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Comment by treypitt | Hacker News Reader

It's tough when you dogmatically refuse to use lidar! For Elmo, since the human eye doesn't have lidar, camera arrays are sufficient to achieve L3

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I know almost nothing about cars and so assumed LiDAR sensors are just prohibitively expensive for Tesla to install in every car. But then years later I learned that every modern iPhone has a LiDAR camera.

Still don't know how to think about this - how is it possible for a phone to have LiDAR (barely utilized) but it's too expensive to have them in such a critical setup as an autonomous vehicle.

> how is it possible for a phone to have LiDAR

Just like you can have a 50MP camera sensor in the phone: it works? Sure. Is it sufficient to capture the Moon (heh) or something 50-100 meters from you? Not at the quality and performance of professional equipment.

Sure, you can have a matrix of iPhone LIDARs but whould they works at sufficient speed, accuracy, at +40C, at -35?

Why should they need to in a L3 system ?

All L3 systems only operate under known easier conditions. The self driving could turn off in unfavorable conditions .

My car’s lane centering switches off if there is rain or snow obstructing sensor .

> But then years later I learned that every modern iPhone has a LiDAR camera.

The iPhone lidar has a range of 5 meters.

Semi-related but how do lidar-based systems handle nearby cars that have lidar jammers installed?

Semi-related how do lidar-based systems handle nearby cars with RPG launchers installed?

This is the rare moment where a random channel in YouTube beats Simpsons to speculate on one absurd scenario:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7YVxLLIuGM

It's not exactly what you describe but it comes close.

You need to buy a monthly subscription to the Premium CIWS package.

To be activated when the Mr Fusion is ready.

Unrelated, but why would a car have a lidar jammer installed?

I think the reference is to ALP systems which are used to defeat law enforcement speed guns? Not sure if those operate on the same frequencies as the DrivePilot LiDAR. It seems unlikely they do otherwise LE would have difficulty prosecuting speeders in these new vehicles?

Aha, thanks! And here I was, thinking that speed guns were just doing basic radar stuff, but I guess speed guns have evolved like everything else.

I can't speak to any production systems, but the ideal is to use a "sensor fusion" approach which can safely degrade or alert the driver when a sensor is lost.

Lidar, cameras, wireless communication with other vehicles and infrastructure, and with the internal sensors in the car.

More concerning would be adversarially-crafted signals. (Think a Wil-E-Coyote style fake-tunnel, but for lidar and and whatnot too.)

I would bet still better than how teslas fail to recognize cyclists or motorcycles still, even in 2023

And most systems use an array of sensors like radar, laser, and vision too. It’s only musk who is hell bent on lying to his customers about machine vision and also lying about his intentions where the goal is cost savings and not because machine vision is better.

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