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Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

spectrum.ieee.org

481–490 of 582 posts

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

#481

Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.

Certain company has 300k subscribers that rely on that ridiculous service.

My father lost vision in 1 eye and 50% in other one something like 20 years ago. He struggles in parking but otherwise doing ok without lidar. Turns out motion vision is more accurate after 10-20 meters than stereoscopic vision.

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

#482
I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong?

I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the models aren't intelligent enough, and that adding LiDAR wouldn't be enough to achieve the reliability required. But I don't know, I don't really work in that field so maybe engineers who have more experience with self driving might say otherwise.

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

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans have both issues. There are many human failures which are distinctly a vision issue and not attention related, e.g. misestimation of depth/speed, obscured or obstructed vision, optical focus issues, insufficient contrast or exposure, etc.

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lidar is by far the most accurate source of range data. You need to explain why Waymo and Zoox use lidar in direct contradiction to what you claim.

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

#485

Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.

Humans don't have explicit distance sensors either. When LIDAR sensors were $20k+ I think it made a lot of sense to avoid them.

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

#486
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Humans don't have lidar and we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Lidar just seems like feature engineering, which has proven to be a dead end in most other AI applications (bitter lesson). https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

> we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Science would like to point out that rats also can learn to drive https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-taught-r...

yeah but not reliably, they often totally space on their commitments to pick you up from the airport, etc

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karpathy provided additional context on the removal of LiDAR during his Lex Fridman Podcast appearance. This article condenses what he said: https://archive.is/PPiVG And here's one of Elon's mentions (he also has talked about it quite a bit in various spots). https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450?s=20 Edit: My personal view is that LiDAR and other sensors are extremely useful, but I worked on aircra…

Based on that list it boils down to 2 things it seems: - cost (no longer a problem) - too much code needed and it bloats the data pipelines. Does anyone have any actual evidence of this being the case? Like yes, code would be needed, but why is that innately a bad thing? Bloated data pipelines feels like another hand-wave when I think if you do it right it’s fine. As proven by Waymo. Really curious if any Tesla engin…

If Waymo proven their model works, why the silly automaker is doing several orders of magnitude more autonomous miles?

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

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are the only intelligence that can reliably drive. Science would like to point out that rats also can learn to drive https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-taught-r...

yeah but not reliably, they often totally space on their commitments to pick you up from the airport, etc

If you had to choose between picking someone up at the airport or dragging a slice of pizza twice your size down the NYC subway stairs, what would YOU do?

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

#490
post #378
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for the record though, Musk isn't blindly anti-LIDAR. He has said (and I think this is an objective fact) that all existing roads and driving are based on vision (which is what all humans do). So that should technically be sufficient. SpaceX uses LIDAR for their docking systems. I would argue that yes, we do use vision but we get that "lidar depth" from our stereo vision. And that used to be why I thought camera…

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…

20 meters away motion vision is more accurate than stereoscopic vision. What is lidar helping to solve here?
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