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by dekhn 2885 days ago
The text you linked to isn't very convincing for any of those. it describes a false positive that nearly caused an injury to the head of the project.

I think it's safe to say that while this was pioneering work, none of the technology it used was acceptable in terms of safety or generalizability.

2 comments

I said they had those functionalities, never claiming they had neither a perfect track record nor something comparable with what we have today.

I pointed that those functionalities existed and presumably sometimes worked, as opposed to OP that said they did _not_ have them. At the very least, the false positive proves they had emergency breaking.

What I find amazing is what they managed to do with much less powerful HW than what we have today, with much more primitive camera systems. To put it into context, the project is older than I am and they managed to achieve things that most of my live until pretty recently I would have categorized somewhere between amazing and impossible.

They had emergency braking... which just means applying the brakes. If you false positive emergency brake, that's worse than doing nothing (increased risk of crash, integrated over a wide range of possibilities).

My concern is that this article massively overstates the results that Dickmanns had in a way that implies his work had any real chance of being used in a production environment. There is a substantial difference in the sorts of Probabilistic systems that Thrun and others build today.

Whether today’s approaches are acceptable in these terms also remains to be seen.