Re:Tesla: Introducing Autopilot and Dual Motor All Wheel Drive
by jameshart on Friday October 10, 2014 @10:52AM
(#8437992)
When the road's full of cars spamming LIDAR, under a network of drones doing the same... interference and noise surely become a real problem?
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Re:Tesla: Introducing Autopilot and Dual Motor All Wheel Drive
by Animats on Friday October 10, 2014 @01:34PM
(#8439022)
The duty cycle on LIDARs is very low. If you're ranging to 200 meters, the receiver is only taking data for 1.2us. At 60 Hz scanning, the receiver is active for 72us/sec, or 0.0072% of the time. So in the presence of 100 other transmitters (worst case), you'll get a conflict 0.72% of the time. If the transmit time is randomized slightly (which I don't think Velodyne does, but a production device must), you won't get the same bogus reading twice in a row. Over three readings, if you throw out outliers, this problem should go away.
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If the LIDAR data has too many outliers, it's necessary to slow down and only use data from short ranges. At some short range, the LIDAR will "burn through" any jamming from a more distant range, per the radar equation. I agree that on production vehicles, anti-jam software, as described above, will be necessary.