The long-term view of LIDAR was not so much that it was expensive, though it was at the time. The issue is that it is susceptible to interference if everyone is using LIDAR for everything all the time and it is vulnerable to spoofing/jamming by bad actors.

For better or worse, passive optical is much more robust against these types of risks. This doesn't matter much when LIDAR is relatively rare but that can't be assumed to remain the case forever.

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tim333 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I hadn't heard that criticism. You can get multiple Waymos near each other without them crashing into things.

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vachina 3 hours ago | parent [-]

When I see Waymos fail they usually fail together

	▲	catgirlinspace 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Doesn’t mean they’re failing because of interfering lidar though. If it’s something like them failing due to the road being blocked or something, it makes sense they’d fail together. Assuming they’re on the same OS, why would one know how to handle that situation and another not?

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consumer451 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am just some schmoe, but optics alone can be easily spoofed as any fan of the Wile E. Coyote has known for decades. [0]

What's crazy to me is that anyone would think that anything short of ASI could take image based world understanding to true FSD. Tesla tried to replicate human response, ~"because humans only have eyes" but largely without even stereoscopic vision, ffs.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ

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wongarsu 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But optical illusions are much less of an issue because humans understand them and also suffer from them. That makes them easier to detect, easier to debug, and much less scary to the average driver.

Sure, someone can put up a wall painted to look like a road, but we have about a century of experience that people will generally not do that. And if they do it's easy to understand why that was an issue, and both fixing the issue (removing the mural) and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift

	▲	consumer451 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> and punishing any malicious attempt at doing this would be swift Is this a joke? Graffiti is now punishable and enforced by whom exactly? Who decides what constitutes an illegal image? How do you catch them? What if vision-only FSD sees a city-sanctioned brick building's mural as an actual sunset? So you agree that all we need is AGI and human-equal sensors for Tesla-style FSD, but wait... plus some "swift" enforcement force for illegal murals? I love this, I have had heath issues recently, and I have not laughed this hard for a while. Thank you. Hell, at the last "Tesla AI Day," Musk himself said ~"FSD basically requires AGI" - so he is well aware.

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solumunus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why isn’t the solution a combination of both?

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ycui1986 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

everyone uses cellphone that transmit on the same frequency. they don't seem to cause interference. once enough lidar enters real word use. there will be regulation to make them work with each other.

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jandrewrogers 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Completely different problem domains. A mobile phone is interacting with a fixed point (i.e. cell tower) that coordinates and manages traffic across cell phones to minimize interference. LIDAR is like wifi, a commons that can be polluted at will by arbitrary actors.

LIDAR has much more in common with ordinary radar (it is in the name, after all) and is similarly susceptible to interference.

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CamperBob2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. Look at how dozens of GPS satellites share the same frequency without stepping on each others' toes, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code

Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly have easier ways to do it.

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addaon an hour ago | parent [-]

> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs.

For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard.

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CamperBob2 an hour ago | parent [-]

I think we may have had this discussion before, but from an engineering perspective, I don't buy it. For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.

Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.

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addaon an hour ago | parent [-]

> For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.

I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses, as opposed to by shaping individual pulses. (I've seen systems that introduce random jitter across multiple pulses to de-correlate interference, but that's a bit different.) The issue is you really do get a hell of a lot of data out of a single pulse, and for interesting objects (thin poles, power lines) there's not a lot of correlation between adjacent pulses -- you can't always assume properties across multiple pulses without having to throw away data from single data-carrying pulses.

Edit: Another way of saying this -- your revisit rate to a specific point of interference is around 20 Hz. That's just not a lot of bits per unit time.

> Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.

I can believe this is true for FMCW lidar, but I know it to be untrue for pulsed lidar. Perhaps we're discussing different systems?

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CamperBob2 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses...

My naive assumption would be that they would do exactly that. In fact, offhand, I don't know how else I'd go about it. When emitting pulses every X ns, I might envision using a long LFSR whose low-order bit specifies whether to skip the next X-ns time slot or not. Every car gets its own lidar seed, just like it gets its own key fob seed now.

Then, when listening for returned pulses, the receiver would correlate against the same sequence. Echoes from fixed objects would be represented by a constant lag, while those from moving ones would be "Doppler-shifted" in time and show up at varying lags.

So yes, you'd lose some energy due to dead time that you'd otherwise fill with a constant pulse train, but the processing gain from the correlator would presumably make up for that and then some. Why wouldn't existing systems do something like this?

I've never designed a lidar, but I can't believe there's anything to the multiple-access problem that wasn't already well-known in the 1970s. What else needs to be invented, other than implementation and integration details?

Edit re: the 20 Hz constraint, that's one area where our assumptions probably diverge. The output might be 20 Hz but internally, why wouldn't you be working with millions of individual pulses per frame? Lasers are freaking fast and so are photodiodes, given synchronous detection.

	▲	addaon 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I suggest looking at a rotating lidar with an infrared scope... it's super, super informative and a lot of fun. Worth just camping out in SF or Mountain View and looking at all the different patterns on the wall as different lidar-equipped cars drive by. A typical long range rotating pulsed lidar rotates at ~20 Hz, has 32 - 64 vertical channels (with spacing not necessarily uniform), and fires each channel's laser at around 20 kHz. This gives vertical channel spacing on the order of 1°, and horizontal channel spacing on the order of 0.3°. The perception folks assure me that having horizontal data orders of magnitude denser than vertical data doesn't really add value to them; and going to a higher pulse rate runs into the issue of self-interference between channels, which is much more annoying to deal with then interference from other lidars. If you want to take that 20 kHz to 200 kHz, you first run into the fact that there can now be 10 pulses in flight at the same time... and that you're trying to detect low-photon-count events with an APD or SPAD outputting nanoamps within a few inches of a laser driver putting generating nanosecond pulses at tens of amps. That's a lot of additional noise! And even then, you have an 0.03° spacing between pulses, which means that successive pulses don't even overlap at max range with a typical spot diameter of 1" - 2" -- so depending on the surfaces you're hitting, on their continuity as seen by you, you still can't really say anything about the expected time alignment of adjacent pulses. Taking this to 2 MHz would let you guarantee some overlap for a handful of pulses, but only some... and that's still not a lot of samples to correlate. And of course your laser power usage and thermal challenges just went up two orders of magnitude...