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Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

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Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#461

Post by overfeed »

jerlam wrote: post #454
c7b wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that there's more data processing required with cameras because you need to estimate distance from stereoscopic vision. And as it happens, the required chips for that have shot up in price because of the AI boom. But I think costs were just part of the reason why Elon decided against Lidar. Apparently, they interfere with each other once the market saturates and you have many such cars on the same…

How does Waymo handle it now? There are many videos of Waymo depots with dozens of cars not running into each other.

Lidar critics like to pretend that anti-collision is not a well-studied branch of Computer Science and telecoms. Wifi, Ethernet and cellphones all work well simultaneously, despite participants all sharing the same physical medium.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#462

Post by sylos »

thfuran wrote: post #441
nindalf wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So that should technically be sufficient Sufficient to build something close to human performance. But self driving cars will be held to a much higher standard by society. A standard only achievable by having sensors like LiDAR.

Even if they weren’t going to be held to a higher standard for widespread acceptance, tens of thousands of people a year in the us die due to humans driving badly. Why would we not try to do better than that?

Because that's an acceptable loss and better costs more!

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#463

Post by btreecat »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #304
btreecat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When designed, built, installed and calibrated correctly, the power and wavelengths used are not considered harmful to humans.

That's a lot of qualifiers. And replace "humans" with "cameras" and I'm reminded that despite their well-intentioned efforts Volvo has failed there already.

It really isn't though. It's how you do something correctly. Drill into the details of just about any system and you'll see there's a lot of assumptions based on the layers above and below.

A good safety system requires multiple of these failures to occur together to become unacceptable in risk.

This is why we create regulations and inspectors.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#464

Post by overfeed »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #217
estearum wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the reasoning. The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes. Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your acci…

Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams. Thats mainly a software problem and companies like Waymo have done it, but Tesla was having trouble with it earlier, and if you don’t do it right, your self driving system can be less reliable.

> Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams

The response to the challenge shouldn't be whittling down your sensor-suite to a single type, but to get good at sensor fusion.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#465

Post by btreecat »

pinko wrote: post #282
btreecat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When designed, built, installed and calibrated correctly, the power and wavelengths used are not considered harmful to humans.

What are the chances some non-trivial proportion of the millions of cars on the road will not have their LIDAR designed, built, installed or calibrated correctly? I suspect this is going to be a recognized public health issue in a decade or two. (It will likely be an issue well before that, but unrecognized...)

For everyone of those safety measures to be intentionally bypassed or ignored, the numbers are assuredly non-zero.

But is it going to raise to a level of concern? I don't think we're going to see a ton of cars with blinding lasers installed, unless they are installed to intentionally blind people.

If you have used face I'd, or someone has used a face detection on modern smart phone on you, or if you've pulled up to a modern intersection, you've been blasted with lasers. It may come one day where that's the largest concern but today it's not my primary problem and investing in FUD isn't going to bring any benefits.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#466

Post by kube-system »

ggreer wrote: post #393
MengerSponge wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If automated driving systems cause accidents at anywhere near the human rate, it'll be outlawed pretty quickly. This is evidently false. Robotaxi crash rates exceed human drivers', but there's not an effective regulatory agency to outlaw them! https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/tesla-robotaxis-cras...

According to that article, Waymo crashes 2.3x more often than human drivers (every 98k miles vs 229k miles), which is clearly false. I think it's far more likely that humans don't report most minor collisions to insurance, and that both Robotaxis and Waymo are safer than human drivers on average.

Definitely. I looked at Tesla's source for these numbers, looks like they primarily used data sourced from police reports, which most people only file if the incident is serious enough to turn into insurance.

Tesla notes:

> These assumptions may contain limitations with respect to reporting criteria, unreported incident estimations (e.g., NHTSA estimates that 60% of property damage-only crashes and 32% of injury crashes are not reported to police

https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#467

Post by jacquesm »

jonplackett wrote: post #420
mdrzn wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2775 fines for a total of €6.8B since July 2018. It's not A LOT (I would hope for A LOT MORE fines), but it's not nothing. https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

It’s very interesting. Thanks for sharing. But also kinda weird. There seems to be a lot of fines for hospitals for example. Some Portuguese hospital was fined €400,000 for ‘Insufficient technical and organisational measures to ensure information security’

Medical, banking and insurance are three industries that the European data privacy watchdogs are much more strict about because of the potential for damage.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#468

Post by servo_sausage »

heisenbit wrote: post #185
servo_sausage wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with programs approaching L3+ from L2, with the requirement that the system works for 99% of roads (not tesla before people start fixating on that). We find that the cases where lidar really helps are in gathering training data, parking, and if focused enough some long distance precision. None of these have been instrumental in a final product; personally I suspect that many of the cars including lidar use it…

Accidents are not normal driving situations but edge cases.

Sort of; accidents are the absolute core of the product. They are rare, but they are the focus of the design.

By edge cases I mean scenarios like the lights going out in an underground garage; low vision due to colourful smoke or dust, or things like optical illusions or occlusion that a human would just need to remember.

Lidar can help, but not really enough to be worth it.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#469

Post by switchbak »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #217
estearum wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the reasoning. The reasoning was simply that LIDAR was (and incorrectly predicted to always be) significantly more expensive than cameras, and hypothetically that should be fine because, well, humans drive with only two eyes. Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR and 2) how incredible the human brain is compared to computers. Having similar sensors certainly doesn't guarantee your acci…

Sensor fusion is also hard to get right, since you still need cameras you have to fuse the two information streams. Thats mainly a software problem and companies like Waymo have done it, but Tesla was having trouble with it earlier, and if you don’t do it right, your self driving system can be less reliable.

I think this is the key. In theory - more information stream when fused together (properly) should reduce error. If their stumbling block is the "properly" part, than the rest of those justifications come off as a pretty weak way to sidestep their own inabilities to deliver this properly.

We have lots of evidence of similar strategies being used in other domains, this seems like an especially life-critical domain that ought to have high rigor and standards applied.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#470

Post by anthonypasq »

kube-system wrote: post #408
dymk wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans aren't using only fixed vision for driving. This is such a tiresome thing to see repeated in every discussion about self driving. You're listening to the road and car sounds around you. You're feeling vibration on the road. You're feeling feedback on the steering wheel. You're using a combination of monocular and binocular depth perception - plus, your eyes are not a fixed focal length "cameras". You're moving…

And also, even with the suite of sensors that humans have, their vision perception is frequently inadequate and leads to crashes. If vision was good enough, "SMIDSY" wouldn't be such an infamous acronym in vehicle injury cases.

the issue is clearly attention not vision when it comes to humans. if we could actually process 100% of the visual information in our field of view, then accidents would probably go down a shit load.
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