Lots of confidence there from a video of a guy driving to a grocery store. Kinda like all the confidence everyone here had after seeing AirPower videos. We'll see how it does with every complexity found on the road around the world if it ever gets into the hands of the people that paid thousands of dollars for a promise.
agreed. machine vision will always beat lidar as a solution for real-world driving environments.
lidar requires mapping and advance knowledge of the world. Machine vision can detect and adapt to novel situations, just like humans. Cameras, big data (from millions of Teslas on the road), and advanced machine learning is the only viable solution if you want true self-driving in the most possible situations. Elon was right on this.
Hey man. You are absolutely right about your stance with Tesla and it’s cameras. I’ve done some extensive research myself a month or so ago. First of all I do not own a Tesla and personally I think Musk is overrated even though he is very intelligent. But his camera system and the FDS computer vision program is the clear front runner right now. FDS gives them much more freedom and they can make changes quickly and efficiently using the years worth or data and any future data of cars already on autopilot. There’s no clear indication that LiDAR today has a competitive edge. Waymo uses LiDAR but they have to carefully map everything block by block to gather that data. That takes way too long and could potentially be a handicap. Things could change in the future and LiDAR could prove to be superior but I’m not sure if it will.
www.indiesemi.com
Sure.
ok, thanks for the video ...
that remains to be seen and prone, none of the technologies used are ready to be deployed across the auto industry ...they are all still in development ...
of course it's not ready for primetime. there's a big label saying BETA on the Tesla software. and it nags you to keep your hands on the wheel while FSD Autopilot is on because it simply isn't ready for all users to use. software is still in development.
I agree with level 5. At level 5 we have the potential to not even need speed limits anymore (on the highway atleast) in a world that has gone completely autonomous. But for apples sake it will be necessary at the start and as it continues to what I think secretly map out whole cities for autonomy over the next several years. Everyone knows or Atleast has the impression that Apple will enter the game with the biggest disadvantage. Nero zero real world user data. Check out that article if you haven’t. The author is very heavily hinting at Apple laying all the ground work for years since 2015 to train its autonomy vision stack. I look forward to the next decade of autonomy.
>Apple is in discussions with multiple suppliers of LiDAR sensors appropriate for a self-driving vehicle
Good take. My one criticism of your reasoning on what Apple is doing -- those LiDAR maps, to be effective with the Waymo approach for full self driving have to be 100% up to date. So say Apple did a full LiDAR map of NYC before the COVID pandemic started. It has radically changed, because there are now outdoor seats for huge numbers of restaurants encroaching into what used to be part of the street. There is high likelihood that a lot of these changes will be long term if not permanent. So, the entire NYC LiDAR map would have to be redone from scratch.
Agree 100%. That’s another downfall of LiDAR is the remapping. But for Apple it will be necessary due to a lack of actual user reporting autonomous data at launch. I’ll be interested in how they dig themselves out of that hole when the Apple car launches but I think they may have a good foundation for that. Check out that TechCrunch article about Apple Maps from 2018. Very interesting about laying the possible foundation of autonomy data and some of what they are doing there sounds similar to what FDS does on the back end. Here’s something I wish I knew more about...in 2015 Apple invested 1 billion into Didi Chuxing (Uber of China and other parts of the world). They have “550 million users and tens of millions of drivers” Didi has a lot of maps data from ride sharing but they also have projects being developed and deployed for autonomous cars. As part of that investment does Apple get access to autonomy data? Gurman needs to to some investigating on that. I’d like to know.
Ultrasonics has very little to do with autonomous driving for the practical reason that its range is very short. It is great for navigating tight spots at very slow pace, but is of no use when the vehicle is actually moving in traffic. Radars, LIDARs and VIS/NIR cameras are the way to go.
I think this is based on some assumptions which are not necessarily entirely accurate.
Level 5 will need and will use all possible sensors. Even if it uses cameras for basic driving, it needs ultrasonics for parking and tight spaces. Radars, LIDARs and even thermal imaging provides additional information which can be used to improve safety. Think of a situation where an animal is running across a road in the dark. Thermal imager will detect it much quicker than any vision system, and LIDAR vill be able to follow its path accurately a lot before it appears in the headlights.
Your comment on Didi Chuxing is spot on. I think a lot of people tend to discount that $1b investment given no one really knows what sort of return AAPL gets on that investment. From this 2017 article, looks like Cook saw the value in the the data being collected by Didi.
I think we have a bit of a problem with Level 5 here.
If a human driver is unable to drive in certain snowy conditions, then we shouldn't expect a level 5 car to.
Yes, true level 5 is very, very, very, very difficult. We have had a pretty snowy winter. I need to do parallel parking in relatively tight spaces with knee-deep of slushly snow (with progressively hardening bits of ice in it). Having more than two decades of that experience, I only get stuck a few times a winter. That is why I have a snow shovel in the trunk, as do almost anyone else who needs to park in the same snowy mess before someone cares to come and collect the snow. (And once it comes, the cars are behind a hip-deep wall of snow. Shovelling is great exercise, but slightly beyond autonomous vehicles' capabilities.)
It’s exciting stuff. I’d love to know all the details of this. Those are great quotes. They have a lot of data. Check out their website and turn on translation unless you are fluent in Chinese. Lol. They have dedicated pages and projects about big plans for their technology. Didi Brain, AI Labs, autonomous driving, Didi Cloud. If these things pan out the way Didi hopes that they do and Apple has access to it Apple has the potential to take everyone buy surprise.Your comment on Didi Chuxing is spot on. I think a lot of people tend to discount that $1b investment given no one really knows what sort of return AAPL gets on that investment. From this 2017 article, looks like Cook saw the value in the the data being collected by Didi.
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But he quickly shifted focus to the vast amount of data that Didi monitors, and its “big-data algorithms.”
“By analyzing commuter patterns the way oceanographers track the tides, Didi may help traffic jams go the way of the flip phone,” Cook writes.
The comment about the algorithms builds on Cook’s earlier comments, where he said that Apple was always on the look out for great intellectual property.
“From a Didi point of view, we see that as one, a great investment. Two, we think that there’s some strategic things that the companies can do together over time. And three, we think that we’ll learn a lot about the business and the Chinese market beyond what we currently know,” Cook said last year.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook reveals what's really valuable about the Uber of China — data
"By analyzing commuter patterns the way oceanographers track the tides, Didi may help traffic jams go the way of the flip phone," Cook writes.www.cnbc.com
What’s most important to this is and even bigger than level 5 is all the cars need to be able to talk to each other via some sort of standard technology. Your Tesla may be able to talk to another Tesla two cars up but what about the Ford stuck in the middle? It’s at a huge disadvantage not having the data of what’s ahead and behind. I’m not sure if manufacturers will ever agree upon this since everyone wants to do what best for their brand.
