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by consumer451 289 days ago
> > If multiple sensor modalities disagree, even without sensor fusion, you can at least assume something might be awry and drop into a maximum safety operation mode.

> This is not always possible. You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.

> What do you do?

Go into your failure mode. At least you have a check to indicate a possible issue with 2 signals.
2 comments
Mentlo 288 days ago
I came here to write the same comment you did. What I’d suspect (I don’t work in self driving but I do in AI) is the issue is that this mode of operation would happen more often than not as the sensors disagree in critical ways more often than you’d think. So going “safety first” every time likely critically diminishes UX.

The issue is not recognising that optimising for Ux at the expense of safety here is the wrong call, motivated likely by optimism and a desire for autonomous cars, more than reasonable system design. I.e. if the sensors disagree so often that it makes the system unusable, maybe the solution is “we’re not ready for this kind of technology and we should slow down” rather than “let’s figure out non-UX breaking edge case heuristics to maintain the illusion of autonomous driving being behind the corner”.

Part of this problem is not even technological - human drivers tradeoff safety for UX all the time - so the expectation for self driving is unrealistic and your system has to have the ethically unacceptable system configuration in order to have any chance of competing.

Which is why - in my mind - it’s a fools endeavour in personal car space, but not in public transport space. So go waymo, boo tesla.

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ethbr1 289 days ago
Exactly my point. That you know the systems disagree is a benefit, compared to a single system.

People are underweighting the alternative single system hypothetical -- what does a Tesla do when its vision-only system erroneously thinks a pedestrian is one lane over?

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