Fantastic tech that Musk hates
The design is also flawed as it has to work with cameras anyway. The last thing you want is two systems arguing over what they see.
Sensor fusion is a thing. There are no two systems that “argue with each other”. I can’t believe the same old ignorant tropes are still making rounds.
Because the company has promised that existing Tesla owners would be able to use FSD.
Having to retrofit them to add LiDAR sensors would be cost-prohibitive.
And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.
And based on what we've seen the results haven't improved enough to put them close to Waymo.
We know this because there have been public presentations about it.
And inventing groundbreaking new tech is so far the domain of academia and large, well funded R&D labs. And almost always shared.
If the goal is to make roads safer. Aiming for cheap is good, it means aiming for more people who can afford that safer car. If it's not safer than humans, it should not be on the road in the first place.
And yeah, as you mention, cameras don't really have the same level of range our eyes have and computers don't operate in the same way.
I'm not a fan of the camera-only approach and think Tesla is making a mistake backing it due to path-dependence, but when we're _only_ talking about this is _broadly theoretical_ terms, I don't think they're wrong. The ideal autonomous driving agent is like a perfect monday morning quarterback who gets to look at every failure and say "see, what you should have done here was..." and it seems like it might well both have enough information and be able too see enough cases to meet some desirable standard of safety. In theory. In practice, maybe they just can't get enough accuracy or something.
In certain conditions, yes. Humans drive terribly in dark and low light, something lidar excels in.
I think more practically cars have adding driver assistance feature for a while now - more cameras, blind spot monitoring, ultrasound for parking, lane drift indicators.
It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that adding more sensors is helpful (but even the old adage of more data is better than less would probably say that).
That "some kind of image processing unit" in humans has an awful lot of compute power and software.
If you remove $100k of sensors but have to add $200k of compute to run more advanced computer vision software, then it's a bad tradeoff to use only cameras, even if in theory that software is possible.
Mercedes Drive Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front.
BMW Personal Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front
Honda SENSING Elite: Uses 5! lidars
They all use lidar, and some of the placement locations are downright hideous (Mercedes EQS). I think further development will require even more/better sensors, and manufacturers tend to agree on this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK3NcHSH49Q&list=PLVa4b_Vn4g...
Worth checking out, many cars are very bad.
Since then, the consensus has been that without lidar, the systems would not meet safety standards. For example, the cars need to be able to detect fairly flat objects, such as pallets that have fallen onto the road, which are very difficult to see optically, especially in difficult lighting conditions. For this reason, and because the technology has come down in price, virtually everyone except Tesla, which is developing advanced driving systems, is using lidar.
This development is nearly a decade old. It is for this reason, combined with the overwhelming amount of Musk-related nonsense, that I objected so strongly.
FSD is a versatile level 2 system, but at best a prototype for level 3. If we are talking about prototypes, it has to be compared to prototypes from other manufacturers like this <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uSph0asNsk> fully autonomous system from ... 11 years ago. The reason FSD is available to the average consumer is mostly a matter of philosophy, not technology.
That is hyperbole at best. I've test driven a Tesla with FSD and it worked flawlessly, such that I would have been perfectly safe taking my eyes off the road. Of course one test drive is not sufficient data to say one should trust the system all the time, but you are making the claim that it is never trustworthy which isn't true.
I have driven a number of level 2 cars on the motorway and almost all of them can do extended zero-intervention driving, but that does not make them safe. The failure rate compared to humans is still sky high.
Multiple independent FSD tests have shown that you need to take over several times an hour to avoid dangerous or illegal situations <https://electrek.co/2024/09/26/tesla-full-self-driving-third...>. The number will be lower on a motorway and you will sometimes have time to correct even if you are not looking, but the number of failures is still significant. If you take your eyes off the road, it is only a matter of time before you end up in a ditch.
I stand by my statement. The system is _never_ trustworthy enough to take your eyes off the road.
There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.
Skimming the Wikipedia article[2], it seems like animals do use time of flight, but also Doppler shifting.
(As a side note, some animals have apparently evolved active countermeasures to echolocation!? It seems obvious in retrospect but incredibly cool.)
There's interesting research into the mechanisms of human echolocation [3], but it was over my head. My impression was that the jury is out as far as the precise mechanisms involved but that there's a lot of evidence to be considered, I'm sure someone with a better background would get more out of it than I did.
(I'm just curious about the mechanism, I agree that LIDAR has natural analogs.)
[1] Speed of sound * 25ms, 25ms being the rule of thumb I've memorized for the minimum interval for two sounds to register as distinct from each other. This is just folk wisdom I've picked up hacking on audio, so perhaps I'm mistaken.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation
[3] https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/1963...
Assuming that all technology should imitate nature is a naive engineering principle. The solution should solve the problem within the given constraints.
Portable, energy efficient, light, doesn't need refined oil, tightly steers...
Boats and aeroplanes are terrible in comparison. They only work due to a huge network of global effort.
And horses don’t need roads like cars do and cars only work thanks to a huge network of global effort. What point are you trying to make? That we abandon planes until we can develop flight as efficient as nature? Abandoning LIDAR until we can develop visual light perception and processing equal to the human eye and brain?