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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

#501

Post by dymk »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #490
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…

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

Waymo claims its system, which uses a combination of LIDAR & vision, resolves objects up to 500 meters away

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...

This company claims their LIDAR works conservatively at 250m, and up to 750m depending on reflectivity

https://www.cepton.com/driving-lidar/reading-lidar-specs-par...

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

#502

Post by pwarner »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #429
zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

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.

It's not that simple. Cameras don't report 3D depth, but these AI models can and do pick up on pictorial depth cues. LiDAR is incredibly valuable for collecting training and validation data, but may also make only an insignificant difference in production inference.

Stereo cameras? My 2015 Subaru has them to detect obstacles and it works great.

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

#503

Post by DennisP »

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 seems like it'd be a big problem when you're handcoding lots of C++, and way less of a problem when all the sensors are just feeding into one big neural network, as Tesla and probably others are doing now. The training process takes care of it from there.

One of Udacity's first courses was on self-driving, taught by Sebastian Thrun who later cofounded Waymo. He went through some Bayesian math that takes a collection of lidar points, where each point contributes to a probabilistic assessment of what's really going on. It's fine if different points seem to contradict each other, because you're looking for the most likely scenario that could produce that combined sensor data. Transformers can do the same sort of thing, and even with different sensor types it's still the same sort of problem.

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

#504

Post by arijun »

kube-system wrote: post #483
anthonypasq wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving? I mean, yes, we can’t see as well in fog, but that’s why you should slow down

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

#505

Post by wagwang »

dymk wrote: post #378
atonse wrote: 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…

Most of what you said has nothing to do with lidar vs camera

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

#506

Post by flambojones »

I worked in mobile robotics for a defense contractor in the early-mid 2000s and we had a homegrown Lidar (though we always called it ladar) that was large, heavy, and cost $250k to make. I remember a year out of college driving 2 hours to a military base with it in the backseat of my car and being paranoid at every bump I hit. These things seem like a dream.

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

#507

Post by turtlesdown11 »

pbreit wrote: post #447
zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

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.

All of driving is designed for visual.

TIL roads don't have rumble strips

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

#508

Post by RockRobotRock »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #428
RockRobotRock wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's silly. I don't own a Tesla. I just wanna talk about LIDAR without people ragebaiting about Elon.

> without people ragebaiting about Elon Hmm. Is it ragebaiting to respond to a tired and wrong statement by saying that it's tired and wrong and that the situation is merely the product of piss poor management decisions? People get understandably frustrated seeing the same wrong talking point that people with domain knowledge in computer vision and robotics have repeatedly explained is wrong in extremely fundamental…

suspiciously defensive??? you got me. Or maybe I just didn't understand their comment.

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

#509

Post by [deleted] »

overfeed wrote: post #461
jerlam wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#510

Post by kube-system »

arijun wrote: post #504
kube-system wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving? I mean, yes, we can’t see as well in fog, but that’s why you should slow down

Again, I'm still not saying that humans don't make bad decisions. I'm saying that, unequivocally, they also get into accidents while paying attention and being careful, as a result of misinterpretation or failure of their senses. These accidents are also common, for example:

* someone parking carefully, misjudges depth perception, bumps an object

* person driving at night, their eyes failed to perceive a poorly lit feature of the road/markings/obstacles

* person driving and suddenly blinded by bright object (the sun, bright lights at night)

* person pulling out in traffic who misinterprets their depth perception and therefore misjudges the speed of approaching traffic

* people can only focus their eyes at one distance at a time, and it takes time to focus at a different distance. It is neither unsafe nor unexpected for humans to check their instruments while driving -- but it can take the human eye hundreds of milliseconds to focus under normal circumstances -- If you look down, focus, look back up, and focus, as quick as you can at highway speeds, you will have travelled quite a long distance.

These type of failures can happen not as a result of poor decision making, but of poor perception.

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