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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]

#281

Post by yarg »

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…

Human binocular vision is what has been used to drive cars up until now, so it can be done (with a few thousand million years of iteration).

Ideally cars will be self-driving using only passive sensors - but I do think that Musk/Tesla completely missed the value of active sensors in training.

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

#282

Post by xodjmk »

freejazz wrote: post #273
xodjmk wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both methods have trade-offs as in there are positive and negative merits for both approaches. Using both systems requires the sensor data to be fused together to make real-time decisions. This is the whole point, why people are trivializing this problem, and why it is easy to believe that they are just trying to scam people by going cheap on using multiple sensors. If you want to argue that it is better to use Lidar…

I'm not sure why you'd assume all of that. You keep saying engineers, but it's a business decision. Seems like you are getting caught up in marketing.

I am an engineer working on autonomous vehicles. Nothing personal just responding to the thread as a whole. I don't believe this guy is conspiring to trick anyone. Business decisions, or course. I think they are in good faith gambling on this one approach. So I am interested to see if their idea will win, or if someone else figures out a better way.

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

#283

Post by tsimionescu »

Reason077 wrote: post #257
RC_ITR wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, yes, cars that are programmed to have AEB: perform well at AEB and not other tasks. We are in agreement here. (I even agree with you that those cars use Radar for AEB). Now, where we disagree is you implying that cars with AEB-level radar (literally $10 off-the-shelf parts with whatever sensor fusion some MobilEye intern dreams ups) are somehow the same as self-driving cars (the goal of Tesla Autopilot). Every se…

> ”There is no one sensor that will do it. Full stop.” Yet somehow, humans can drive cars with just a pair of optical sensors (mounted on a swivelling gimbal, of sorts). In theory, a sufficiently capable AI should be able to drive a car at least as well as a human can using the same input: vision.

The optical sensors are just a small part of the human (and animal in general) vision system. A much bigger component is our innate (evolutionarily acquired) understanding of basic mechanics, simple agent theory, and object recognition.

When we look at the road, we recognize stuff in the images we get as objects, and then most of the work is done by us applying basic logic in terms of those objects - that car is off the side of the road so it's stationary; that color change is due to a police light, not a change in the composition of objects; that small blob is a normal-size far-away car, not a small and near car; that thing on the road is a shadow, not a car, since I can tell that the overpass is casting it and it aligns with other shadows.

All of these things are not relying on optics for interpreting the received image (though effects such as parallax do play a role as well, it is actually quite minimal), they are interpreting the image at a slightly higher level of abstraction by applying some assumptions and heuristics that evolution has "found".

Without these assumptions, there simply isn't enough information in an image, even with the best possible camera, to interpret the needed details.

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

#284

Post by jakeogh »

Giving human[1][2] drivers better situational awareness[3] is the future. Specifically open[4]:

a. Windshields that clean the inside as well as the outside.

b. Better eyeglasses[5].

c. User controllable hi-res HUD thermal IR overlay.

d. Headlights with adaptive notch filters so the oncoming vehicle can pick an empty spectral range... without the source being monochromatic (with required adaptive filters on the recieving end)... and/or really good coronagraph's.

e. Brake control[6].

Any entity capable of driving[7] in a population of humans (including adversarial humans) is sentient[8], and has real skin in the game. It would be unethical to lock one in a car:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33213860 (analog FPGA)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21106367 (general AI)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16646112 (2018)

[4] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you (2014)

[5] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7744217 (2007)

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18013388 (2018)

[7] no human behind the wheel, no human to correct impending mistakes, but (critically) with one or more humans in the car.

[8] The idea that non-biological machines can have 'self' is a window into modern mass transformation. Please checkout the analog FPGA experiments linked above.

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

#286

Post by tsimionescu »

ion_fury wrote: post #95
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…

lex's comment did not strike me as a dig. i am actually concerned by your comment because it makes me wonder if i am missing other things too? it just doesnt seem like a dig. it seems like he thought of something funny and wanted to share it. am i alone in this? and also i dont understand your assertion that it was some kind of cynical maneuver to re-frame the question. he could have also said "yes, more sensors are…

> also is there some intrinsic limitation of the dynamic range of cameras? people are talking about problems with dynamic range being intrinsic to cameras but im pretty sure that cameras and especially camera suites that do not have more problems with dynamic range than a human eye are possible to make and probably already on the market.

I think it's possible that professional movie cameras (with the appropriate lenses) may have higher dynamic range than human vision. Good luck getting those cheaper than a lidar.

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

#288

Post by bonestamp2 »

Reason077 wrote: post #257
RC_ITR wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, yes, cars that are programmed to have AEB: perform well at AEB and not other tasks. We are in agreement here. (I even agree with you that those cars use Radar for AEB). Now, where we disagree is you implying that cars with AEB-level radar (literally $10 off-the-shelf parts with whatever sensor fusion some MobilEye intern dreams ups) are somehow the same as self-driving cars (the goal of Tesla Autopilot). Every se…

> ”There is no one sensor that will do it. Full stop.” Yet somehow, humans can drive cars with just a pair of optical sensors (mounted on a swivelling gimbal, of sorts). In theory, a sufficiently capable AI should be able to drive a car at least as well as a human can using the same input: vision.

Yes, a "pair" of optical sensors. Tesla is at a disadvantage compared to humans -- they do not do stereoscopic imaging, which makes distance of objects less reliable -- they try to infer distance from a single flat image. Humans having two sensors pointed in the same direction gives us a very reliable way of determining distance (up to a relevant distance for driving at least).

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

#289

Post by lnsru »

oxplot wrote: post #245
rootusrootus wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Now, if you want the best EV, it's usually not going to be a Tesla. Would love to hear what you consider "good" and what specific EV ticks the most good features that a Tesla Model 3 doesn't.

360 degree camera on BMW i4. Overall build quality too.

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

#290

Post by YZF »

xodjmk wrote: post #282
freejazz wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you'd assume all of that. You keep saying engineers, but it's a business decision. Seems like you are getting caught up in marketing.

I am an engineer working on autonomous vehicles. Nothing personal just responding to the thread as a whole. I don't believe this guy is conspiring to trick anyone. Business decisions, or course. I think they are in good faith gambling on this one approach. So I am interested to see if their idea will win, or if someone else figures out a better way.

There problem is not that he was wrong, the problem is that he's made a motherhood statement in response to a very specific question.

He's not conspiring to trick people per se but he's also not being super clear. His position obviously makes it difficult to answer this question. It's possible he really believes this is better but if he didn't he wouldn't exactly tell us something that makes him and his previous employer look bad. Also his belief here may or may not be correct.

Is it a coincidence that the technical stance changed at the same time when part shortages meant that cars could not be built and shipped because of shortages of radars?

More likely there was some brainstorming as a result of the shortages and the decision was made at that point to pursue an idea of removing the additional sensors and shipping vehicles without those. This external constraint makes believing the claims that this is actually all around better, while hearing some reports of increases in ghost braking (anecdotes) a little difficult. Not clear if there was enough data at that time to prove this and even Andrej himself sort of acknowledges that it's worse by some small delta (but has other advantages, well shipping cars comes to mind).

So yes, sensors have to be fused, it's complicated, it's not clear what the best combination of sensors is, the software might be larger with more moving parts, the ML model might not fit, a larger team is hard to manager, entropy - whatever. Still seems suspicious. Not sure what Tesla can do at this point to erase that, they can say whatever they want, we have no way of validating that.

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