Hacker News Reader

Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a (relatively) trivial addition to the Autopilot system would be to allow the drive to tell the car when it has made a mistake and if Autopilot(s) consistently make mistakes in the same area then Autopilot should give a specific warning, or force a disengagement, when it detects that it is approaching that area.

I can't imagine that this isn't already a thing or that someone at Tesla hasn't come up with this... am I missing something here?

View on HN

Tesla engineers talked about this in great depth during the recent streaming event. Manual disengagement of Autopilot is the mechanism used to trigger an upload of the sensor data. It is automatically uploaded to Tesla servers and used to train the driving model.

A Twitter user who rooted his Tesla claims that autopilot disengagement reports are very small (< 1 KB) and do not contain any actual sensor data, just things like GPS coordinates, speed, heading, etc.: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1096322810694287361

Not the kind of information that you use to train computer vision algorithms. I found his claims to be an interesting read.

Definitely interesting but I wouldn’t trust a rooted system to behave the same as a non-rooted system.

Nor is there any guarantee that the snapshot in time when he did his research is representative of everything they do.

And such logging behavior can vary by car, by location, and by software version.

I tend to think it is in Tesla’s interest to collect the most useful data, efficiently, and make good tradeoffs when doing so. They say they are gathering data on interventions that will help improve their neural nets. I believe them.

You might want to read the whole Twitter thread again.

The long section where he describes “campaigns” is Tesla's mechanism for capturing high quality data based on certain triggers, and including pictures.

However the rest of the thread explains that Teslas are "trigger"ed to capture imagery data (in rapid succession, almost like a video) in a variety of situations like being close to pedestrians/cyclists not just disengagements.

You are not missing anything. They have that and gave details in their last Autonomy Day event.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com