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As the AV space continues to mature, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that Waymo made some good choices: 1. Prioritizing safety over everything has kept

• mtgx 6y ago
  I just wish they'd stop making us all work for free to improve their self-driving system via ReCAPTCHA. Better yet, I wish web developers stopped using ReCAPTCHA for anti-bot protection. In most cases it's overkill anyway.
• ilyas121 6y ago
  Can you point to examples or evidence for the third or is that just a prediciton?
  • foxtr0t 6y ago
    My own prediction based on the fact that almost all other AV programs are using LIDAR, costs are decreasing with scale /R&D, and Teslas localization looks shotty at best. As costs continue to drop, its going to be tough for the company to continue rationalize sticking with cameras only just to keep Elon's ego in tact.
    • bootlooped 6y ago
      I've always found his position here weird. In a safety critical system, I don't like hearing "we don't need x, we can get by with just y". I like redundant systems, especially when one may do better in certain conditions than the other.
    • joakleaf 6y ago
      I was actually in the "pro lidar" camp, until I saw the user uploaded youtube videos of the Tesla beta FSD released last week in action. Now I am not so sure anymore. Looking at the beta UI in the car while it is driving, I am impressed with how well it detects everything. There are examples in dark and even areas with leafs covering parts of an unmarked road. It doesn't look at all like the detection system is struggling. The only thing is, that things seem to "float" a bit, or cars and pedestrians disappears when going behind other cars and reappears again on the other side. The sides of the road also seems to float/shift a little bit from time to time. I wonder if they are not using a temporal filter of some sort (like assume a car continues in the same trajectory when goes behind another object), or if the UI only displays an "unfiltered" value. In any case, I still haven't seen examples where the cameras didn't pick up anything relevant/critical.
      • foxtr0t 6y ago
        Object detection is mostly solved though, right? I don't think anyone is advocating using LiDAR for detection. It is used to accurately model depth and then localize the vehicle and surrounding objects/vehicles. The "floating" phenomenon you're talking about is noise from the computation method(s) Tesla uses to build a composite 3D model. You can fix that with LiDAR. I'd wager this noise gets worse in some circumstances. You can try to fix it by piling on noise reduction methods, but at a certain point, one has to wonder when it becomes obvious that an extra $X/vehicle to make the problem go away forever makes sense, where X is a monotonically decreasing value that'll probably get down to ~$200 with scale/R&D.
  • refulgentis 6y ago
    The new iPhone has LIDAR. Solid state LIDAR continues to improve and get cheaper.
    • genericone 6y ago
      Any idea what Apple's LIDAR specs are? Just saying that if the sample rate is only supposed to be good enough for auto-focusing a camera every second within a 10-20 degree FOV on-center, then there's still a deal of improvement needed before they can be used for self-driving cars. I think the tech will get there eventually, but this is an area where the sensor specs become really important.
    • dilyevsky 6y ago
      That lidar probably doesn’t have good fov and resolution. Getting those working on a solid state unit is a big challenge
      • deepnotderp 6y ago
        Multi point flash is actually petty good at that, and as the number of vcsels increases, it will increase
  • judge2020 6y ago
    From the earnings call last week: > Hey, Elon, a question on LIDAR. If LIDAR were totally free, would you want to use it in your cars near term? Would that tech significantly help Tesla on the training of your neural network for FSD? > I mean totally free, well, I think probably — I think even if it was free, we wouldn't put it on. https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/10/22/tesla-tsla-q3-2020-earnings-call-transcript/#time:~:text=a%20question%20on%20LIDAR https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/10/22/te...
    • colinmhayes 6y ago
      Do you believe him though? I absolutely do not. He just has to say that otherwise people will be talking about how their system is inferior.
    • hcknwscommenter 6y ago
      My guess is that there is so much technical debt that adding LIDAR is a tough choice for TESLA. They would need to throw out all the visual only data they have to-date and start over.
    • Gravityloss 6y ago
      They might have an imaging radar coming up. https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1319363515610812416 https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1319363515610812416
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• Ecstatify 6y ago
  I think Elon Musk makes some good points why Lidar isn’t the best choice. https://youtu.be/HM23sjhtk4Q https://youtu.be/HM23sjhtk4Q Waymo taxi looks incredible but how can they scale it.
  • ra7 6y ago
    I don’t agree he makes good points at all. His arguments essentially come down to two things: 1. LiDAR is expensive - this makes sense from his perspective because he has already declared all Tesla cars on the road are capable of “full” self driving with their current hardware. If he walks back on his, he would have to retrofit a million cars. 2. Humans can drive with just vision, so why can’t computers? This is a naive argument because human vision isn’t just vision, it’s linked to a ridiculous intelligence in the form of human brain. And computers are nowhere close to replicating it. If you want to read more on LiDAR’s importance, read some of Brad Templeton’s writings. https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/cameras-lasers.html https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/cameras-lasers.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/05/06/elon-musks-war-on-lidar-who-is-right-and-why-do-they-think-that/#3fbad5c2a3bd https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/05/06/elon-m...
    • onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
      Also, blind humans (and bats) can walk (and fly) around the city pretty easily with just sound. Why would you tie your hands behind your back and try to make a robot that can navigate the city using only sound? To cut corners and costs. Point #2 is deeply flawed.
      • dgut 6y ago
        Not really a good example. Blind humans don't navigate cities easily, even when cities take them into account. As an example, crossing a street despite tactile surfaces on each side can be a hassle because it's difficult to tell if you're walking straight or diagonal towards the other end, potentially walking into a car. Sound only takes you so far. Source: I have blind friends.
    • 6y ago
• temp667 6y ago
  Agreed. There are options for low res / narrower FOV lider as well with fewer moving parts / lower cost. At some point for safety you end up with a question - is it worth a few hundred $ to have definitive depth data in some directions. For tesla's, they have in the past struggled with stopped objects - so you have a tesla going straight into something at 70 mph on autopilot (highway dividers, stopped trucks, crossing trucks). They also suffer from phantom braking which is very disruptive, and the fix may have been to basically to disable emergency breaking in these areas which increases risks if something is stopped there. Lider, even lower rest, would really help in all of this plus pedestrian detection for emergency breaking there (see China videos of teslas crushing mocked-up walkers in videos there). Google also is building absolutely nuts training data for wide stereo vision recognition if they wanted. They are driving these vehicles generating very hi def point clouds with synchronized video. In terms of a training data set for a vision based system, this is basically a dream situation. Ie, if google wanted to reduce lidar reliance, they may be well positioned for that as well. Finally, what people want is level 5 autonomous driving. What trucking companies want is level 5. So they are skipping some of the earlier levels but getting to where I think people want this to go. Could a trucking company put a lot right near freeway and waymo get's the truck from lot to lot (1000's of miles) with then last mile hand driven? The savings would be huge there.
  • reitzensteinm 6y ago
    Tesla has lidar equipped vehicles that presumably provide training data for depth perception as you're describing. Although given the rarity of the sightings probably just one or two.
    • temp667 6y ago
      And google runs street view cameras everywhere with lidar now I believe, so their HD maps are getting pretty darn HD. They are going to be in a great position when this all shakes out.
• nickik 6y ago
  I have to disagree. 1. They are 10s of billions deep in a hole and make no profit (or revenue) and will not for multiple years. To ever pay back that investment they basically need to become Uber. And to get there, they need many more 10s of billions of capx. Uber is not even making a profit yet. 2. Waymo approach is the classic 'solve the easiest problem first' mistake. They started and have driven most of their miles, in literally the easiest place to do AV in the world. They have created incredibly complex high resolution maps on one small and simple region in Arizona where the streets are wide, the weather is always nice, and the general upkeep of the infrastructure is done very well. 3. Reliance on hd mapping for localization is fragile approach, and it essentially requires you to continuously map the whole global road system to have a real generalized driving solution. When will they have cars that can just drive on roads they have never seen before, something that human drivers often do. Seems to me this is the wrong approach to take. 4. Waymo still needs highly specialized vehicles, even with lidar becoming cheaper, their whole stack is still a very high cost low volume stack. How they will compete against an Uber driver in a cheap mass produced car anytime soon is totally dubious to me. Tesla clearly does not want Lidar. Elon Musk even said he wouldn't use Lidar if it was free. What they are actually doing is using next generation radar and likely next generation sonar as well. See: https://electrek.co/2020/10/22/tesla-4d-radar-twice-range-self-driving/ https://electrek.co/2020/10/22/tesla-4d-radar-twice-range-se...
  • reitzensteinm 6y ago
    Do you have a source for tens of billions? Did you confuse market cap for spending? I can't find any good sources, but that seems like an order of magnitude too much. They just raised $3bn (the vast majority of which is presumably not spent), and piecing together other sources indicates Google put in a couple billion of their own. This article claims they've spent $3bn on R&D: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30857661/autonomous-car-self-driving-research-expensive/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a30857661/autonomous-car-s... Google's approach requires a lot of mapping, yes. But they mapped damn near every road in the important markets to pursue maps, an opportunity two orders of magnitude smaller than self driving. If their cars and software are both ready, the mapping won't be more than a small roadbump.
  • ehsankia 6y ago
• slg 6y ago
  >Prioritizing safety over everything has kept regulators far away and there haven't been any mishaps that I'm aware of. Maybe I have missed it, but has there been any substantial use of Waymo outside of the Phoenix area? There is a reason why both Uber and Google were targeting that area for testing. It is an area with lots of sun, little precipitation, lots of relatively new, big, and straight roads, no real wildlife that might jump out into the road, and that is notoriously hostile to pedestrians. Is demonstrating a self driving vehicle is safe there truly indicative that it will be safe in the back alleys of Boston's North End when there is a foot of snow on the ground?
  • Jyaif 6y ago
    > an area with lots of sun, little precipitation, lots of relatively new, big, and straight roads, no real wildlife that might jump out into the road, and that is notoriously hostile to pedestrians. You just described a quarter of the US.
    • slg 6y ago
      And probably only 10% of the population. But either way, I'm not sure your point. It appears no one has anything close to true self driving. Different companies are attacking the complexities of the problem in difference ways. For example, Tesla is limiting its system by situation while Waymo is limiting it by environment. Neither has been proven safe for the full spectrum of driving and we all know that the biggest problems for self driving are going to be solving those outlier scenarios.
      • 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
        I agree with you mostly, except your definition of self driving. Full self driving limited to the Phoenix metro area counts to me as full self driving. That doesn’t meant squat towards full self driving in different conditions, but if you’re a Phoenix resident, who cares? If it works for the full spectrum of usage for normal people, I’ll count it, even if it’s not all normal people everywhere. If we get something that works everywhere in the US, but not the crowded streets in India, you’d count it, right?
• jayd16 6y ago
  LIDAR can't read traffic signs or stop lights. At best its a very nice addition to the depth sensing but the bulk of the work will still have to be sensing in the visible spectrum, categorizing the sensor data, and making decisions. If it turns out Tesla can drop in a cheap LIDAR system down then the line then aren't they the ones that made the right choice?
  • foxtr0t 6y ago
    They'd certainly have a lot of very angry customers who were promised this was unnecessary and other OEMs would drop LiDAR. If it turns out that more accurate depth perception is necessary for L3 AVs, every Tesla owner with "FSD" wasted 6-10k, unless Tesla voluntarily retrofits these vehicles, which would likely kill their profit for half a decade. Recalls are always much more expensive than getting it right first.
    • jayd16 6y ago
      Why for half a decade? I mean they only need to offer it to those who already paid, which isn't too much. It seems like a pretty safe marketing gimmick for Tesla even if some retrofits need to be doled out.