Comment by zemvpferreira
4 days ago
The mind salivates at the idea of sub-$100 and soon after sub-$10 Lidar. We could build spatial awareness into damn near everything. It'll be a cambrian explosion of autonomous robots.
4 days ago
The mind salivates at the idea of sub-$100 and soon after sub-$10 Lidar. We could build spatial awareness into damn near everything. It'll be a cambrian explosion of autonomous robots.
There are already very good sub-$100 lidars, especially for 2D since they were made en masse for vacuum cleaners. E.g. the LD19 or STL-19P as they're calling it now for some reason. You need to pair them with serious compute to run AMCL with them, plus actuation (though ST3215s are cheap and easy to integrate now too) and control for that actuation which also wants its own compute, plus a battery, etc. the costs quickly add up. Robotics is expensive regardless of how cheap components get.
I think the difference is that these are intended for automotive use and have a much longer range than the ones in your Roomba.
True, you have to go up to $120 for the 25m version, or $450 for Unitree's L2 which gets 30m in 3D. That's about as much you could possibly ever need unless you're making high speed vehicles that need more reaction time. In which case you probably shouldn't be relying on the cheapest thing on the market :)
RIP to every single camera in existence if that happens. Lidar is awful with damaging camera lenses.
I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers?
It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...
There is complains that some Volvo cars damaged iPhone cameras. It’s not even clear if Apple takes those under warranty. We’ve seen car review YouTubers that got their iPhone camera sensors damaged captured (by a second camera) while reviewing
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If this is true, the eyes are no better. Especially as it can't be seen, who will look awsy? And at night, with open irises?
There was someone who had his eyes damaged by sitting next to a heater.
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The next headline will be that it also damages human retinas.
It's not safe just because it's infrared. And the claims that it's safe because of the exposure time is highly questionable, would you be okay with that for any other laser?
> The biggest concern is not photographic cameras but rather the video cameras mounted on autonomous cars to gather crucial information the cars need to drive themselves.
So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?
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Is there any deeper study on long term effects regarding retinal damage?
I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.
More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these laser sources.
Some lidar units simply use the wavelength that the human eye is opaque to.
The grandparent comment is about camera lenses with little to no near infrared cutoff filter. Some older iPhones were like that and that was the original breaking story.
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I suspect we can't quantify human eye-damage enough to easily rule-out chronic effects... until it's too late for the patient.
iPhones have had lidar for years, have cameras been affected?
Other cameras. When the lidar laser points at the camera sensor.
I wish this was true. It'd immediately be the best way to fight surveillance systems like Flock
Could be a gain for privacy ;-)
we'd likely see new coatings and sensor designs that avoid it, not trivial but also not the end of the world
TIL!
Thanks! What a headache
What? Please explain!
Sensor damage
https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=hpLBgqom_kHVPuhL
The short-range stuff is already $150-300 per unit. If you're thinking indoor robots that's already technically feasible. Over 25% of all Chinese cars being produced today have LiDAR.
Even mid-range sensors used in ADAS systems only cost $600-750. The long-range stuff that's needed for trucking or robotaxis is $1,500–6,000
RIP to humans under authoritarian regimes?
And, I guess, even more advanced surveillance.
I think we’re well past the point where mass surveillance was a technical challenge. Mass oppression through autonomous violence however…
Even back when Snowden was current news, we'd reached the point where laser microphones could cover every window in London for a bill of materials* less than the annual budget of London's police force.
* I have no way to estimate installation costs, but smartphones show that manufacturing at this scale doesn't need to increase total cost 10x more than the B.o.M.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_(robot)
The minute internet became widespread it was game over.
Pros and cons. :/
It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it.
Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though?
Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant.
Lidar doesn’t really give you much to “see”, just shape and distance…so I’m a bit confused how it can be used for invasive surveillance, do you mean when fused with vision input it somehow allows it to infer more privacy stuff?
The EU already has. GDPR and the AI Act puts a lot of limits on what you can do in the open space, although it doesn't always go far enough.
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LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually
I don't think it makes a difference. Dense lidar goes you more information than 2d colour imagery.
There are SLAM cameras that only select "interesting" points, which are privacy preserving. They are also very low power.
I’d definitely feel much better if most cameras in the world were replaced by LIDAR. I feel like it would be much tougher to have a flawless facial recognition program with LIDAR alone
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People saying LIDARs can't recognize colors or LIDARs can't take pictures don't know what they are talking about.
They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.
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> LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually
Right, but how likely is it that there will be LIDAR and no cameras (especially given the low cost of the latter)?
Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflict.
Mass surveillance is a relatively recent development. Dense urban civilizations are not. And yet their denizens have not historically devolved into a “nasty, brutish, and short” existence. In fact, cities have been centers of culture and learning throughout history. How does this square with your theory?
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This is a reduction to absurdity. Those old societies you cite didn't actively surveil with the goal of micromanaging people's daily lives the way that modern ones do.
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That's an incredibly bullshit argument to defend the indefensible.
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