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by letitbeirie 1596 days ago
It's for safety reasons so that the system doesn't enter an undefined state if one of those sensors fails, which it eventually will.

If the signal goes from "black nothing" to "orange round" you know you went from no object to an orange, but what if your form sensor breaks and it goes from "black nothing" to "orange nothing?"

1 comments

You just made a point for redundancy ie more sensors...

Sensor failures are independent events and need to be correctly identified no matter what.

To take Lidar and Vision, both say something about distance and form of objects. Together they can achieve better performance. If one of them fails (and failure is identified) it defaults to the other sensor only and will be somewhat worse, but should at least allow it to pull over and warn you about sensor failure.

Also failures are much easier to identify when you have a baseline reference of one or more other sensors, in isolation much harder.