Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video] • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by throwntoday » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

quonn wrote: post #47

throwntoday wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're to trust what Elon and the team said during the last few AI day, none. They stated that the ultrasonic and radar sensors were actually performing worse than their pure vision stack.

I‘m ready to be convinced that this will be true at some point for the ultrasonic sensors. But by design the radar can see things that vision can never see. It seems like a bad idea to take that away.

Right but I think the signal to noise ratio was eating to much compute for what was little payoff. And either the ultrasonic or radar don't even work above 10mph, I forget which. They are used purely for parking.

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

#482

Post by 01100011 » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 6:39 PM UTC

snovv_crash wrote: post #479

01100011 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about radar and ultrasonic sensors here, not accelerometers. We're also talking about feeding them to a deep neural network. Not the same thing. Sensor fusion is not being done with a Kalman filter in this case.

Radar and ultrasound both give drastically less data than a simple 720p webcam. After postprocessing their output bandwidth is more similar to a 9-axis IMU than a camera.

Yes and each time you process the incoming camera data in the neural network you have extra calculations due to the sensor fusion with another data source, regardless of its bitrate. Have you worked with deep learning much?

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

#483

Post by FreakLegion » Tue, Nov 08, 2022, 5:56 AM UTC

YZF wrote: post #188

FreakLegion wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Tesla really optimizing for best performance at any cost or are they optimizing making more money and selling that to us as an improvement? More likely they had a fixed budget and optimized with that constraint, if they made a rigorous decision at all. But this is guesswork. I'm not speculating about how Tesla made the decision, just commenting on Karpathy's answer. His answer is correct even if it isn't true ,…

It's like the joke about the mathematician in the hot air balloon ... His answer is correct but it's not useful. It is correct there is some optimal solution short of an infinite number of sensors/technologies and larger than no sensors. The argument that Tesla is converging on the optimal solution vs. the more or less known reality that they couldn't get the components they needed to build enough cars is weaselly. B…

The original comment I replied to:

> It seemed like all the "full cost" negatives Andrej mentioned were related to Tesla's ability to execute, and not what would actually produce better results.

This is objectively wrong, and it's the only substantive part of the discussion. The rest is fantasizing about things nobody actually knows ("It's media training!") and imputing questionable motives to someone who hasn't done anything to deserve that ("He only cares about Tesla's bottom line!").