YouTuber Mark Rober has kicked the hornet's nest with his latest video. But are Tesla fanboys right mistakes were made?

In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.

The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.

  • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    9 hours ago

    It’s a cost-benefit calculation.

    • For a vacuum at the speeds they travel and the range it needs to go, LiDAR is cheap, worth doing. Meanwhile computing power is limited.
    • my phone is much more expensive than the robot vacuum, and its LiDAR can range to about a room, at speeds humans normally travel. It works great for almost instant autofocus and a passable measurement tool.
    • For a car, at the speeds they travel and range it needs to go, LiDAR is expensive, large and ugly. Meanwhile the car already needs substantial computing power

    So the question is whether they can achieve self-driving without it: humans rely on vision alone so maybe an ai can. I’m just happy someone is taking a different approach rather than the follow the pack mentality: we’re more likely to get something that works

    Edit: everyone talks about the cost-benefit, but I imagine it makes things simpler for the ai when all sensors can be treated and weighted identically. Whether this is a benefit or disadvantage will eventually become clear

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      7 hours ago

      An automotive lidar scanner is nothing compared to the price of a car. Yeah it’s more expensive than the one that’s in your phone but that’s not shocking they’re not going to put a really expensive one in your phone because it would exceed the value of the phone.

      Although if you’ve got an iPhone that’s possibly not the case.