As the tentative launch date for Tesla's Robotaxi service approaches, more details are emerging, including the presence of a human safety driver and other key aspects.
Does the taxi driver remember every sign in the city, every road and parking spot? No. They are humans - they remember the streets, some important spots that are confusing, maybe a couple of shortcuts. There is a huge difference between having a 3d map of everything in the city in the memory, and setting a GPS to an address, reading the signs as you go by and adhering to them. Also if self driving tech is to expand, you don’t go putting the entire world into memory - that’s not scaleable.
Does the taxi driver remember every sign in the city, every road and parking spot? No.
having a 3d map of everything in the city in the memory
you don’t go putting the entire world into memory
Cars don’t do this either, do they? Surely this type of data is streamed as needed. Just like video games do. This type of optimization has been around for decades… We need not worry about that in cars either.
I’m just saying that GPS and LIDAR is needed in addition to just camera input.
No argument on gps and lidar from me. Streaming doesn’t work. You are probably thinking about Microsoft flight sim, which completely fails (and is the first “completely streamed” map). Out in the “real world”, you don’t have a fiber connection to stream gigabytes every hour.
Streaming doesn’t work. You are probably thinking about Microsoft flight sim, which completely fails (and is the first “completely streamed” map).
Streaming might be the wrong word. I’m talking about loading just enough data to do what’s relevant right now. And I’m not talking about full 3D geometry of the world, that’s not helpful to a vehicle. It needs to know in 2D where it can and cannot drive, as well as real non-static/dynamic obstacles (what the cameras and LIDAR are for).
You don’t need gigabytes of data to load a 2D geometry of a small area like a part of a city, surely. You can also cache it on disk. Your phone can even do this. In fact, you can ask it to cache however wide of an area as you’d like. You might hit several hundred megabytes but that’s like a whole midsize city probably.
Does the taxi driver remember every sign in the city, every road and parking spot? No. They are humans - they remember the streets, some important spots that are confusing, maybe a couple of shortcuts. There is a huge difference between having a 3d map of everything in the city in the memory, and setting a GPS to an address, reading the signs as you go by and adhering to them. Also if self driving tech is to expand, you don’t go putting the entire world into memory - that’s not scaleable.
Cars don’t do this either, do they? Surely this type of data is streamed as needed. Just like video games do. This type of optimization has been around for decades… We need not worry about that in cars either.
I’m just saying that GPS and LIDAR is needed in addition to just camera input.
No argument on gps and lidar from me. Streaming doesn’t work. You are probably thinking about Microsoft flight sim, which completely fails (and is the first “completely streamed” map). Out in the “real world”, you don’t have a fiber connection to stream gigabytes every hour.
Streaming might be the wrong word. I’m talking about loading just enough data to do what’s relevant right now. And I’m not talking about full 3D geometry of the world, that’s not helpful to a vehicle. It needs to know in 2D where it can and cannot drive, as well as real non-static/dynamic obstacles (what the cameras and LIDAR are for).
You don’t need gigabytes of data to load a 2D geometry of a small area like a part of a city, surely. You can also cache it on disk. Your phone can even do this. In fact, you can ask it to cache however wide of an area as you’d like. You might hit several hundred megabytes but that’s like a whole midsize city probably.