The car in that video had so much extra custom stuff it's not even funny. And while it's still a technical feat, I don't see every mercedes being sold with that equipment in it already.
The reason this is amazing is because Tesla is planning on switching this on for all of their new cars in the very near future. It might not be the most technically advanced, but it's here.
While the others make promises, Tesla's making cars.
BTW I doubt that the Tesla is ASIL D complient in this sense. AFAIK their is no ASIL D implemented component right now. Everybody avoids that. But this is required to be fail safe.
The Tesla video is a bit more exciting, because it is using a car that consumers are already driving, whereas the Mercedes has "aftermarket" sensors and a computing platform built in. Mercedes is impressive on the other hand, because that was three years ago.
Having a working implementation in a consumer grade car is impressive, but the ability itself is not novel.
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co...
I could see the former being useful during development, but I wouldn't want a "slam on the brakes" button in my car. And the latter could be much more easily worked out by just switching under any driver input on the steering wheel.
Probably the same thing a new-to-the-area human would do if the sign was removed. Where I live there are many intersections where only 1 road has stop signs. I'd imagine there are other areas were the norm is a 4 way stop.
As for damaged, I would imagine it can still recognize the sign as often in image recognition you do not need the whole picture to confirm a match.
Either on the first video or some news, i think i heard the ability to drive where the lanes are not clearly defined. Things such as snow would absolutely requires such reconstruction.
IIRC it would automatically make a note of your location when you pass speed bumps or bad patches of road and adjust the suspension accordingly.
I think a polite driver may have slowed down gradually to not startle the joggers, but not stopped if it were avoidable, especially since there was a car behind the tesla.
In the latter case i guess the field of view of the cameras is not wide enough to assess those things during a turn in advance?
It's astounding to realize the AI will learn and change it's habits, just like a young human driver learning.
If you don't see the legs and don't have very accurate 3d vision, the object might just as well stand further away in the middle of the road: http://malea.lacerta.uberspace.de/up/e92e6492-ce56-468b-8e09...
I think the hydrant is the same problem: head on you don't have any parallax effect to do know the distance, so if you don't detect where the thing is rooted to the ground you might guess it's in the way.
and it completely fails do detect the right end of the lane (the moments before I was amazed how it still drove so fluid)
I think 0.25x is the right speed if you want to watch it in realtime
From the video it looks like lane detection and 2D object recognition.
It might use a structure-from-motion (SfM) running on CUDA to get a 3D point cloud out of the 8 cams. Does someone know more about how their new auto pilot works?
Stereo might require some level of calibration to account for camera alignment, maybe they want to avoid that? I would think that implementing stereo would be fairly cheap both computationally and in hardware- if they can get by this well without it, they could pare the stereo computations down to a few frames per second, on specific objects in the scene. Maybe a future update will add binocular cameras in the dash, but they are pretty confident about their current hardware.
If I was an investor I'd be super fucking pissed off Tesla is squandering capital on NOT CHEAP sync rights for Rolling Stones songs to be used in their PR materials.
If I was an investor I'd be super fucking pissed off Tesla is ignorant enough about Intellectual Property that they'd use a Rolling Stones song in their PR materials without paying the NOT CHEAP sync rights.
No credits at the end? Yeah, I get the feeling they didn't pay. Before you want to dog pile me for doubting if Tesla did things right, keep in mind this is a company that blows its own deadlines and wants to lock in its IP...well, I've seen a thing or two over the past 20 years of online life and I remember when Microsoft paid out the nose to get the Rolling Stones to license "Start Me Up" for a Windows campaign. The rights holder to some Rolling Stones material broke up The Verve following "Bittersweet Symphony" case.
Yes, I'm an IP asshole, but I'm a lot better at it than most.
Come to think of it, I just feel like making a montage.
I'd have a hard time believing that, to be honest.
Looks pretty promising, not bad, especially since the trend in software (and sensors) is to get better over time.
A human driver (well, at least myself) would simply have lifted the foot off the accelerator somewhat and drifted closer to the centre line when passing - seeing as there was no oncoming traffic.
Maybe it knows that if the joggers were to suddenly jump out, doing what you or I would do isn't enough, so it slowed down to a near stop just in case.
Also, it's a bit of a "blind corner", so drifting out toward the middle of the lane might not be the best idea (again, even though it's probably something I as a person in that scenario would have done).
90 - 95% of the time I am driving long stretches, I spend on highways. No problem if only that part would be done selfdriving. Those few minutes in busy town centers I do not mind to do myself. No problem of driving short stretches (10 - 15 min) either.
I did notice that the lane markings are suspiciously bright and well-painted throughout the video. Almost as if they'd been touched up by Tesla! Or maybe this area just has particularly diligent road-painting crews.
In many parts of the real world you'd be lucky to get such clear lane markings throughout the journey, certainly not here in the UK or in places that get winter ice & snow.
The first self-driving video came out a few days after Episode 1 of Westworld, where an a cover of this song featured prominently (I'm trying not to spoil it).
Elon confirmed on Twitter it was inspired by this. [1]
e: Added twitter thread link.
I really cannot wait for next video, featuring Jean Jacques Perrey's "Little Ships".
The tech community tends to be a bit dour and pompous. We tend to overblow every tiny announcement into some world-changing event. Look at Apple's recent announcement video for their $300 book for a particularly gratuitous example.
It's healthy for Tesla to retain a sense of self-deprecating humour. Self-driving cars are massively important, but they're also a bit silly and strange. There's no harm in acknowledging the absurdity of a car that drives itself. There's no harm in bursting your own bubble.
I expect Tesla got feedback indicating that some people didn't notice that the last video was sped up, so they decided to make this video a lot more obvious by speeding it up even more and adding the music. I agree, it's not really a good choice, but I can see how they might have come to that decision.
Appropriate in bringing light heartedness to a typically sped up video.
Can everyone chill the fox out about a theme tune?
Road centerline recognition seems good. Every road seems to have really clear centerline markings, though. Road edge recognition isn't always successful. Roadside obstacle recognition seems very dependent on recognizing cars and people. The system doesn't recognize a large trash can in the roadway until very close. Recognition of roadside traffic cones and barriers seems to be about 50%. Guard rails aren't recognized at all.
This has the look of something using deep neural networks trained on common obstacles. It doesn't look like something that profiles terrain.
Mainly to play Vimeo videos at 2x speed since Vimeo refuses to put the feature in the player.
Does the lack of lidar not scare anyone else?
Also, Out of curiosity, does anyone know how a Tesla behaves if you point ultrasonic transducers in the same frequency at it? Do they have special modulation to avoid tampering in this manner? I imagine you could confuse the car into thinking there are barriers it can't see.
I don't think lacking lidar should be inherently scary, humans don't have lidar sensors either and they do well enough. I do hope that cheap solid state lidars do come to market to improve low visibility driving nonetheless.
Thanks!
Anybody knows if these 3 cameras on the right are the only ones used by the auto pilot?
I really wish they provided a non-sped up video.
I wonder if the AI just detects an intersection and if it doesn't know what to do, disengage?
Also, if the driver wants to exceed the speed limit of a road will autopilot allow them? If so, who becomes liable since the system will obviously know the speed.
If the road had not been curved when it came upon the joggers would it have passed without stopping? Is that something that needs work on? I understand its erring on the side of safety.
So next drives, a night run, a rain run, and if they are really ballsy then both at one time. Would be cool to have someone throw something in front of it while its going through the parking lot, beach ball, etc.
Something you wouldn't wish on anyone who is even remotely your friend.
And then there's the magic roundabout in Hemel Hempstead! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih223jffmek
I understand that whether the driver was paying attention or not, he or she would be at fault, I'm just pointing it out.
I regularly stop to let people cross the road, I cross the center line when safe to give people and cyclists (if I plan to pass) extra space etc. I suppose, in this Tesla at least, you can just take control, but some other proposed implementations seem to have a less traditional UI.
these guys are doing it right (teach your car to drive on the other side of the road) : http://www.deccanchronicle.com/technology/in-other-news/0103...
I notice at 0:24 in the short version (0:41 in longer version [0]) it seems to stop early for a stop sign and then resumes driving to the stop sign. It looks like the vehicle in the oncoming lane may have caused the stop. I only noticed because in the longer version the person in the driver's seat lifts his hands when the stop occurs (not as noticeable in the short version).
[0] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
The only left on green we get to see in the video is at 15s, but it didn't have to wait for any oncoming traffic. Hopefully it knows to treat those situations differently.
p.s I really enjoyed the choice of music on that video.
</deep philosophical mode>
Oh well... I guess I'll have to wait for the mini-van style with blacked out windows :)
What about driving through a parking lot (lots of cars around).
Seems dang near impossible to deal with all the edge cases.
