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posted by takyon on Wednesday August 07 2019, @10:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the liedurr dept.

Lots of companies are working to develop self-driving cars. And almost all of them use lidar, a type of sensor that uses lasers to build a three-dimensional map of the world around the car. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk argues that these companies are making a big mistake. "They're all going to dump lidar," Elon Musk said at an April event showcasing Tesla's self-driving technology. "Anyone relying on lidar is doomed."

"Lidar is really a shortcut," added Tesla AI guru Andrej Karpathy. "It sidesteps the fundamental problems of visual recognition that is necessary for autonomy. It gives a false sense of progress, and is ultimately a crutch."

In recent weeks I asked a number of experts about these claims. And I encountered a lot of skepticism. "In a sense all of these sensors are crutches," argued Greg McGuire, a researcher at MCity, the University of Michigan's testing ground for autonomous vehicles. "That's what we build, as engineers, as a society—we build crutches."

Self-driving cars are going to need to be extremely safe and reliable to be accepted by society, McGuire said. And a key principle for high reliability is redundancy. Any single sensor will fail eventually. Using several different types of sensors makes it less likely that a single sensor's failure will lead to disaster.

"Once you get out into the real world, and get beyond ideal conditions, there's so much variability," argues industry analyst (and former automotive engineer) Sam Abuelsamid. "It's theoretically possible that you can do it with cameras alone, but to really have the confidence that the system is seeing what it thinks it's seeing, it's better to have other orthogonal sensing modes"—sensing modes like lidar.

Previously: Robo-Taxis and 'the Best Chip in the World'

Related: Affordable LIDAR Chips for Self-Driving Vehicles
Why Experts Believe Cheaper, Better Lidar is Right Around the Corner
Stanford Researchers Develop Non-Line-of-Sight LIDAR Imaging Procedure
Self Driving Cars May Get a New (non LiDAR) Way to See
Nikon Will Help Build Velodyne's Lidar Sensors for Future Self-Driving Cars


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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 08 2019, @02:38AM (7 children)

    by legont (4179) on Thursday August 08 2019, @02:38AM (#877307)

    Not trying to get into lidar vs whatever discussion, more information does not mean better decision. It is good to have say vision and hearing, while it is not good to have two visions.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 08 2019, @02:55AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 08 2019, @02:55AM (#877316)
    Humans have two vision systems - one for daylight and another for the night. Cameras cannot cover both, and they work best in daylight. Lidar does not need external light at all, it will see a rider in dark clothes on a black bicycle that is outside of the car's headlights.
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 08 2019, @12:32PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 08 2019, @12:32PM (#877415) Journal

      Cameras cannot cover both

      Yet.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday August 08 2019, @02:56AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 08 2019, @02:56AM (#877317) Journal

    It is good to have say vision and hearing, while it is not good to have two visions.

    Ummm... binocular vision, not good?

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 08 2019, @10:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 08 2019, @10:44AM (#877397)

    while it is not good to have two visions.

    Have you had one of your eyes removed yet?

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 08 2019, @01:37PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 08 2019, @01:37PM (#877443) Journal

    So - you would prefer to have bat sonar, rather than lidar? QUICK - to the Batmobile, and I'll show you how it works!

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 08 2019, @01:43PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 08 2019, @01:43PM (#877451) Journal

    Let's say you've got six sensing systems. You can figure that one goes out now and then. So, fail-safe it. If three or more of your systems agree that you're good to go, you can go - at reduced speed. Nobody gets stranded at the side of the road because one out of six isn't happy.

    Back aboard ship again - we had four big-ass boilers for main power. If one boiler was sick, we ran with three. That's how repetitive redundancy is supposed to work.

    Your autonomous vehicle should have lots of different sensors, and the car should only shut down if multiple sensors agree that conditions are actually unsafe.

    • (Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 08 2019, @07:06PM

      by legont (4179) on Thursday August 08 2019, @07:06PM (#877606)

      The only thing I wanted to point out is that a statement "two systems are better than one" is often not true. When two systems provide similar information the decision is often worse than with one system. It does not mean that a backup is bad. It does not even mean that having two system is necessarily bad. It simply means that a designer should be ware of the fact that adding a sensor may decrease the results, which the original poster is not aware of.

      More generally, the philosophy "more is better" is typical for an American design and it is a weakness, I believe.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.