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Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

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Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#441
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla uses only cameras (some color and some black and white I believe) along with a radar system and perhaps sonar? But Tesla is controversial in their approach - essentially all other self driving systems use depth sensors. Tesla makes the argument that you can actually calculate depth from moving cameras, which is true. The technique is called structure from motion and it is well understood. However a lidar is a m…

> So Tesla has the advantage of collecting a huge data set of real world data now Do Tesla owners know about this? Is this an opt-in feature?

Can confirm: There is an overlay that appears which asks whether you consent to collection of video (only from the 7 outside cameras -- there is one facing the interior but it doesn't include that), and telemetry / GPS data for autopilot training and sentry mode training. If you don't agree, I'm assuming your car will not be used for the fleet learning since they can't gather any telemetry. I do believe that critical logging w/o user-data(?) (aka drive system failure, MCU crashes, etc) is still enabled independently && regardlessly of the data collection for AI toggle.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#443
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good fix, but they should apply the filter to the data used in the driving logic also.

If the filter adds significant latency that could go poorly

To elaborate, the filter also may not improve the accuracy, just the perceived accuracy.

To be correct but one second late is to be completely inaccurate. The system is trying to estimate the current position of the car, but also predict future positions.

So a little bit of imprecision is fine since it improves accuracy related to predicting the future positions of the cars. A slight move in one direction may indicate a lane change, so it is always useful to be aware of that so as not to accelerate past a car whose measurement appears to be more inaccurate, since they actually might be moving. If you did the same thing with a human's "sixth sense" perception of the positions of the cars, you'd definitely find that they move a lot compared to their actual positions when the head is turned since our ability to merge our vision and our inertial sense is not very good for the most part.

The same issues arises with AR/VR, it's useless to know a more accurate position of the user if it's not the present position, because then that will definitely lead to motion sickness.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#444
post #436

I wonder why they would let the public see this. To the critical eye it looks like it barely works. It loses its mind right at the beginning, around 0:06-0:07, veers to the right for no reason and then rolls through a stop sign without stopping. It spends the rest of the video hunting left and right like a drunk.

Karpathy (their Head of AI) showed how they are able to generate a 3D depth map of an environment given 2 forward-facing stereo cameras, it's possible that's what the car is attempting to do here since it recognizes that part of its vision will be blocked once it stops moving. Or it's trying to avoid the puddle lol.

Maybe they can, but the videos give the impression (possibly misleading) that the software doesn't have object permanence. After it gets real close to the truck its estimate of where the road might be starts to wander around.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#445
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now? Musk was bullshitting when he made that prediction. Maybe he did it because he had bought his own bullshit. Personally I think what's more likely is that he was cynically conning people. In reality, I think no-one is anywhere close to fully self driving cars. I would be surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years. The whole…

I don't understand why "otherwise smart people" feel the need to diminish the potential and successes of ML. When chess was basically solved, it was dismissed brute force, with a sarcastic challenge to do Go, and we now the fate of that challenge. There used to be, on slashdot and I believe in the early days of HN, this running complaint of the new-at-the-time CSI-style shows, specifically the "enhance" trope: "you c…

They exist now as what amounts to fancy amusement park rides. Wake me up when I can get sloppy drunk and catch one home. Only I was drunk and didn’t provide the exactly correct drop off address and need to somehow communicate to the robo-Uber where exactly it should drop me off... (how will I do that, by the way? talk to it? What if it doesn’t understand my accent?)

Also, I’m at a wedding and the pickup is in a grass field in front of the venue. Can’t pick me up on pavement... it’s a two lane road 50mph road with no shoulder to pull over in. Also the entrance to the venue is a poorly marked dirt road. Also, the “pin” I told the robo-Uber to pick me up at has it at the street ‘cause that is the address.

I’ll wait for the robo-Uber to call me on how the hell it should pull into the lot. I did mention cell sucks here, so hope you’ve got that all offline, right?

And I fully expect my use case to be waved away as “edge case” and “doesn’t matter”. Except it does. Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#446
post #117

How does it work in the snow/heavy rain?

Their head of AI talked about this during their AI Investor Day and he said that even when the road is entirely covered, there is still enough subtle clues for the neural net to pick up on that it will be possible to have a self-driving car in the snow. Just like how humans are able to observe the edge of the road (enough) to slowly drive to their destination, the car will pick up and learn from those clues too eventually.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#447
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it worked so well, why isn't it good enough for self driving cars?

Or people, for that matter, who break the speed limits like 99% of the time and regularly smash their cars into eachother?

Five over is still an acceptable rate, right?

Okay, good.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#449

Any other HN users getting an Access Denied on their website? The usual "You don't have permission to access " http://www.tesla.com/" on this server." I'm not behind any proxies - I'm at home, connecting from Brazil here.

Same here. Tesla's website is blocked in Brazil by Tesla itself.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#450

All this jitter couldn't get some physics ? If it recognized a object moving couldn't it do some approximate dynamics calculation to predict it's location on the next frame and use that to help the networks ? Especially in the end where you see the stopped cars blinking.

If you look closely, you'll notice that the stopped cars aren't actually blinking - their outlines are changing color from yellow to black. Who knows what that means, but at least it isn't losing track of cars completely.
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