Comment by mota7
3 years ago
Excellent example: "reflective cistern tank with a reflection of the back of a truck transporting stop signs"
People tend to forget just how hard the edge cases in vision are!
3 years ago
Excellent example: "reflective cistern tank with a reflection of the back of a truck transporting stop signs"
People tend to forget just how hard the edge cases in vision are!
It’s weird to me people forget how bad vision can be for driving and Exocet Tesla to somehow be better then our own eyes.
How often a do you encounter situations like bad fog/sun set/rain at night where it’s a total struggle to drive and you slow right down to a crawl and even then only do alright because of a ton of inference?
i think Tesla deciding to go vision only will be regarded of one of the greatest blunders is self driving history.
The counterargument to this is that since humans reach acceptable safety levels with vision only, it must be possible to do self driving with vision only. That said, augmenting vision with other methods does seem like a no brainer for better performance.
We have a lot more signal than vision only. For example audio, the “feel of the road”, like feedback on the steering wheel and traction that we physically experience. Most of all we have actual intelligence and reasoning - not just pattern recognition.
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The counterargument to THAT is that human safety levels aren’t acceptable. They are tolerable perhaps, but I wouldn’t call the number of accidents and fatalities we have today acceptable.
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That counterargument only holds if Tesla can build software that can approximate the human brain. I think it's laughable to expect they can do that, at least on any reasonable timeframe.
Even if they could, a goal of self driving should be to do better than a human driver. Avoiding technology that can "see" in ways a human cannot is just short-sighted, and a huge missed opportunity.
And all that still even ignores the fact that many common environmental conditions make driving only with human eyes very unsafe. Think fog or heavy rain. A car relying only in cameras to drive in those situations will be next to useless.
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Two thoughts: how sure are you that the safety levels achieved by humans during bad vision would be considered acceptable for AVs? And secondly: humans have access to a reasonable (non-artificial) general intelligence.
> since humans reach acceptable safety levels with vision only
No AI (reasoning) exists yet, only Machine Learning. It will take decades if not centuries.
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> The counterargument to this is that since humans reach acceptable safety levels with vision only
100+ car pileups in Southern California checking in to provide a counterexample.
The patchy fog in Southern California on I-5 can go from "not too bad" to "can't see your own hood" in a matter of seconds. Radar is going to catch hazards WAY before a human will.
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Or perhaps it will be their advantage in the short term.
Imagine a foggy condition that causes a 50 car pile up on the highway. Which is more likely to avoid the collision, a Tesla that slowed down because it couldn't see or a Waymo/Cruise blasting down the highway at 65 mph because it's Lidar can see through the fog?
Lidar can't see through fog (or snow/rain to enough of a degree), which is one reason tesla has avoided it. Do you mean radar? In the case of radar, I would hope that it becomes a base features of all cars eventually to avoid/mitigate rear endings by preemptive braking.
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