Ever wondered why in millions of years nature didnt evolve a LIDAR equivalent and most species use passive vision?
Because it compensated for poor sensor hardware with a processing unit and software that we have thus far been unable to even come close to replicating? Granted, solve that, and we’re just a few years away!
The problem with that is that LIDAR is a sensor that is so unlike human perception humans completely misjudge what it's capable of. After an accident humans refuse to believe that the sensor really didn't see it coming, which of course is a big problem later in court. Sonars have the same problem. There's things those sensors can see that humans just can't but in the case of Lidar, only in specific planes (so, for example, it just doesn't see things that "point" at the sensor. It just doesn't see stairs or even an abyss, even at close range). Sonar has similar problems. It sees everything everything everything ... as long as there is a whole lot of consistent nothing surrounding it. When there is structure on the sea floor, sonar is useless near it. When there is a ship on the surface accelerating, the eddy currents create a region around, behind and below the ship where the sonar is blind. And near the surface, sonar is useless. The more wind, the deeper the problem goes. In a storm, it can be 10 meters and more. People with decades of experience for some reason seem to outright refuse to believe that.
People seriously misjudge the limitations of these sensors, and this leads to accidents.
Better to use cameras, which have almost exactly the same issues humans have (e.g. bad vision in low light, limited view, "blind" angles near corners, bad optical performance near the edges, ...), which will lead to "understandable" mistakes.
Nobody will understand if a LIDAR misses a beam sticking out of a truck in front of you (which would be expected behavior: such a thing is essentially invisible to LIDAR) and impales the person sitting in the passenger seat on it.
Or the Tesla fuckup. Failing to see the difference between front and back wheels of a large truck and 2 cars. Then decapitating the driver by driving in between the 2 sets of wheels at high speed. That's a typical LIDAR issue.
Sooner or later LIDAR will decide that just driving off an abyss is the best solution to a simple traffic situation (because LIDARs see abysses everywhere, so they use algorithms that assume abysses don't exist).
I've seen LIDAR controlled robots drive into tables "decapitating" (sort-of) themselves, because it only saw the feet of the table, looking at the data, and coming to the conclusion ... yep ... it was a perfectly understandable mistake. That robot also threw itself off the stairs. Again ... tough to fault it for that, as it saw the stairs as pretty much the same thing as a stick lying on the floor. Afterwards looking at the data, that was a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
We lost the robot to the stairs. I was looking at it making that decision. Why ? You see it move, and you're automatically assuming "surely it's not going to go for the hole in the staircase". And then it decides on a solution. Boom. And yes, I pressed the emergency stop button. Doesn't help much if the robot is already falling.
Ever wondered why with millions of years of evolution, human drivers with depth perception-enabled HDR cameras in their heads still get into accidents all the time? If that's your bar for "good enough" then we're in big trouble with autonomous vehicles.
> Hint: it’s not due to the sensor package being used.
But it is. The package is pretty limited, and the firmware running it is full of hacks that compensate. Hiding the blind spot, saccade masking, not paying attention to stationary things...
The vast majority of accidents are due to distracted driving. The millions of humans successfully operating a car more or less prove that the problem isn't our sensors. Alternative sensors may help, but marginally.
It at partially is. For example, humans' blind angles get blamed for quite a few accidents. Pointing attention in the wrong direction for another decent batch.
Eagles can see 4-8x further than humans can and many varieties of birds can see in additional spectrums to ours. And of course SONAR exists in whales, dolphins etc which is a corollary.
He neglects to mention that those sensors eagles use have their own limitations. They have zero peripheral vision. It's like having strong binoculars glued to your eyes.
This has consequences. It takes them forever to find anything, even if they can do it from great distances. They are blind for several seconds when they change position (such as when they just caught prey), or just generally at short range.
And you can try this with cats: this makes it very easy to sneak up on them. No peripheral vision, directional hearing ... if they're focused in front of them, you can almost just walk up to them from the back, they won't notice.
These things are tradeoffs. Humans are prey species, pack hunters. If a human is paying attention you can't really hope to sneak up on them. One human is easy to take down. But 10 humans will defend each other effectively.
There is no such thing as "the top of the evolutionary ladder." There is well fit to an environment and not well fit. To say "top of the ladder" implies that evolution encodes the concept of "progress". It does not. This notion of "top of the ladder" has been used to promote all sorts of pseudo-scientific racism and used to justify all sorts of bad conduct up to and including genocide.
I'm not accusing you of any of this, just pointing out that a seemingly innocuous, almost cliched term like "evolutionary ladder" can carry a lot of unwelcome baggage.
Because it compensated for poor sensor hardware with a processing unit and software that we have thus far been unable to even come close to replicating? Granted, solve that, and we’re just a few years away!