Compare Boston Dynamics and cat. They are on the absolutely different levels for their bodies and their ability to manipulate their bodies.
I have no doubts, that using cameras-only would absolutely work for AI cars, but at the same time I'm feel that this kind of AI is not there. And if we want autonomous cars, it might be possible, but we need to equip them with as much sensors as necessary, not setting any artificial boundaries.
Check out what the Tesla park assist visualization shows now. It's vision based and shows a 3D recreation of the world around the car. You can pan around to see what's there and how far away it is. It's fun to play around with in drive thrus, garages, etc. just to see what it sees.
I guess you don't drive? You use more senses than just vision when driving a car.
You also do use your ears when driving.
Provable by one-eyed people being able to drive just fine, as could you with one eye covered.
> That something magical is happening because the eyes are close topographically to the brain?
It sounds to me like you have to study what eyes actually are. It's not about proximity or magic, they are a part of your brain, and we're only beginning to understand their complexities. Eyes are not just sensory organs, so the analogy to cameras is way off. They are able to discern edges, motion, color, and shapes, as well as correct errors before your brain even is even aware.
In robotics, we only get this kind of information after the camera image has been sent through a perception pipeline, often incurring a round trip through some sort of AI and a GPU at this point.
> Sounds implausible.
Musk just spent billions of dollars and the better part of a decade trying to prove the conjecture that "cameras are sufficient", and now he's waving the white flag. So however implausible it sounds, it's now more implausible than ever that cameras alone are sufficient.
No. I live in snow country. Folks with vestibular issues are advised to pull over in snowstorms because sometimes the only indication that you have perpendicular velocity and are approaching a slide off the road or spin is that sense. My Subaru has on more than one occasion noticed a car before I did based on radar.
Vision only was a neat bet. But it will cost Tesla first to market status generally and especially in cities, where regulators should have fair scepticism about a company openly trying to do self driving on the cheap.
I'm consistently surprised by how immune to sun-blindness my car is. It regularly reads traffic lights that have the sun right next to them; I've never seen any discernible degradation due to too much light, too little light, or bad contrast of any kind.
You're just bringing up a never-ending stream of but-what-abouts, so I'm done refuting them after this. It's not a good use of my time.
> You're just bringing up a never-ending stream of but-what-abouts
By "what abouts" you of course mean "shortcomings of camera-only systems that make them unsuitable for full autonomy."
> It's not a good use of my time.
No it's not, it's a losing battle, and Musk has admitted it. Camera-only systems will not enable full self driving. Y'all got scammed.
What is up with hn today? Was there a mass stroke?
Deaf drivers (may include drivers playing loud music too) don't, unless they're somehow tasting the other vehicles.
Nature's accelerometers.
I've had mine go bad, and it wasn't fun.
Just sayin'...
I was unable to stand up.
It all came out OK, in the end, but it was touch-and-go for a while.
Not quite a Lotus Position, but I used the Epley Maneuver on her which immediately lessened her symptoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver
Even driving with mild vertigo could be difficult because you want to restrict your head movement.
Source: my dad gets Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV)
He's mentally sharp, and has a science background, but nope!
While it doesn't often snow or ice up here (it does sometimes), it does rain a good bit from time to time. You can usually feel your car start to hydroplane and lose traction well before anything else goes wrong. It's an important thing to feel but you wouldn't know it's happening if you're going purely on vision.
You can often feel when there's something wrong with your car. Vibrations due to alignment or balance issues. Things like that.
Those are quick examples off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.
Of course, all these things can be tracked with extra sensors, I'm not arguing humans are entirely unique in being able to sense these things. But they are important bits of feedback to operate your car safely in a wide range of conditions that you probably will encounter, and should be accounted for in the model.
As for auditory feedback, while some drivers don't have sound input available to them (whether they're deaf or their music is too loud or whatever) sound is absolutely a useful input to have. You may hear emergency vehicles you cannot see. You may hear honking alerting you to something weird going on in a particular direction. You may hear issues with your car. Those rumble strips are also tuned to be loud when cars run over them as well. You can hear the big wind gusts and understand those are the source of weird forces pushing the car around as opposed to other things making your car behave strangely. So sure, one can drive a car without sound, but its not better without it.
But that's sort of besides the point: why would you not use additional data when the price of the sensors are baked into the feature that you're selling?
I am not saying that you couldn’t do this with hardware, I am quite confident you could actually, but I am just saying that there are senses other than sight and sound at play here.
The problem is clearly a question of the fidelity of the vision and our ability to slave a decision maker and mapper to it.
Sure, for some definition of "works"...
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
Sensory processing is not matched, sure, but IMO how a human drives is more involved than it needs to be. We only have two eyes and they both look in the same direction. We need to continuously look around to track what's around us. It demands a lot of attention from us that we may not always have to spare, especially if we're distracted.
Not on all metrics, especially not simultaneously. The dynamic range of human eyes, for example, is extremely high.
AFAIK there is also more than one front camera. Why would anyone try to do it all with one or two camera sensors like humans do it?
It's important to remember that the cameras Tesla are using are optimized for everything but picture quality. They are not just taking flagship phone camera sensors and sticking them into cars. That's why their dashcam recordings look so bad (to us) if you've ever seen them.
try matching a cat's eye on those metrics. and it is much simpler that human one.
a cursory glance did not find studies on cat peripheral vision, but would assume it's worse than human if only because they rely more on audio
But the human brain can process the semantics of what the eye sees much better than current computers can process the semantics of the camera data. The camera may be able to see more than the eye, but unless it understands what it sees, it'll be inferior.
Thus Tesla spontaneously activating its windshield wipers to "remove something obstructing the view" (happens to my Tesla 3 as well), whereas the human brain knows that there's no need to do that.
Same for Tesla braking hard when it encountered an island in the road between lanes without clear road markings, whereas the human driver (me) could easily determine what it was and navigate around it.
LIDAR based self-driving cars will always massively exceed the safety and performance of vision-only self driving cars.
Current Tesla cameras+computer vision is nowhere near as good as humans. But LIDAR based self-driving cars already have way better situational awareness in many scenarios. They are way closer to actually delivering.
No part costs less, it also doesn't break, it also doesn't need to be installed, nor stocked in every crisis dealership's shelf, nor can a supplier hold up production. It doesn't add wires (complexity and size) to the wiring harness, or clog up the CAN bus message queue (LIDAR is a lot of data). It also does not need another dedicated place engineered for it, further constraining other systems and crash safety. Not to mention the electricity used, a premium resource in an electric vehicle of limited range.
That's all off the top of my head. I'm sure there's even better reasons out there.
> Lidar can be added for hundreds of dollars per car.
But LIDAR would probably be wired more directly to the computer then use a packet protocol.
it has to do with the processing of information and decision-making, not data capture
Wake me up when the tech reaches Level 6: Ghost Ride the Whip [0].