Why did Tesla decide not to use radar any more?
What wavelengths do other cars' radars operate at? How big are the apertures?
What wavelengths do other cars' radars operate at? How big are the apertures?
Elon may not be a great engineer but he is a genius businessman in many aspects so that would also make sense.
To a layman the sole reliance on cameras seems like one of Tesla's biggest mistakes.
This is quite subjective. My opinion is not very representative, but I for one find teslas horrifically bulky and ugly (and most other cars, in fact). They all look like gigantic broken eggshells. On the other hand, a lidar rig looks very cool.
There is no reason to not to have them in a car priced $100k, even just as a failsafe backup to the videocamera.
In the future though, mass produced single chip radars have all the chances to beat every other sensing method on cost.
Lidar on the other hand has no problem with stationary objects, but cars can’t depend on it in all weather conditions. Which means full self driving cars need to be able to operate based on vision like we do. I would expect all level 5 systems to use Lidar especially if costs continue to drop, but it’s not as clear cut as you might think.
But you are right on the point of there being no silver bullet sensing technology. All of them have their own very glaring weaknesses.
Radars are superior for simple collision avoidance for them being able to directly sense the velocity, but they are obviously useless for lane keeping.
Lidars are super unreliable from both internal factors, and the environment. Basically, a splat of dirt, and a collision.
Cameras are subject to all uncertainties of a CV system, and smog, smoke, and weather as well.
Unless they remove them and rely on only one type of sensor, which is exactly what Tesla has done. It's like complaining that each sense has issues, then removing all but one. Multimodal integration is literally how we use our senses normally.
RADAR is great for collision detection and early breaking systems because drivers don’t depend on them. If they fail in an early breaking system noting worse happens. But self driving systems can’t accept failures like that. These systems would need to stop if their camera/Lidar system failed so what’s it actually useful for?
From my understanding, the problem is the software doesn't know if that radar object is a car or a sign or an overpass. So it assumes that moving objects are cars, and makes a good guess at stationary objects. Occasionally when it is wrong, there would be unusual braking for signs, or just plowing into stationary cars.
RADAR systems are rapidly improving, but there’s a reason everyone shows Lidar data over RADAR.
Now in the long run, for true driverless cars, LIDAR will be rendered obsolete by sufficiently accurate AI interpretations of camera feeds. But in the medium term, I think they are key to filling in huge weaknesses camera only systems have, and freeing up computing power currently being used by trying to judge “depth perception” using cameras, to be freed up to better deal with other things cameras are actually good at like color/text recognition for reading traffic signs, facial recognition for determining if a pedestrian sees you, differentiating between hard and soft objects, etc.
[0] https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/lidars-for-self-dri... [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Cheaper-lidar-s... [2] https://news.itu.int/the-price-of-lidar-is-falling/
System redundancy in safety-critical systems exists for a reason. Either their engineering team refused to see this or they were unable to make Product/Management/Regulatory people see it.
AEB is quite finicky and needs quite a fair bit of calibration and mechanical alignment, still like the article says can suffer from false positives.
But although LIDAR is still prohibitively expensive it is possible to design ADAS that can integrate stereo camera, RADAR and long range sonar, that would at least give you three sources of data for some margin.
> What wavelengths do other cars' radars operate at?
The spectrum used for AEB in most transceivers is 76 GHz to 81 GHz (so between about 3.9 and 3.7 mm) some older implementations also worked at 24GHz i think.
Yet, that's the very point. These very primitive radars are more than enough for a car to avoid an obvious collision threat.