| > while Tesla's vehicles had no video input. This is factually incorrect. Tesla vehicles rely on Mobileye [1] cameras to do its environmental analysis. These cameras come with the processing hardware to analyze the sensor data they're getting, and spits out environmental information that the driver assistance [2] can use to navigate the car. Whether Tesla had access to the sensor data directly rather than just the analyzed stream is not public information. Now that Mobileye broke up with Tesla [3], it's unlikely they'll ever have it. Mobileye has years of experience in dealing with the kind of visual data you need to have on the road, such as crazy HDR (you want to be able to extract useful information when the sun is glaring at you as well as in the dark woods in the night, and be able to switch immediately as when you're going through a tunnel). They've developed dedicated hardware to reliably and quickly do object distance and velocity detection: this is exactly the scenario that a "Real-Time OS" is made for. You cannot afford to be pre-empted and lose 5ms on your analysis and miss an action frame. Thinking you can pull this off reliably with a non-RTOS and consumer cameras is... naive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobileye [2] Mobileye's equipment was never rated for full-on "Autopilot", which is why they were very unhappy with Tesla marketing their systems as such [3] http://www.wsj.com/articles/mobileye-ends-partnership-with-t... |
This was admitted by Musk on Twitter following the fatal crash in Florida: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748625979271045121