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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if ubiquity doesn’t effect the lidar performance? Wouldn’t the systems see each other’s laser projections if there are multiple cars close to each other? Also is LIDAR immune to other issues like bright 3rd party sources? At least on iPhone I’m having faceid performance degradation. Also, I suspect other issues like thin or transparent objects net being detected.

With vision you rely on external source or flood light. Its also how our civilization is designed to function in first place.

Anyway, the whole self driving obsession is ridiculous because being driven around in a bad traffic isn’t that much better than driving in bad traffic. It’s cool but can’t beat a the public infrastructure since you can’t make the car dissipated when not in use.

IMHO, connectivity to simulate public transport can be the real sweet spot, regardless of sensor types. Coordinated cars can solve traffic and pretend to be trains.

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LIDAR systems use timing, phase locking, and software filtering to identify and eliminate interference from other units. There is still risk of interference, resulting in reduced range, noise, etc.

I'd assume not since Waymo uses lidar and has entire depots of them driving around in close proximity when not in use.

I'm not a self-driving believer (never had the opportunity to try it, actually), but I'd say bad traffic would be the number one case where I'd want it. I don't mind highway driving, or city driving if traffic is good, but stop and go traffic is torture to me. I'd much rather just be on my phone, or read a book or something.

Agreed that public transportation is usually the best option in either case, though.

Unfortunately in my region highway traffic is quite congested, and so called "adaptive cruise control" is a game changer. I find it reduces fatigue by a lot. Usually the trucks are all cruising at the speed limit and I just hang with them. I only change lanes if they slow down or there's an obstruction etc.

Driving in fog is the number one reason I want lidar looking out.

To me any kind of driving is torture. I don't want the responsibility, the risk, the chance of fines if I miss a speed sign somewhere. And if my car could self drive I could spend the time usefully instead of wasting it on driving. It would be amazing.

Right now I don't even have a car but for getting around outside of the city it's difficult sometimes.

I used to think like that before I started driving, it's way more structured and harder to screw up than you'd think.

Avoiding potholes is the hardest part of driving, really.

I've driven hundreds of thousands of kms in my life and on both sides of the road (lived in various countries). But I still find it awful.

It's not that it's hard but I just hate it.

Yeah, I feel ya. I don't mind it, but I'm far from loving it. What particularly stresses me out is how I can be screwed even doing everything correctly, if someone else screws up.

All reasons why I think public transit is the better solution over self driving cars. They're generally much safer, and also you get to do something while you're on the go. Pretty nifty, I think.

Yes that's why I don't own a car. In a big city public transit is amazing. I spend 20 bucks a month on unlimited travel. That won't even buy me a headlight bulb for a car these days lol. When I still owned one I had to pay for the car, insurance, road tax, fuel, maintenance, parking, tolls. It felt like it was dragging me down the whole time. It's insane how much costs add up.

I love public transport and an added benefit is: I don't have to go back to where I left it. I often take a metro from A to B, walk to C and then get a bus back to A or something. Can't do that with a car, as such I tend to walk a lot more now. Because it's a hassle-free option now. The world seems more open for exploration when I don't have to worry about returning to the car, or having a drink, or the parking meter expiring. I really don't get that people consider cars freedom.

Of course once you go outside the city it's a different story, even here in Europe. Luckily I don't need to go there so much. But that's something that should be improved. On the weekend here in the city the metro runs 24/7 and the regional trains really should too but they don't.

There are regular 100+ car pileups in the central California valley due to fog. Cars crash in a lot of situations because the driver simply can't see. We need something better than vision to avoid these kinds of accidents.

Coordinated cars won't work unless all cars are built the same and all maintained 100% the same and regularly inspected. You can't have a car driving 2 inches from the car in front, if it can't stop just as fast as the car in front. People already neglect their cars, change brake compounds, and get stuck purchasing low quality brake parts due to lack of availability of good components.

Next time you see some total beater driving down the road, imagine that car 2 inches off your rear bumper, not even a computer can make up for poor maintenance. Imagine that 8000lb pickup with it's cheap oversized tires right in your rearview mirror with it's headlights in your face. It's not going to be able to stop either.

A combination of cameras, lidar, ridar, ultrasonic fused together have a strong sense of perception since they fill in each other's gaps. (short, long, different spectrums of electro-magnetic spectrum / sound).

The good news is they're all commodity hardware prices now.

Tesla removing radar and parking ultrasonic sensors was a self own. Computer vision inference is pretty bad when all the camera sees is a while wall when backing up.

Fog - Radar will perceive the car. Multi car crash, long range radar picks it up.

Bright glare from sun, lidar picks it up. Lidar misses something, camera picks it up.

Waymo has the correct approach on perception. Jam with sensor so they have superhuman vision of environment around.

They're wideband EM devices, so the problem of congested spectrum can be dealt with by the same sort of techniques used by WiFi and mobile phone services.

Do you always get good wifi at a level of consistency with which you'd trust your life?

i imagine seismic has already well solved a lot of that.

you know a lot about the light you are sending, and what the speed of light is, so you can filter out unexpected timings, and understand multiple returns

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