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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

#541

Post by cobbzilla »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #456
cobbzilla wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are good arguments but this isn’t one. Many humans (like me!) drive fine without binocular vision. And the cars have many cameras all around, with wide angle lenses that are watching everything all the time, when a human can only focus in one direction at a time.

I thought only the front view has binocular vision on the cars. The others are single, with no depth perception. How does it know how close objects are outside this forward cone? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378671275/figure/fi...

I’m guessing the fields of view overlap for any 2 adjacent cameras, so you can get parallax measurements from any angle.

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

#542

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

0_____0 wrote: post #446
keyKeeper wrote: post #84

There are laser measurers sold for a few buck on Temu. Robot vacuums sold for few hundred dollars have Lidars that map out the room in a seconds. Is there any actual technical reason why automobile Lidar be expensive? Just combine visual processing with single point sampler that will feed points of interest and accurate model of the surroundings will be built.

Oh my god so many reasons. I don't feel like getting fully into it but that's kind of like asking why you can't use your kitchen scale to measure highway traffic as it drives over it.

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

#543

Post by rfv6723 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #190
rfv6723 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural surveillance was far more suffocating because every single action was subject to the community gaze. This is exactly why classic literature frames the journey to the city as a liberation from the crushing weight of the village eye. The idea of the peaceful countryside is a modern utopian fantasy that ignores how ancient clans dictated every aspect of life including marriage and death. Modern Homeowners Associat…

"It was always shit everywhere" is revisionist history born out of the fantasy of statists looking to justify the modern (administrative) enforcement state. While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter.…

Modern bureaucracy provides the institutional architecture and political recourse needed to check such arbitrary local tyranny. Without a central legal authority, an HOA or a town council becomes a lawless fiefdom. In those "freer" times, falling out with the local elite meant you didn't fight a permit; you simply had to pack your life and leave.

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

#544

Post by rfv6723 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #198
rfv6723 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 19th century was the true cradle of mass surveillance. Civil registration, property tracking, and institutionalized police forces provided the systemic oversight required to manage dense urban life. These administrative tools served as the analogue version of digital monitoring to ensure every citizen remained known and categorized. Cities thrived as centers of culture only because these new forms of visibility p…

And what about all of the previous ~40-50 centuries where cities were centers of learning and art and not Hobbesian hell holes? Ur is slightly older than the 19th century, I believe. And note that there is evidence for cities of tens of thousands of inhabitants from 3000 BCE, while Rome reached 1 000 000 residents by 1CE. Again, without becoming some Hobbesian nightmare.

Augustus established the Vigiles Urbani and the Urban Cohorts, creating a state-funded police and firefighting force to replace the chaotic and often violent system of private client-patron justice. These were the bold, persistent experiments in social order that allowed a million people to coexist without descending into a Hobbesian hell.

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

#545

Post by estearum »

Gee101 wrote: post #472
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…

Musk has never been scared of vertically integrating something that's too expensive initially.

What has he vertically integrated that's as technologically sophisticated as LIDAR?

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

#546

Post by UltraSane »

servo_sausage wrote: post #533
UltraSane wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Urban operating domain combined with legacy approaches. If I was designing a robotaxi 10 years ago I would use lidar, designing consumer vehicles for near future L3 it's no longer the best use of resources. I prefer more compute and cameras for the money. Our current issues are now scene understanding and navigation; followed by parking. We get very little value from LIDAR in the driving cases, so much so that we don…

Are you claiming that the detailed 3D point clouds LIDAR provides isn't useful in scene understanding?

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

#547

Post by wiredpancake »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #302
bilsbie wrote: post #211

Are we sure these things aren’t damaging our eyes? It’s lasers shooting all over the place right?

I get pretty ticked when people shine laser lights in my direction regardless of their intensity, so I'm not too thrilled about the idea of invisible lasers hitting me square in the pupil without my knowledge.

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

#548

Post by nateb2022 »

peaceofcake wrote: post #528
flambojones wrote: post #506

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.

What is $200 LiDAR going to mean for the war in Ukraine? I imagine these things will be very useful for drones, if nothing else.

For single-use FPV munitions, a $200 LiDAR probably wouldn't be very useful. For one, that's about half the price of the drone itself, and second, for self-destructing munitions, it's not really necessary to have anything more than video footage to direct it.

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

#549

Post by servo_sausage »

UltraSane wrote: post #546
servo_sausage wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urban operating domain combined with legacy approaches. If I was designing a robotaxi 10 years ago I would use lidar, designing consumer vehicles for near future L3 it's no longer the best use of resources. I prefer more compute and cameras for the money. Our current issues are now scene understanding and navigation; followed by parking. We get very little value from LIDAR in the driving cases, so much so that we don…

Are you claiming that the detailed 3D point clouds LIDAR provides isn't useful in scene understanding?

Yeah, not compared with the extra money being spent on compute directly. $200 gets you a fair amount of extra processing power, and that's if one LIDAR is even enough, with the solid state style currently around we need several.

Things like when to change lanes, do I need to yield for that ambulance, or what is that pedestrian going to do, are not really improved by point clouds.

I still want the massive point clouds for validation and ground truth, but not for driving.

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

#550

Post by Rohansi »

cheema33 wrote: post #512
Rohansi wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old? The 2023+ models with HW4 are pretty good at FSD. A 2021 model with HW3 was scary bad when I tried it about a year and a half ago.

> I tried it about a year and a half ago. So, you do not own a Tesla.

I do. I replaced that HW3 model 3 with a HW4 model Y.
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