous features until they get their vision-based systems upgraded to be able to fill in this gap.

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

#230

Post by freejazz »

aeternum wrote: post #93
flashgordon wrote: post #51

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".

Lack of focus is a major problem for companies and we all know that tech debt leads to increased bug counts. Team focus on vision which is by far the highest accuracy and bandwidth sensor allows for a faster rate of safety innovation given a constant team size.

> "Team focus on vision which is by far the highest accuracy and bandwidth sensor allows for a faster rate of safety innovation given a constant team size."

By hiding the ball that you are starting from a much more unsafe position

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