[giantrobot]

The human eye is a far better sensor in many ways than the CMOS sensors used in cars. They have variable focus lenses, finely controlled irises, and are on gimbaled mounts in the head. They have integrated shades/shutters and cleaning mechanisms. The head itself is on a gimbaled mount which itself can be moved. Attached to the eye mount are inertial sensors, audio sensors, and an accelerometer.

A camera or even a stereo pair of cameras mounted in or on the car will provide inferior imagery to the control system than eyes to the brain. They have less dynamic range and no articulation. If you wanted to replicate human style vision you'd need a bunch of fixed cameras and inertial and acceleration sensors all on top of AI that's better than what Tesla's been demonstrating.

LIDAR is the most straightforward augmentation for fixed cameras because it can build very accurate depth maps and image segmentation. You need fewer fixed cameras if your spacial model is built with LIDAR. You're in even better shape if those systems are augmented with radar.

While humans don't have LIDAR and such, our visual systems are highly developed and augmented with highly developed proprioception. Trying to replicate it with just cameras and tons of processing power is a fool's errand.

[uncoder0]

First worked on Autonomous cars in 2007 for DARPA grand challenge and even back then fused sensing was where it was at. Modern Cameras are better but they're no replacement for the eye. The best thing we can do right now is take high quality cameras and augment them with things like radar and LIDAR to get close to the human eye level perception. It makes the AI's job more about the macro driving problems and less about vision. Look at the string of crashes of Teslas into white box trucks on bright days.

I remember the first time we had problems with a matte black surface with our LIDAR that would have been easily spotted by our camera and vice versa with a shiny white surface in direct sunlight relative the car being easily picked up by lidar but nearly invisible to the cameras.

[bydo]

It seems insane that Tesla continues to shun LIDAR. Is it just pride at this point? Apple sells an $800 tablet with it built in, so while obviously the Tesla unit would have to be a lot larger and more powerful, I can’t see the cost argument making sense when the cheapest car they sell costs 50x as much (and the most expensive will be 250x).

[giantrobot]

I think at this point Tesla's camera-only system is an issue of pride for Elon Musk more than anything. He makes declarations and then refuses to backtrack on them ever unless he is literally forced to do so.

In theory a camera-only autonomous system can work effectively but in practice there's innumerable edge cases where it doesn't work well and edge cases are where catastrophic failures happen. If you had infinite processing power and error free AI you might be able to cover many edge cases but Teslas have neither.

[jvanderbot]

Worked on autonomous X for US gov. For any value of X, its a fool's errand to try to reduce the amount of information going into your GNC. Multi spectral, multi viewpoint, inertial-calibrated, and lots and lots of onboard models and processing.