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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]

#371

Post by codeflo »

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…

Exactly. The way biology solved something may not always be the best way to do it with technology, because the constraints or so different. And to be more blunt, I think none of the problems where technology surpassed human performance were achieved by doing it the exact same way. From locomotion (legs vs. wheels) to playing chess (strategic intuition vs. billions of calculations).

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

#372

Post by tibbydudeza »

gibolt wrote: post #338
yarg wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty sure humans haven't been striving for drivers licenses for millions of years... Tesla does use Lidar on a small number of test vehicles for assessing ground truth. However, they have built enough of a data pipeline and fleet data acquisition to use repeat clips to determine ground truth better than human labelers.

But the "system" is so adaptable from bipedal locomotion, spotting predators or prey and identifying unfit food, figure out social hierarchy, human facial expressions that driving a car is easy.

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

#373

Post by Eric_WVGG »

sumedh wrote: post #220
YZF wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's cameras often get blocked by rain or blinded by the sun or not see that well in the dark. It's really hard to imagine those cameras replacing the ultrasonic sensors which do a pretty good job at telling you where you are when you're parking etc. I can't see how the camera is going to detect an object at pitch dark and estimate the distance to it better than an ultrasonic sensor. But hey, if people ding their…

> I can't see how the camera is going to detect an object at pitch dark Lights?

I just assumed they used something similar to iPhone FaceID and Xbox Kinect dot emitters. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/17/16315510/i...

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

#374

Post by camgunz »

cbsmith wrote: post #298
Reason077 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”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.

> Yet somehow, humans can drive cars with just a pair of optical sensors (mounted on a swivelling gimbal, of sorts). In fairness, humans have a lot more than just optical sensors at their disposal, and are pretty terrible drivers. We've added all kinds of safety features to cars and roads to try to compensate for their weaknesses, and it certainly helps, but they still make mistakes with alarming regularity, and they…

> We've added all kinds of safety features to cars and roads to try to compensate for their weaknesses

This is a super important point. Whenever self-driving cars comes up in conversation it's like, "we're spending billions of dollars on self-driving cars tech, but what if we just, idk, had rails instead of roads". We're putting all the complexity on the self-driving tech, but it seems pretty clear that if we helped a little on the other end (made driving easier for computers), everything would get better a lot faster.

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

#375

Post by gizmo »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #364
Reason077 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”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.

> Yet somehow, humans can drive cars with just a pair of optical sensors (mounted on a swivelling gimbal, of sorts). This is wrong and I was surprised to hear them say it was enough in the video. We don't have car horns and sirens for your eyes. You will often hear something long before you see it. This is important for emergency vehicles. Once you hear it, a good driver will immediately slow down and pull to the sid…

Deaf people (or those who blast music) can drive. People who are blind in one eye can drive.

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

#376

Post by Dunedan »

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.

Up to a certain degree they work, as humans can drive in fog or heavy rain/snow as well. If visibility is so bad that a human wouldn't be able to drive, I wouldn't want to sit in a self-driving car either, no matter if it does use vision only or has additional sensors.

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

#377

Post by Dunedan »

diskzero wrote: post #21
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…

Out of curiosity: Could you please elaborate what such challenging environments can be?

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

#378

Post by naijaboiler »

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.

Optical sensors, an innate understanding of they works around them that they are previewing. And most importantly, a social understanding of what other humans around them are likely to do.

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

#380

Post by funstuff007 »

jholman wrote: post #328
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".

Uh, that's not at all a good paraphrase. Q: "Does [removing some sensors] make the perception problem harder, or easier?" (note, this is literally what Lex asked, your restatement is misleading) A: [paraphrasing] "Well more sensor diversity makes it harder to focus on the thing that I believe really moves the needle, so by narrowing the space of consideration, I think we'll get better results" Karpathy might not be t…

> because it's often true that you can deliver better by focusing on a smaller number of things.

This is true / dogma in linear / non-linear regression world, but of no real import in deep learning or Bayesian methods.

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