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.
It’s also very expensive.
Sorry but I don’t get it. You can getva robot vacuum with lidar for $150. I understand automotive lidars need to have more reliability, range etc. but I don’t understand how it’s not even an option for $30k car.
You’re car’s not driving indoors at 1mph with the maximum damage being tapping but not marring the wall or vehicle.
You need high speed, bright lasers, and immense computation to handle outdoor, fast, dangerous work
IIRC robot vacuums usually use a single Time of Flight (ToF) sensor that rotates, giving the robot a 2d scan of it’s surroundings. This is sufficient for a vacuum which only needs to operate on a flat surface, but self driving vehicles need a better understanding of their surroundings than just a thin slice.
That’s why cars might use over 30 distinct ToF sensors, each at a different vertical angle, that are then all placed in the rotating module, giving the system a full 3d scan of it’s surroundings. I would assume those modules are much more expensive, though still insignificant compared to the cost of a car sold on the idea of self driving.