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.

  • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    My 500$ robot vacuum has LiDAR, meanwhile these 50k pieces of shit don’t 😂

    • Animal@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Holy shit, I knew I’d heard this word before. My Chinese robot vacuum cleaner has more technology than a tesla hahahahaha

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      19 hours ago

      Vacuum doesn’t run outdoors and accidentally running into a wall doesn’t generate lawsuits.

      But, yes, any self-driving cars should absolutely be required to have lidar. I don’t think you could find any professional in the field that would argue that lidar is the proper tool for this.

      • rmuk@feddit.uk
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        18 hours ago

        …what is your point here, exactly? The stakes might be lower for a vacuum cleaner, sure, but lidar - or a similar time-of-flight system - is the only consistent way of mapping environmental geometry. It doesn’t matter if that’s a dining room full of tables and chairs, or a pedestrian crossing full of children.

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
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          18 hours ago

          I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.

          Let me make it a but clearer for you to make a fair answer.

          Take a .25mw lidar sensor off a vacuum, take it outdoors and scan an intersection.

          Will that laser be visible to the sensor?

          is it spinning fast enough to track a kid moving in to an intersection when you’re traveling at 73 feet per second?

          • Forbo@lemmy.ml
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            18 hours ago

            You’re mischaracterizing their point. Nobody is saying take the exact piece of equipment, put it in the vehicle and PRESTO. That’d be like asking why the vacuum battery can’t power the car. Because duh.

            The point is if such a novelty, inconsequential item that doesn’t have any kind of life safety requirements can employ a class of technology that would prevent adverse effects, why the fuck doesn’t the vehicle? This is a design flaw of Teslas, pure and simple.

            • rumba@lemmy.zip
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              17 hours ago

              But they do, there are literally cars out there with lidar sensors.

              The question was why can’t I have a lidar sensor on my car if my $150 vacuum has one. The lidar sensor for a car is more than $150.

              You don’t have one because there are expensive at that size and update frequency. Sensors that are capable of outdoor mapping at high speed cost the price of a small car.

              The manufacturers suspect and probably rightfully so that people don’t want to pay an extra 10 - 30 grand for an array of sensors.

              The technology readily exists rober had one in his video that he used to scan a roller coaster. It’s not some conspiracy that you don’t have it on cars and it’s not like it’s not capable of being done because waymo does it all the time.

              There’s a reason why waymo doesn’t use smaller sensors they use the minimum of what works well. Which is expensive, which people looking at a mid-range car don’t want to take on the extra cost, hence it’s not available

              • Forbo@lemmy.ml
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                1 hour ago

                https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-standalone-lidar-sensors/

                Waymo’s top-of-range LiDAR cost about $7,500… Insiders say those costs have fallen further thanks to continuous advances by the team. And considering that this short-range LiDAR is cheaper than the top-of-range product, the price is likely under $5,000 a unit.

                This article is six years old, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re even cheaper now.

              • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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                4 hours ago

                Good God it’s like you’re going out of the way to intentionally misunderstand the point.

                Nobody is saying that the lidar on a car should cost the same as a lidar on a vacuum cleaner. What everyone is saying is that if the company that makes vacuum cleaners thinks it’s important enough to put lidar on, surely you’re not the company that makes cars should think that it’s important enough to put lidar on.

                Stop being deliberately dense.

                • rumba@lemmy.zip
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                  49 minutes ago

                  I’m not being deliberately dense it just a seriously incomplete analogy. At worst I’m being pedantic. And if that’s the case I apologize.

                  I agree with the premise that the cars need lidar radar whatever the f*** they can get.

                  Saying if a vacuum company can see that a vacuum needs lidar (which is a flawed premise because half the f****** vacuums use vslam/cameras) then why doesn’t my car have lidar, none of the consumer car companies are using it (yet anyway). It’s great to get the rabble up and say why are vacuum companies doing it when car companies can’t but when nobody’s doing it there are reasons. Ford Chevy BMW f***, what about Audi what about Porsche? What about these luxury brands that cost an arm and three fucking legs.

                  Let’s turn this on its head, why do people think they’re not including it in cars. And let’s discount musk for the moment because we already know he’s a fucking idiot that never had an original idea in his life and answer why it isn’t in any other brand.

                  Is it just that none of these companies thought about it? Is it a conspiracy? What do people think here. If I’m being so dense tell me why the companies aren’t using it.

                • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                  55 minutes 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

                • Miaou@jlai.lu
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                  3 hours ago

                  Whether lidars are reliable enough to run on autonomous cars has nothing to do with whether they are cost efficient enough to run on vacuum cleaners though. The comparison is therefore completely irrelevant. Might as well complain that jet fighters don’t allow sharing on Instagram your location, because your much cheaper phone does.

                • rumba@lemmy.zip
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                  58 minutes ago

                  Shit that’s pretty decent. That looks like a ready fit car part, I wonder what vehicle it’s for. Kind of sucks that it only faces One direction but at that price four them would not be a big deal

                  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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                    44 minutes ago

                    I can’t find what it goes to, but it looks like Baidu and the US company Zoox use them in their robotaxis.

                    Edit: Lixiang models L9, L8, and L7 use that sensor.

                • KlausWintergreen@lemmy.world
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                  2 hours ago

                  So that one sensor is $700. Waymo has 4 LIDAR sensors (all of which are physically larger and I would imagine fancier than the Alibaba ones, but that’s speculation), so just in the scanner hardware itself you’re looking at $2,800. Plus the computer to run it, plus the 6 radar receivers, and 13 cameras, I could absolutely see the price for the end user to be around $10k worth of sensors.

                  But to be clear, I don’t think camera only systems are viable or safe. They should at minimum be forced to use radar in combination with their cameras. In fact I actually trust radar more than lidar because it’s much less susceptible to heavy snow or rain.

              • Lemmyoutofhere@lemmy.ca
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                15 hours ago

                Only Tesla does not use radar with their control systems. Every single other manufacturer uses radar control mixed with the camera system. The Tesla system is garbage.

                • rumba@lemmy.zip
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                  14 hours ago

                  yeah, you’d think they’d at least use radar. That’s cheap AF. It’s like someone there said I have this hill to die on, I bet we can do it all with cameras.

          • rmuk@feddit.uk
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            18 hours ago

            I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.

            and I think you’re suffering from being an arrogant sack of dicks who doesn’t like being called out on their poor communication skills and, through either a lack of self-awareness or an unwarranted overabundance of self-confidence, projects their own flaws on others. But for the more receptive types who want to learn more, here’s Syed Saad ul Hassan’s very well-written 2022 paper on practical applications, titled Lidar Sensor in Autonomous Vehicles which I found also serves as neat primer of lidar in general..

            • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              8 hours ago

              Wow, what’s with all the hostility against him.

              It’s maybe because i also know a bit about lidars that his comment was clear to me (“ha, try putting a vacuum lidar in a car and see if it can do anything useful outside at the speeds & range a car needs”).

              Is it that much of an issue if someone is a bit snarky when pointing out the false equivalence of “my 500$ vacuum has a lidar, but a tesla doesn’t? harharhar”.

              • octopus_ink@slrpnk.net
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                3 hours ago

                (“ha, try putting a vacuum lidar in a car and see if it can do anything useful outside at the speeds & range a car needs”).

                Because no one suggested that.

              • rmuk@feddit.uk
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                3 hours ago

                But, yes, any self-driving cars should absolutely be required to have lidar.

                So they think self-driving cars should have lidar, like a vacuum cleaner. They agree, and think it’s a good idea, right?

                I don’t think you could find any professional in the field that would argue that lidar is the proper tool for this.

                …then in the next sentence goes on to say that lidar is not the correct tool. In the space of a paragraph they make two points which directly contradict one-another. Hence my response:

                What is your point here, exactly?

                They could have said “oops, typo!” or something but, no, instead they went full on-condescending:

                I think you’re suffering from not knowing what you don’t know.

                I stand by my response:

                arrogant sack of dicks

                And while I’m not naive enough to believe that upvotes and downvotes are any kind of arbiter of objective truth, they at least seem to suggest, in this case, that my interpretation is broadly in line with the majority.

            • rumba@lemmy.zip
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              18 hours ago

              Well look at you being adult and using big words instead of just insulting people. Not even going to wastime on people like you, I’m going to block you and move on and hope that everyone else does the same so you can sit in your own quiet little world wondering why no one likes you.