You cannot rebuke that claim via an aerospace analogy because they are not equivalent fields. It remains to be seen whether lidar is better for cars than "vision".
I was responding specifically to "Instead, LIDAR should exactly identify potential obstacles to the self-driving car on the road." - LIDAR isn't economically viable in many self driving car applications (for example: Tesla, TuSimple) right now.
I really can't understand how any logical person would think lidar is better here. You are driving with the sight of your eyes correct? then the AI would do the same but better.
Why can't you apply the same logic in reverse then? We're not able to speed up and compress what takes the 100 Watt machine as much as 21 years to fully develop, into something cars use locally yet, so we sidestep the problem with Lidar.
Honestly both seem a little silly though, would an early, poorly trained version of Alpha GO confirm the need for lidar because it doesn't beat top humans?
Yeah. But that's not what the OG comment is suggesting. The use of Lidar here would rule out a light resembling a traffic signal by virtue of there being no laser reflection of that object: lidar would complement vision to rule out false positives.
So Lidar is getting cheaper, but the advantage of Lidar (Vs. optical) may be diminishing.
Lidar worked really well because it was computationally impractical to process visual images in near real-time onboard. Lidar simplifies the informational inflow, which reduces computational cost. But the computational cost and practicality of processing optical data onboard has changed radically, it is now practical and affordable (both due to substantially improved software and new/cheaper hardware).
Keep in mind humans use "optical sensors with parallax" (i.e. our eyeballs). Cars are already optimised around that assumption (e.g. headlines to improve visibility in the visible light spectrum). Lidar still has advantages, but also a bunch of drawbacks (like dispersion and sunlight disruption), optical sensors do too (e.g. glare) but they're a lot more intuitive for humans because we share them.
I guess what I am saying is: Are you betting on better sensor tech (Lidar) or better computational tech (Optical)? I think Lidar will hit a ceiling after the "easy wins" have been consumed (and we're approaching that point), whereas optical has no real ceiling (even over and above human's innate abilities). With optical you can understand the world as humans visibly see it, Lidar sees the world fundamentally differently, seeing both less (bad) and more (good).
Obviously it is a somewhat false choice, but if people are investing dollars into development of both techs it is a choice that matters.
Musk badly wants for you to not realize that nobody is proposing LIDAR-only, but are rather proposing LIDAR+optical+radar. Musk argues against straw men.
(Also the radar Telsa is using has jack-shit for angular resolution. It can't tell the difference between a tree next to the road and a fire truck parked right across it. Consequently that radar has very limited utility.)
> This is one of the criticisms (of self-driving cars, and with LIDAR vs. imaging specifically) I just simply don't get. You can blind a real driver much more easily and less recoverably than you can any sensor.
Human optics is actually really, really good. We can adapt very well to having a light source as bright as the sun in the same field of view as shaded and make at details in both very bright and very dark regions. Optical sensors can't do that--you either wash out the bright stuff and see the shaded detail, or you darken the shade and make the bright stuff visible.
It’s not mutually exclusive either. You can have lower frequency, lower angular res 360 spinning LIDAR for low granularity general perception, and also have much higher frequency, brighter, and lower FOV (~90-120deg) solid state lidar mounted at the very least on the front corners of the car. We should be absolutely littering these vehicles with sensors, there’s no reason to be conservative at this stage.
#2 seems like an argument in bad faith. Nobody is suggesting that LIDAR is the "only" solution, just that it can/should be part of the solution- augmentation.
Similar to airbags- You can't only depend on them, but nobody does. That is why cars still have seatbelts
> As far as I know, no car manufacturer ships cars equipped with LIDAR.
I can confirm that, at least in a sense, this is false. There are plenty of series cars with LIDARS, but not he scaning things you are thinking about, but simpler kind of lidar tech[1]. I know that is not what you were talking about, but I thought it's worth pointing out other, existing, alternative approaches.
LIDAR is still not that good for driving. It's better than cameras but it's still pretty bad, because its vision can be obscured by weather conditions. Radar is the gold standard for vision like this.
Thanks for the response. I agree that LiDAR can make that determination. I think he was confused about what it was possible to learn from the LiDAR sensors rather than what LiDAR provides. His ability to distinguish between radar in former Tesla vehicles and LiDAR in former Tesla vehicles wouldn't be present if he thought they were the same sensor.
If I understand correctly the airborne LIDAR works in the timedomain and is much more expensive, while the LIDAR on automobiles is much more affordable but works in the frequency domain...
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