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This article doesn’t address when cameras are blocked, which is the obvious issue with camera-only self driving. Teslas have crashed when cameras were blinded b
by vm 3y ago
This article doesn’t address when cameras are blocked, which is the obvious issue with camera-only self driving. Teslas have crashed when cameras were blinded by the sun. Now throw in snow, rain, dust… Is that solvable with lots of cameras and different types? …Does it need to be solved?
Maybe the bigger question - anyone know the status of low cost lidar? Dozens of startups and larger companies were working on it 10 years ago, yet Lidar still costs “thousands” according to the article
- deeviant 3y ago> Maybe the bigger question - anyone know the status of low cost lidar? "Solid state" lidars would fit the fit bill for likely low cost lidar. They are probably 3-4 years out, and have been for the last 10 years.
- coolspot 3y agoiPhone 13 Pro has solid state LiDAR.
- nucleardog 3y agoIt was introduced in the 12 Pro models released in 2020.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y agoThere's something bizarre going on with lidar manufacturing/pricing. When I was looking into it for a specific application it was much cheaper to buy entire made-in-china products containing the exact lidar module than it is to buy the part separately, even at bulk pricing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- krisoft 3y agoThis is very common with all kind of components. There are economies of scale your vendor can achieve when they sell someone a million of the same thing. Also the company buying a milion of the same thing is going to pay the vendor a significant sum, even if they get all kind of discounts, and that puts them at a much better negotiating position than you buying a single one. Hobbyist buying a few units of a component, even if they are buying it with a significant margin, will net the producer peanuts. So not surprising they don’t worry much about serving them that market.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y agoYes, I'm aware of that. That's why I added the bit about bulk pricing. In my case I was looking at buying quite a number of units, outside of a hobbyist application. In fact, I would say it was a higher number than the cheaper China-made products could possibly sell (different market sizes). It seemed to me that they didn't want to sell for any price really but would make an exception if they could really, really rip me off.
- asdff 3y agoMaybe this explains the reason why its somehow too costly to put lidar in a $50,000 tesla, but I can have it in my $200 xiaomi vacuum.
- coolspot 3y agoXiaomi vacuum has 1D laser rangefinder that is physically rotated in a 2D plane, much cheaper and simpler than a 3D LiDAR.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y agoNot exactly, as explained by the other commenter, but it could help explain why your $200 Xiaomi has lidar but a $1500 Roomba does not.
- KaiserPro 3y agoAs others have pointed out, lidar doesn't denote capability. 1d lidars that have a range of 8 meters indoors are quite cheap <$15 volume. "2d" lidar, that is one measuring one plane's depth, are generally a lost more costly. Not only that they are bigger and eat more power. again indoor only. 3d lidars are more expensive still, and if you want it to work outdoors, even more.
- pokerhobo 3y agoYou do know that lidar has resolution and a vacuum doesn't need high resolution for its needs vs a car?
- jstanley 3y agoWhat does a human driver do when their vision is obstructed? 1. Attempt to use the vehicle's built-in windscreen wiper to remove the obstruction. 2. Failing that, stop the car. Preferably before the vision gets so badly obstructed that the car cannot safely be brought to a stop. But stop the car even so. 3. Get out and clear the obstruction. Admittedly the AI will have trouble with this, but it is vanishingly rare anyway, and if the car is carrying passengers, this task can be given to the passengers.
- demondemidi 3y agoThis is whataboutism for ADAS. People and ADAS have their own, different, and critical weaknesses. Neither is a panacea. (Which is why mass transit investment should be prioritized over scifi fantasy ADAS.)
- NegativeLatency 3y agoOr walking, the most robust transportation option
- bipson 3y agoYeah, right. Since if there is snowfall we get out of the car and shoo the flakes away. Or scream at the sun to stop blinding us. Humans have something called perception and cognition, we can make sense of things we don't see. AFAIK we don't have cameras yet that can do that. We need better sensors.
- jstanley 3y agoThe cameras are for perception and the AI is for cognition.
- mrguyorama 3y agoIf we have to wait for "General" AI to have self driving cars, we should probably stop selling them today.
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- xnx 3y agoThis page from March 2023 says $1,000/unit for Lidar: https://www.sae.org/news/2023/03/adas-and-autonomous-vehicle-sensor-trends https://www.sae.org/news/2023/03/adas-and-autonomous-vehicle...
- adolph 3y ago> Teslas have crashed when cameras were blinded by the sun. Now throw in snow, rain, dust… I used to think the more sensors the better, but after listening to George Hotz talk about it I can see the logic of focusing on ambient spectrum in visual and near range. Of course, he will talk up his approach as best, but here it is as best as I recall: 1. more sensors ~= more signal 2. more sensors means a. longer processing pipeline for fusing data streams (timing, registration) b. more software, thus more surface area for defects c. decisions about response when 1 sensor modality fails 3. visual range spectrum is a. well adapted for environment b. has inexpensive and high quality sensors c. sufficient for humans so is sufficient to get to human-like driving by a computer The answer to blocked cameras is: 1. to have protocols to slow down and stop gracefully 2. maintain enough of a spatial model of the vehicle surroundings to perform the above (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, SLAM) Both of the above are basically what humans do.
- mrguyorama 3y agoOur eyeballs are not cameras and have way more depth info from their function than just two arrays of pixels that you can derive parallax from, and all the claims that "humans only use their eyes" fundamentally ignore all the other parts we use, up to and including an intrinsic simulation of physics in our brain.
- adolph 3y agoYes, sure. Cameras and biological light sensing have different tradeoffs. My lay person's understanding is that the eye-brain neuron pathway bandwidth is not theoretically sufficient for what we perceive and so our brain is effectively running an ongoing simulation of the future a few miliseconds ahead of now and correcting based on sensory input. The book "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us" by Ed Yong [0] is really great for understanding how sensory input informs but isn't the same as a mental model of the world built into the operations of a living thing. Likewise ADAS and similar systems do not operate simply on what is sensed at any particular moment. Even ahead of things like being blinded by a sunset, there are occlusions when one object moves behind another and cannot be directly detected but can be inferred by an object model that predicts future positions given the the earlier known velocity and acceleration. [1] 0. https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal-ebook/dp/B09JBJS1MF https://www.amazon.com/Immense-World-Animal-Senses-Reveal-eb... 1. Visual SLAM in dynamic environments based on object detection https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214914720304402 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221491472...