Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?

My opinion is that skipping lidar is nonsense. Check Mark Rober's video, published one month ago, "Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?" where he compares a Tesla with other Lidar-equipped cars: [VIDEO]

Here's a good demonstration why LIDAR SHOULD be implemented instead of what Tesla tries to sell: [VIDEO]

To skip the intro and go to the car tests, jump to 8:11. [VIDEO] Spoiler for the results: The Luminar car (using LiDAR) passed all six tests. The Tesla (using only cameras) failed half of them: fog, rain, painted mural.

He disabled autopilot right before the crash. Before crash - you can see autopilot is on with rainbow road visualization, then cuts into his reaction, then at crash it's disabled - [VIDEO] Caveat: Autopilot is known to disable itself right before the crash (if it senses it) tho. I doubt this is the case because he would've obviously mentioned.

To be fair, we don’t need a new product, a tesla can do the same[1]. With AIs becoming more powerful and expanding to new areas, it makes even more sense to avoid businesses that are consistently user hostile. I wonder if anti tesla protests and related bad pr will contribute to increased consumer awareness around the topic. [1]: e.g. it can crash into a will e coyote style wall on autopilot: [VIDEO]

> For instance, being distracted, poor reaction times, or not being able to monitor all angles simultaneously. As a pitch for self driving, it's going to be a long time before I trust a computer to do the above better than I do. At the very least adding sensors I don't have access to will give me assurance the car won't drive into a wall with a road painted on it. I don't know how on earth you'd market self-driving as competent without being absurdly conservative about what functionality you claim to be able to deliver. Aggregate statistics about safety aren't going to make me feel emotionally stable when I am familiar with how jerky and skittish the driving is under visually confusing driving conditions. Perhaps vision is sufficient, but it seems hopelessly optimistic to expect to be able to pitch it without some core improvement over human driving (aside from my ability to take the hand off the wheel while driving). Edit: hilariously, there's already a video demonstrating this exact scenario: [VIDEO]

As someone who's done a lot of computer vision, it is insane to skip it. And it's sad because what everyone missed from that viral Mark Rober video [0] was not the Looney Toons wall hit but the fucking kid in the smoke. Add all the cameras and AI you want, you ain't changing the laws of physics: visible light doesn't penetrate smoke. But radar does. Every (traditional) engineer knows that safe systems have redundancy. That safe systems have redundancy through differing modalities. Use cameras, but also use radar, lidar, and even millimeter wave. Using just cameras isn't just tying one hand behind your back, it's shooting yourself in the kneecap afterwards [0] [VIDEO]

AI isn’t magic. If there isn’t enough information in the inputs, you can’t expect reliable results. It’s the same principle in all of software: garbage in, garbage out. If there simply isn’t enough visual information, vision-only will fail. [VIDEO]