This isn't a "mistake". This is the key problem of getting self-driving to work.

Elon Musk is right. You can't cram 20 radars, 50 LIDARs and 100 cameras into a car and declare self-driving solved. No amount of sensors can redeem a piss poor driving AI.

Conversely, if you can build an AI that's good enough, then you don't need a lot of sensors. All the data a car needs to drive safely is already there - right in the camera data stream.

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vrighter 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

if additional sensors improve the ai, then your last statement is categorically untrue. The reason it worked better is that those additional sensors gave it information that wac not available in the video stream

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ACCount37 4 days ago | parent [-]

"If."

So far, every self-driving accident where the self-driving car was found to be at fault follows the same pattern: the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, and it didn't make the right call. The bottleneck isn't in sensors.

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	▲	rootusrootus 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In that case we're probably even further from self-driving cars than I'd have guessed. Adding more sensors is a lot cheaper than putting a sufficient amount of compute in a car.

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BuckRogers 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Multiple things can be true at the same time you realize. Some problems, such as insufficient AI can have a larger effect on safety, but more data to work with as well as train on always wins. You want lidar.

You keep insisting that cameras are good enough, but it’s empirically possible since safe autonomous driving AI has not been achieved yet to say that cameras alone collect enough data.

The minimum setup without lidar would be cameras, radar, ultrasonic, GPS/GNSS + IMU.

Redundancy is key. With lidar, multiple sensors cover each other’s weaknesses. If LiDAR is blinded by fog, radar steps in.