It has? This again gets to "are they safer than human drivers?", because the competition hits stationary objects all the time. If you have data let's discuss data, but "proven false" is, again, just spin.
> Pedestrian motion is not strictly a vision challenge but a general category of environment understanding
Semantic evasion. You agree that it's "not a problem solved by LIDAR", right? It needs a camera. You can use a LIDAR output as a (somewhat inferior) camera, but it's not providing any advantages.
The LIDAR addresses the part where all current cameras are unsuited to the purpose. It's not one or the other, but you appear to be assuming an imaginary not-the-one-we-live-in reality where only one is needed because you assume that all available cameras aren't actually very bad. But they are all actually very bad. So we continue to need both for the indeterminate future until someone invents mechanically robust extreme fidelity stereoptic cameras with motion freedom independent from the vehicle body, which is what humans have.
> "But depth info is...one of the easiest [problems]" ... "are they safer than human drivers?" ... Semantic evasion.
It looks like you're jumping from "depth is easy with cameras" (demonstrated false) to "safer than humans anyway without it" (speculative and not demonstrated by anyone), so which of us is evading?
Humans are unsafe predominantly because of inattention, not ability. Camera-only vehicles are unsafe because of camera ability before you even get to the attention part.
Tesla's repeated failures over the years demonstrate a dangerously erroneous belief that object identification is the first step for path planning. But that's not how humans drive, and it's not how to drive safely. The vehicle should avoid driving into any space that isn't going to be open smooth road, period. You don't need to recognize what's there. You do need to map whether it's open smooth road.
humans are absolutely doing sensor fusion, brains are bayesian inference machines. do not underestimate the power of the visual system.
and no, that the brain does is not an argument in favor of LIDAR-less cars. the eyeball + visual cortex system is alien technology compared to our feeble models. beware the hubris of a man who has learned to classify golden retrievers.
Not in the sense in the upthread comment they aren't, no. We have two cameras and two microphones. The latter is limited to weak detection of horns and tire screeches and not much else, and the former are too close together to give stereoscopic depth information at traffic distances.
We have a camera, basically. We do lots of stuff with the camera, sure. But that's not sensor fusion.
We sure as hell don't have anything like LIDAR.
They're only too close together to give very precise depth information, but they do still provide useful depth information.
> We have a camera, basically. We do lots of stuff with the camera, sure. But that's not sensor fusion.
They're varifocal cameras with very good dynamic range that also have full freedom to move around, both rotationally and translationally, which provides, among other things, more depth information and better object boundary segmentation from controlled parallax and focus, and which involves the continuously varied activation of many different muscles and sensory nerves because they're attached to the extremely complex and sensitive proprioceptive structure called the rest of your body, which your brain fully uses as input when processing visual information. And we know that your brain uses this other information, because not having this other information causes reduced perception and motion sickness.
So, no, they're not just cameras. And, yes, we do sensor fusion.
As far as LIDAR itself: sure, yeah, you get depth info out of it. But depth info is only part of the problem, and frankly it's clear at this point that it's one of the easiest. The hard parts are in the recognition side: not "is that pedestrian in your path" (easy), but "is that pedestrian going to step into the street or not" (hard). And that's a computer vision problem. You can use LIDAR output as vision input, sure, but it's has no advantages.
Tesla was right, basically.