Comment by dbcurtis
19 days ago
No, I don't think that will be successful. Consider a day where the temperature and humidity is just right to make tail pipe exhaust form dense fog clouds. That will be opaque or nearly so to a camera, transparent to a radar, and I would assume something in between to a lidar. Multi-modal sensor fusion is always going to be more reliable at classifying some kinds of challenging scene segments. It doesn't take long to imagine many other scenarios where fusing the returns of multiple sensors is going to greatly increase classification accuracy.
The goal is not to drive in all conditions; it is to drive in all drivable conditions. Human eyeballs also cannot see through dense fog clouds. Operating in these environments is extra credit with marginal utility in real life.
But humans react to this extremely differently than a self driving car. Humans take responsability, and the self-driving disengages and say : WELP. Oh sorry were you "enjoying your travel time to do something useful" as we very explicitely marketed ? Well now your wife is dead and it's your fault (legally). Kisses, Elon.
There’s nothing about the human reaction to a cloud of fog that can’t be replicated.