Re:Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock
by freerobby on Thursday July 05, 2018 @03:06PM
(#17465884)
Thanks for posting that Waymo vid, that's the best processing of Lidar in adverse conditions that I've seen. I think the million dollar question is how far Waymo (or others) can push noise reduction with Lidar. The video seems impressive in isolation, but if you compare it to what Nvidia was doing with cameras two years ago (object recognition in snow/fog that appears to outperform humans[1]), it quickly becomes apparent that Lidar is still nowhere close. But maybe they can get it good enough to bridge us between specific and general techniques.
Personally, I'm long on the camera-based approach because I think reliable autonomy will require a generalized vision solution, and once you've achieved that, the Lidar is redundant.
Waymo supposedly processes their lidar signals to detect other cars with reasonable accuracy even in snow/rain(https://youtu.be/UrJ4-AUL4U0?t=9m41s). They only operate in pre-mapped areas so they should be able to follow lanes just fine even if the actual markings are obscured (by weather or by poor maintenance).
This kind of approach (mapping everything beforehand and using lidar for perception) is used by other players as well, and seems the most likely to work for short term level 4. Trying to do everything without the benefits of lidar and high-res maps (what e.g. Tesla are doing) is a more general solution, and cheaper hardware-wise, but will take longer to get right.