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A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

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131–140 of 187 posts

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#131
post #25

Are LIDAR dangerous to the eyes of other drivers or pedestrians?

No, there’s a class system for laser safety The rating is for you to stick your eyes right up to it for a long period of time and still be fine

What’s “a Long time”? Does it cover a 2 hour commute in traffic with 20+ cars around you blasting it continuously any direction you look, invisibly?

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#133
post #57
post #25

Are LIDAR dangerous to the eyes of other drivers or pedestrians?

1550nm LiDAR Damaged Sony Camera at CES - http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/2019/01/1550nm-lidar...

Thanks for sharing that, clearly there is something at least worth investigating here. The concern about long-term exposure to LiDAR beams is not extensively studied. Current regulations seem to primarily focus on short-term exposure limits, and there is a lack of comprehensive testing under real-world conditions

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#134
post #98
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely? In certain conditions, yes. Humans drive terribly in dark and low light, something lidar excels in.

Still, millions of humans drive every night and only a miniscule percentage cause any accidents. So maybe we are not so bad at this.

According to NHTSA, about half of all fatal crashes occur at night, even though only 25% of driving happens at nighttime. So yes, we are pretty bad at this.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Extremely controlled environments like the entire city of San Francisco?

Sensor fusion is a thing. There are no two systems that “argue with each other”. I can’t believe the same old ignorant tropes are still making rounds.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

We’re in the regime of throwing rocks at a freeway from a bridge to cutting brake lines as a prank. The attack surface here isn’t new and isn’t difficult to think through. Someone who can’t is going to be equally dangerous, machine or man.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also he wants to reuse the foundational machine vision tech in Optimus bot, which probably won't have lidar.

Optimus should probably have LiDAR more than a car…

I would guess the plan is to have the foundational machine vision tech that becomes the core of robotics sensors. Not just Optimus but every robot arm in a factory, robot mule, etc. I don't think everything will have LIDAR if its proven to be unnecessary.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also he wants to reuse the foundational machine vision tech in Optimus bot, which probably won't have lidar.

Based on presentations we've seen what sets Tesla apart are its datasets not the core technology. And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.

I think they will though, I think the enormous corpus of video data and the supercluster that powers self driving development are the machine vision analog of internet scale text data that gave rise to LLMs. We'll see the same moment for vision models that text prediction models had once the data is there, where an enormous foundation model becomes much much better, especially at zero-shot tasks.

Re: A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Roughly like in this paper https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/RadarScenes:-A-Real-Wo...

Thanks. Spot on!
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