371–380 of 582 posts
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Limited resources? Billions per year are being thrown at the base technology. We have the capital deployed to exhaust every path ten times over.
Even if so, it doesn't mean that capital deployment efficiency and expected payoff make equal sense in all directions. Then again, it's good that we have self-driving companies with lidar and without — we will find out which approach wins.
It looks like these sensors have just enough range to be effective for lidar terrain scanning. I would have bought a Movia S right now just to try it out.
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I find it comical that people continue to go back to this rage well against "a certain company" for their vision-only approach when the truth is they have the best automatic driving system an individual can buy, rivaling Waymo and beating the Chinese brands. Why are the commenters not pissed at the dozens of other car companies who have done absolutely nothing in this space? Answer: because it's not nearly as fun to…
1. Tesla is not competitive with Waymo, they're not even in the same class. Waymo is 10 years ahead at least. I understand you can't buy a Waymo, but still. 2. Other car companies are properly valued, Tesla is overinflated. 3. Other cars, even basic Hondas, have the same level of self driving as Teslas. 4. Other car companies don't lie to their customers about their capabilities or what they're buying.
This is not true at all. Don't confuse lane assist with self driving. And yes I'm aware people are upset by the "Autopilot" product name they chose for lane assist.
Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part. Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a…
Time to extend comma.ai!
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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...)
It occurs to me there is an opportunity here. Passive lidar detectors sampling fleets of vehicles in the real world, measuring compliance and detecting outliers, would be interesting. A well placed, stationary device could sample thousands of vehicles every day. Patterns will emerge among manufacturers. Failure modes will be seen.
Cursory queries on this reveal nothing. Apparently, no one is doing this. We're all relying on front end certification and compliance. No thought given to the real world of design flaws, damage, faulty repairs, unanticipated failure modes, etc.
Apparently there are lidar jammers. I bet those are rigorously compliant with Class 1 safety regs... No one manufacturing those is ever going to think; "hey, why not a 50W pulse train?"
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Self driving cars are not equipped with human brains so this doesn’t really make sense. “We should achieve self driving cars via replicating the human brain” strikes me as an incredibly inefficient and difficult way to solve the problem.
Then you deeply underestimate how difficult the problem is, and deeply misunderstand where all the effort has been spent in developing autonomous vehicles.
We have a tool that can tell with great accuracy how far away an object is. The suggestion that we should ignore it and rely on cameras that have to guess it because “that’s how humans work” is absurd, frankly.
I really wish that companies would just sell their products instead of doing the business relationship 2-step. It is an unnecessary waste of time to sell product. It looks like these sensors have just enough range to be effective for lidar terrain scanning. I would have bought a Movia S right now just to try it out.
- Setting up infrastructure and support for consumers is expensive and hard to do well, especially if that's not your main industry.
- Some products are only economical if mass produced, and that requires large, guaranteed buyers.
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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…
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…
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 your head to change the perspective you see the road at. Your inner ear is telling you about your acceleration and orientation.
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I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsof…
> but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support. Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse. For one, people actually need to trust your brand…
Those bits should be easy, unless the OEM was tragically stupid. Where you'll get into trouble is when you need replacement computer bits; those are often tricky for mainstream brands, but if your niche brand ECUs all fail around the same time (wouldn't be the first time for a Google product), and the OEM isn't around to make new ones or make it right, off to the junkyard with all of them. If it's just normal failure rates, you can probably scavenge from totaled vehicles at junkyards even after new parts become unobtainium.
OEM style lighting will also probably get hard to find. Ideally a niche maker would lean towards standard parts there, but that's not the fashion of the times.
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considering cameras can create reliable enough distance measurements AND also handle all the color reception needed for legally driving roads it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain set of people that lidar is necessary.
No, cameras cannot create reliable distance measurements in real-world conditions. Parallax is not a great way to measure distance for fast, unpredictably moving objects (such as cars on the road). And dirt or misalignment can significantly reduce accuracy compared to lab conditions. Note that humans do not rely strictly on our eyes as cameras to measure distances. There is a huge amount of inference about the world…
Several companies, most notably Tesla, have done this well enough to drive in all manner of traffic. I'm not going to comment about if lidar is strictly needed or not to achieve better-than-human safety, that's yet to be proven one way or another by anyone. The point is that cameras + local inference can do a pretty good job at distance estimation