Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.
When you drive on the freeway, everyone's going the same way (or at least you'd hope), the configuration of the road is well known, lines are consistent, etc. It's all the little things that need to be accounted for - opposing traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, random obstacles, and any number of other road, traffic and obstacle configurations that exist, that make consistently and safely driving elsewhere difficult for autonomous systems.
Google/Waymo did a pilot - letting employees commute - and canceled because the system was too good and staff stopped paying attention.
This is a clip, there was a longer clip and description in a Waymo CEO speech in the past year or two.
Most California weather driving is very mundane and boring. ...but the moment you throw an outside variable into the mix - the computer cannot identify objects, and therefore cannot predict outcomes.
We're still teaching them to recognize Stop signs. How are they supposed to distinguish between a floating plastic bag and a 5 year old child?
So they started Adding curves in the road. Not much, but it improves the engagement factor. Gives the person something to do.
It sounds horrible to have to be fully alert, yet nothing to do.
In programming, I can’t stand shadowing people for more then few minutes before I want to start driving the code myself.
I can appreciate why the lay person may believe them to be similar, but it's hard to express just how much more challenging even the most basic form of driver assistance technology is in comparison to an autonomous vacuum.
The biggest challenge is speed. Just look at the napkin math of detection range of sensors versus stopping distance of a car. The higher the speed, the more range you need... and lidar, radar, etc. all have a fixed maximum detection range.
The rule of thumb is 50m for radar/lidar depending on how much you are willing to pay for the sensor. To stop the car safely, will take 56m at 100km/h.
Then ofcourse, the rest of the struggle is all in exception handling (getting from 70% to 99%).
Comparatively, the iRobot can use the dumbest and cheapest sensors and still be fully aware of everything around it in its relatively slow path of travel. It also does not need to predict the paths of travel of everything around it. It's enough for it to slow down or stop, especially at such low speed. If it hits something or fails to recognise an obstacle, it's not really a big deal. In comparison, lives can be lost in the car and there will be enquiries and legal battles.
I would put good money on the camera based automation delivering the best product at the end of the day, but requiring an order of magnitude more research and development than a comparitively "dumb" lidar setup. The lidar setup will have better immediate results, but probably will never reach the 99.999% effectiveness that everyone is chasing, and will probably never be safe at higher speeds.
On a freeway, that's terrifying.
It _seems_ like lots of parallel systems, each with the capability to reduce speed or stop could cope with city traffic about as well as a tourist. but, uh, I guess $2.5B says otherwise.
I do think Musk was (in part) wrong about LIDAR - I imagine that it could provide a valuable source of supplemental data to be used in training and classification.