In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.

The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    15 hours ago

    Vacuum doesn’t run outdoors and accidentally running into a wall doesn’t generate lawsuits.

    But, yes, any self-driving cars should absolutely be required to have lidar. I don’t think you could find any professional in the field that would argue that lidar is the proper tool for this.

    • rmuk@feddit.uk
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      15 hours ago

      …what is your point here, exactly? The stakes might be lower for a vacuum cleaner, sure, but lidar - or a similar time-of-flight system - is the only consistent way of mapping environmental geometry. It doesn’t matter if that’s a dining room full of tables and chairs, or a pedestrian crossing full of children.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        14 hours ago

        I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.

        Let me make it a but clearer for you to make a fair answer.

        Take a .25mw lidar sensor off a vacuum, take it outdoors and scan an intersection.

        Will that laser be visible to the sensor?

        is it spinning fast enough to track a kid moving in to an intersection when you’re traveling at 73 feet per second?

        • Forbo@lemmy.ml
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          14 hours ago

          You’re mischaracterizing their point. Nobody is saying take the exact piece of equipment, put it in the vehicle and PRESTO. That’d be like asking why the vacuum battery can’t power the car. Because duh.

          The point is if such a novelty, inconsequential item that doesn’t have any kind of life safety requirements can employ a class of technology that would prevent adverse effects, why the fuck doesn’t the vehicle? This is a design flaw of Teslas, pure and simple.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            14 hours ago

            But they do, there are literally cars out there with lidar sensors.

            The question was why can’t I have a lidar sensor on my car if my $150 vacuum has one. The lidar sensor for a car is more than $150.

            You don’t have one because there are expensive at that size and update frequency. Sensors that are capable of outdoor mapping at high speed cost the price of a small car.

            The manufacturers suspect and probably rightfully so that people don’t want to pay an extra 10 - 30 grand for an array of sensors.

            The technology readily exists rober had one in his video that he used to scan a roller coaster. It’s not some conspiracy that you don’t have it on cars and it’s not like it’s not capable of being done because waymo does it all the time.

            There’s a reason why waymo doesn’t use smaller sensors they use the minimum of what works well. Which is expensive, which people looking at a mid-range car don’t want to take on the extra cost, hence it’s not available

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              20 minutes ago

              Good God it’s like you’re going out of the way to intentionally misunderstand the point.

              Nobody is saying that the lidar on a car should cost the same as a lidar on a vacuum cleaner. What everyone is saying is that if the company that makes vacuum cleaners thinks it’s important enough to put lidar on, surely you’re not the company that makes cars should think that it’s important enough to put lidar on.

              Stop being deliberately dense.

            • Lemmyoutofhere@lemmy.ca
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              12 hours ago

              Only Tesla does not use radar with their control systems. Every single other manufacturer uses radar control mixed with the camera system. The Tesla system is garbage.

              • rumba@lemmy.zip
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                10 hours ago

                yeah, you’d think they’d at least use radar. That’s cheap AF. It’s like someone there said I have this hill to die on, I bet we can do it all with cameras.

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                    10 hours ago

                    Not sure it’s a him thing, though it definitely could be. An inexpensive Chinese radar element could have eliminated all these problems and they could still use cameras as the main system. It would have cost them dollars to add it to the parts list and it’s just a minor input to the collision avoidance stuff.

                    I would expect him to do a cost-savings thing and pull parts, but they’re not really all that cost adverse. ( until you get to QC )

                    Maybe it was a DOGE kid he hired to come up with ideas or something. Doing with cameras only is more like a technical challenge, nobody looks at that and goes, WOW they can just do that with cameras, they go wow, that’s a horrible idea full of dust, dirt and mud issues.

                    That said, he has made worse plans :)

        • rmuk@feddit.uk
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          14 hours ago

          I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.

          and I think you’re suffering from being an arrogant sack of dicks who doesn’t like being called out on their poor communication skills and, through either a lack of self-awareness or an unwarranted overabundance of self-confidence, projects their own flaws on others. But for the more receptive types who want to learn more, here’s Syed Saad ul Hassan’s very well-written 2022 paper on practical applications, titled Lidar Sensor in Autonomous Vehicles which I found also serves as neat primer of lidar in general..

          • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 hours ago

            Wow, what’s with all the hostility against him.

            It’s maybe because i also know a bit about lidars that his comment was clear to me (“ha, try putting a vacuum lidar in a car and see if it can do anything useful outside at the speeds & range a car needs”).

            Is it that much of an issue if someone is a bit snarky when pointing out the false equivalence of “my 500$ vacuum has a lidar, but a tesla doesn’t? harharhar”.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            14 hours ago

            Well look at you being adult and using big words instead of just insulting people. Not even going to wastime on people like you, I’m going to block you and move on and hope that everyone else does the same so you can sit in your own quiet little world wondering why no one likes you.