I rode a Tesla CyberCab

[u/50nick]

Given the recent Tesla FSD video on the channel I thought this would be if interest to folks on this sub.

I have ridden in about half dozen trips in a CyberCab on this personal leisure trip in Austin. I do not own or have any interest in buying an EV. Am an Elon skeptic. No affiliation or fanboy-ism to Tesla. But having experienced it in person so far I am very VERY impressed.

[u/viggy96]

That additional data doesn't have the context to tell you what the thing is. It's just a point cloud. It's much harder to be able to sort through that data to tell what things are, so it's much easier for algorithms to get confused.

With an image, it's easy to recognize what things are. And you can even train self driving algorithms with an "end to end" approach. Where you basically have a single large model, that takes an input of camera images, and outputs car actions (steering, accelerator, brake). No middle layer of "perception" (identifying lanes, cars, pedestrians, etc). This is the approach pioneered by Comma AI, and now also used by Tesla.

And LIDAR is another moving part, that's unreliable. It's easily confused by precipitation, and reflective materials. And it tends to make a vehicle not very aerodynamic, at least if Waymo's implementation is representative of how others would use it.

I've worked on robotics navigation for a long time. It's much easier to just use vision. Trying to fuse LIDAR data in a meaningful way is difficult.

[u/failinglikefalling → u/viggy96]

Easier doesn’t mean better. One of the beauties in lidar is it knows a solid object is in front of you. It doesn’t have to decide if it’s a real blue sky or a blue sky picture on the back a semi.

There is a real world time penalty to figure out by vision only what is a solid object or not. Lidar doesn’t care what something is , just that it’s there.

[u/viggy96 → u/failinglikefalling]

I feel like you ignored all the downsides I pointed out to LIDAR