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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: 1) by khallow on Friday August 09 2019, @12:41AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 09 2019, @12:41AM (#877694) Journal

    Tesla currently uses both cameras and radar (passive and active in your usage).

    Still means two more systems that have to work on top of what they already have. And as I noted, now you need five systems to work, not three.

    If you look down a few posts, it appears that the cruise control in some models of Tesla depends on the radar working...and the radar doesn't work if covered with snow/ice.

    In other words, a failure mode. I mentioned that happens. It's not like a lidar equipped car would be racing along in those conditions either.