odysseus2000 wrote:Musk's comment on Lidar was that it uses 400 -700 nm photons, visible light, that are not able to penetrate many atmospheric conditions, I.e. they are no better than optical cameras.
You realise that the conclusion drawn in that statement is not an inevitable outcome of the premise? That operating in the same medium means neither that they are doing the same job, nor that they are pulling the same information, nor the same amount of information?
“You need a combination of cameras, radar, and lidar in order to create a self-driving system,” explains Jada Tapley, VP of Advanced Engineering at Aptiv. She would know. Aptiv built the autonomous Lyft cars that ferried attendees around Las Vegas for CES 2018. In the worst gridlock the city sees all year. And monsoon-like conditions. With zero accidents.
Those cars had nine lidar, ten radar, and four cameras. A combination of all three allow it to drive itself, but lidar performs the crucial function engineers call localization. “It’s important for the vehicle to be able to identify with a very high degree of accuracy where it is on the map,” Tapley explains. “We use our lidar to do that.”
While GPS can narrow down your location to a circle about 16 feet in diameter, lidar can do it within a circle four inches in diameter. That’s better than a lot of drivers can manage...
While cameras can identify objects, and radar can tell how far away they are, lidar can achieve both with a degree of precision neither can touch. “Imagine that there’s an 18-wheeler tire tread in the middle of the road,” Tapley says. “Radar will not detect that. Lidar will.”
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https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/soli ... ving-cars/...also nobody is suggesting running an autonomous vehicle using only LIDAR.
odysseus2000 wrote:More power is allowed at 1550 nm, but the systems are more expensive.
Somebody should build a whacking great factory to produce them for cheap...
An electronics buff in my family is famous for declaring that we'll never be able to build a pocket calculator cheaply enough for it to become a mass consumer item.
In 1999, Jaguar introduced the first radar-based cruise control in the XK, a coupe that sold for about $100,000 in today’s dollars. At the time, the sensors were so expensive that as Tapley tells it, “People joked around that you got a free Jag with every radar purchase.”
Today, you can get the same feature in a $18,000 Corolla. “We’re kind of on that same learning curve with lidar,” she says. “Until solid state becomes mature and enters mass production, these vehicles are going to be pretty cost prohibitive for an average consumer to own.”
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https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/soli ... ving-cars/The technology is evolving fast, and there are numerous companies competing in LIDAR.
https://www.vehicle-trend.com/Knowledge ... -1146.htmlodysseus2000 wrote:But no matter what system you have, if it is switched off as seems to be the case for the fatal Googl bicycle collision it won't help.
Do you mean Uber?
Uber use APTIV and Mobileye hardware, but run their own code and turn the built in safety features off. They also try running on a single LIDAR, rather than the 4+ used in cars which haven't been involved in fatal incidents.