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A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

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Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#101

Post by rightbyte »

0_____0 wrote: post #22
xnx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe automotive radar has a cone of sensitivity that is read as a single "pixel" worth of data. Even if the radar spun like lidar, the radar cone of sensitivity is thousands of times wider than the lidar beam so you can't make much of a picture with radar.

IIRC the data coming out of the Conti radars was preprocessed to give bearing, distance, and size of an object in the FOV of the unit. I don't know if I ever saw the true raw data out of one of them, but I'm curious what it looks like.

Ye I have a hard time imaganing how a car radar image looks like.

On boat radars it seems like the radar have really high resolution (can see much further than lidars) but have worse accuracy. I.e. things looks like blobs.

A lidar image at 50+ meters is very sparse.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#102

Post by rightbyte »

slt2021 wrote: post #72

LIDARs can be blinded by consumer grade laser pointers, I wonder if there are systems that protect LIDARs against adversarial attacks or DOS attacks

They can be blinded by the sun too.

I worked as a reaserch engineer at a uni playing with a 16 beam Velodyne when those were fancy.

Put it on a car for a demo day, drawing the dots in 3d and marking obstacles red, and during sun set there was artifacts with no obvious way to filter out.

Strangely, I was never able to recreate this. I think was some specific athmospheric condition.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#103

Post by rightbyte »

elictronic wrote: post #73
slt2021 wrote: post #72

LIDARs can be blinded by consumer grade laser pointers, I wonder if there are systems that protect LIDARs against adversarial attacks or DOS attacks

Drivers can also be blinded by consumer grade laser pointers. If someone starts attacking safety systems physically I would expect they will get quite a bit of jail time.

Messing with machines have a way lower ethical threshold for most people.

Like fooling vending machines to give you soda. Nothing 'my teenage friend' lost sleep over.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#104

Post by altacc »

UltraSane wrote: post #81
jaimex2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.

I find opinions like this to be almost as crazy as saying that the earth is flat because Waymo has a working, truly self-driving taxi service RIGHT FREAKING NOW while Musk is still promising to have one some day in the hazy future while NEVER making a single vehicle that can actually drive without someone in the car. Musk rejecting LIDAR means that he fundamentally doesn't understand the technological challenge of se…

I think anyone who listens to Musk talking about something they themselves know a lot about quickly realises that Musk's skills are elsewhere. He can motivate and market the hell out of a business whilst snorting more ketamine than a herd of horses but he is not a technical genius by any means. He pays people well to agree with him and fires them when they don't, so I suspect that his companies that produce better and more stable products do so because he micromanages them less.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#105

Post by jaimex2 »

edm0nd wrote: post #77
jaimex2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk has said several times Lidar is great. It's just a stupid idea for automotive use and he's not wrong. There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.

Bats kinda have Lidar.

Echo location but they still mostly use their eyes. Same as dolphins

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#106

Post by jaimex2 »

UltraSane wrote: post #81
jaimex2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.

I find opinions like this to be almost as crazy as saying that the earth is flat because Waymo has a working, truly self-driving taxi service RIGHT FREAKING NOW while Musk is still promising to have one some day in the hazy future while NEVER making a single vehicle that can actually drive without someone in the car. Musk rejecting LIDAR means that he fundamentally doesn't understand the technological challenge of se…

It doesn't. It has a party trick that works in very specific conditions.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#107

Post by olabyne »

jaimex2 wrote: post #106
UltraSane wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find opinions like this to be almost as crazy as saying that the earth is flat because Waymo has a working, truly self-driving taxi service RIGHT FREAKING NOW while Musk is still promising to have one some day in the hazy future while NEVER making a single vehicle that can actually drive without someone in the car. Musk rejecting LIDAR means that he fundamentally doesn't understand the technological challenge of se…

It doesn't. It has a party trick that works in very specific conditions.

At least it works. Meanwhile Tesla have nothing to show, even in "very specific conditions".

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#108

Post by jaimex2 »

bobsomers wrote: post #33
jaimex2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.

That's a bold claim. Care to justify it?

Yeah, it only works in extremely controlled environments driving really slowly.

The design is also flawed as it has to work with cameras anyway. The last thing you want is two systems arguing over what they see.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#109

Post by jaimex2 »

bobsomers wrote: post #35
jaimex2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk has said several times Lidar is great. It's just a stupid idea for automotive use and he's not wrong. There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.

Airplanes don't flap their wings and boats don't wag their tails. Assuming that all technology should imitate nature is a naive engineering principle. The solution should solve the problem within the given constraints.

Nature came up with something much better in both those cases.

Portable, energy efficient, light, doesn't need refined oil, tightly steers...

Boats and aeroplanes are terrible in comparison. They only work due to a huge network of global effort.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#110

Post by jaimex2 »

itishappy wrote: post #31
jaimex2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk has said several times Lidar is great. It's just a stupid idea for automotive use and he's not wrong. There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.

Time of flight ranging is used in nature by bats and whales/dolphins.

Both primarily use their eyes. Look it up.
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