I'm surprised that rotating scanners are still used. It's been twenty years since Velodyne built their first one. They work OK, but cost too much. I was expecting flash LIDAR or MEMS mirrors to take over. Continental, the auto parts company, bought the leading flash LIDAR company over a decade ago, but the volume market a big parts company needs never appeared.
Waymo is still using rotating LIDARs even for the little ones at the vehicle corners. Those need less range. There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things. The location is too vulnerable. Maybe millimeter phased array radar mounted behind Fiberglas body panels.
Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York.
The LIDAR on top may not be a problem. Insisting that it has to go away to "look like a car" is like insisting that cars had to have the form factor of horse-propelled buggies. Early cars looked like buggies, but that didn't last.
One big advantage of pulsed LIDAR over continuous is that the interference problem between identical units is much less. The duty cycle is tiny. Data from one pulse round trip is collected in less than a microsecond. Just put some randomization in the pulse timing and getting multiple conflicts in a row goes away.
0_____0 10 hours ago [-]
Waymo have in house radar, I think in the 70GHz gap in the absorption spectrum. They're pretty obvious as sort of paperback book sized planes, mounted near other sensors IIRC.
The old Velodyne units were actually susceptible to damage if you left two units running right next to each other. I did hear a proposal at some point for a different but similar unit to use GPS time to sync the rotations of all the units we had live so they wouldn't be pointed at each other, but in practice it seemed to not be a huge issue.
BTW I once gave you guff about continuing to bring up Conti's flash LIDAR, and in retrospect I wish I hadn't, I really enjoy your contributions here.
deepnotderp 7 hours ago [-]
The SNR for flash Lidar is really low because you spread the beam out over such a large area.
Most automotive Lidar already operate in a “photon starved regime”, ~200-300 photons per return[0]. If you spread that over the entire scene, your snr drops quickly.
This forces you into 1550nm, and a large detector array and high power laser at 1550nm is extremely expensive.
As for MEMS, it’s been a while but I think FOV/steering angle range , steering speed and even maximum beam power were concerns
EDIT: my Lidar friend Jake reminded me that the appetizer size is also an issue with MEMS- smaller aperture = less light collected = lower SNR
Continental is folding their automotive LiDAR division and is laying off everybody.
Animats 3 hours ago [-]
Not surprised. I don't think they sold many.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
> They work OK, but cost too much.
Costs have dropped dramatically in the past 20 years and continue to do so.
> There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things.
Why? Corners are the optimal mounting position for maximum visibility. It allows the car to -in-effect- see around corners in ways no centrally mounted sensor can.
> Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York.
What? Because of vandalism?
aftbit 10 hours ago [-]
Have you ever seen the corners of a car that has been parked in a big East-coast city? They will sustain damage during the course of normal operation and storage, and many people will not stop and leave their insurance information, especially if the damage is perceived as minor and happens while the car is parked and the owner not present. Currently, the corners of a car are relatively non-critical to its function and usually not too expensive to repair. If both of those change, we'll see more expensive damage that is more challenging to repair as well as less likely to be handled by the responsible party.
Also, having the sensors stick out from the corners makes the car's collision box and turning radius bigger. That doesn't help in any tight situation, but I imagine that's not that different between e.g. SF and New York. What is different is the sheer volume of cars and pedestrian activity.
Animats 3 hours ago [-]
Right. It seems to have been Waymo's decision to have zero blind spots around the vehicle perimeter, even if that means having the sensors stick out.
Cruise had an accident where another vehicle knocked a pedestrian into a Cruise car, and the pedestrian was dragged. Cruise lost their California DMV autonomous license for that. So there's a good case for full perimeter coverage.
Humans don't have that. The same week as the Cruise incident, a NYPD tow truck dragged a pedestrian some distance because they were in a blind spot for the driver.
Filligree 2 hours ago [-]
Did the tow truck driver lose their license?
AlotOfReading 8 hours ago [-]
They don't stick out that much. The geely vehicle has front sensors recessed just above the front wheel well, without much additional side clearance. Either way, a collision involves regulatory filings, downtime, and sensor recalibration even if no damage is sustained.
m0llusk 8 hours ago [-]
Waymos sometimes stop briefly in parking spots while waiting for assignments, but they don't really park as such except in special lots. The big problem I have seen is they tend not to always pull to the curb when releasing passengers and if a door is left even slightly ajar then they will sit there requesting the door be closed even if they are blocking a lane with many cars behind them beeping.
UltraSane 5 hours ago [-]
Not having a motor and thus having to depend on people to close doors on an autonomous car seems very silly.
xnx 4 hours ago [-]
Waymo's custom designed 6th generation vehicles[1] with self-closing doors were expected to enter service this year, but have [probably] been put on indefinite hold due to tariff issues
Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor
This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years.
The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements.
The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing.
This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
arrakark 6 hours ago [-]
Which Tor hidden service was this?
Asking for a friend...
edm0nd 5 hours ago [-]
If it was leaked in 2017, that's when Tor hidden service v2 URLs were still in use. Meaning the site is long gone and inaccessible these days.
hammock 9 hours ago [-]
Are LIDAR dangerous to the eyes of other drivers or pedestrians?
deepnotderp 7 hours ago [-]
No, there’s a class system for laser safety
The rating is for you to stick your eyes right up to it for a long period of time and still be fine
I know we are talking about car type lidar, but the iPhone Pro has a type of one and gets a depth map of photos. So you’re shooting it everyone you are taking photos of.
itishappy 9 hours ago [-]
They should not be. In theory they can be, but there are strict regulations to prevent that.
hammock 8 hours ago [-]
What are the regulations and who are the relevant regulatory bodies? I could not find with a google search
itishappy 7 hours ago [-]
Good question! You're right, this is surprisingly hard to Google. It looks like the FDA is responsible. I would not have guessed that!
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) would have been my guess, but I'm not finding much there. They have a spec for LIDAR speed measurement devices, and one for the required sensors in vehicles, but nothing on the the output of said sensors.
> For manufacturers of laser products, the standard of principal importance is the regulation of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which regulates product performance. All laser products sold in the USA since August 1976 must be certified by the manufacturer as meeting certain product performance (safety) standards, and each laser must bear a label indicating compliance with the standard and denoting the laser hazard classification.
In a recent No Priors podcast with the Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, he talks about how they evaluated just driving with cameras and how it isn't good enough for full autonomy and doesn't meet their bar for safety [1].
They went deep down the wrong path and need to justify their mistake. Waymo will be killed off any day now.
UltraSane 5 hours ago [-]
I find opinions like this to be almost as crazy as saying that the earth is flat because Waymo has a working, truly self-driving taxi service RIGHT FREAKING NOW while Musk is still promising to have one some day in the hazy future while NEVER making a single vehicle that can actually drive without someone in the car. Musk rejecting LIDAR means that he fundamentally doesn't understand the technological challenge of self-driving despite have access to the world's experts OR he is cynically using false promises of self-driving to pump up Tesla share price. I know which one I think is true.
altacc 4 minutes ago [-]
I think anyone who listens to Musk talking about something they themselves know a lot about quickly realises that Musk's skills are elsewhere. He can motivate and market the hell out of a business whilst snorting more ketamine than a herd of horses but he is not a technical genius by any means. He pays people well to agree with him and fires them when they don't, so I suspect that his companies that produce better and more stable products do so because he micromanages them less.
JaggedJax 6 hours ago [-]
From person experience, the state of the art Tesla vision FSD still can't drive east at sunrise, west at sunset, or in moderate rain. I haven't seen any sign of them solving that fundamental problem with vision, especially given there are existing non-vision solutions.
bobsomers 9 hours ago [-]
That's a bold claim. Care to justify it?
ra7 7 hours ago [-]
Google killing off Waymo by giving them $5.6B just a few weeks ago!
UltraSane 5 hours ago [-]
What do they actually use that much money for?
quonn 12 hours ago [-]
It‘s not just Musk. Most automobile manufacturers have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap and pretty sensors.
Klaus23 8 hours ago [-]
This is simply not true. Let's look at the best autonomous driving features available today, i.e. level 3:
Mercedes Drive Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front.
BMW Personal Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front
Honda SENSING Elite: Uses 5! lidars
They all use lidar, and some of the placement locations are downright hideous (Mercedes EQS). I think further development will require even more/better sensors, and manufacturers tend to agree on this point.
ra7 6 hours ago [-]
Chinese OEMs (BYD, Xaomi, Nio) use lidar in almost all of their mid to premium segments. Also, Polestar 3.
UltraSane 5 hours ago [-]
How well do they work? Camera only systems can be easily blinded by sun, fog, dirt, and snow
asdasdsddd 7 hours ago [-]
What are the benchmarks that say Mercedes, BMW, and Honda have the best level 3 features.
Klaus23 7 hours ago [-]
I ignore the Chinese because it is difficult to get reliable English information. Apart from those, these are the only level 3 systems available, and level 3 is the most advanced system that private individuals can currently get their hands on. Have I missed any?
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
Don't forget Blue Cruise from Ford.
Klaus23 7 hours ago [-]
Blue Cruise is level 2+, not 3, and does not rely on lidar.
juliushuijnk 10 hours ago [-]
> have maintained that they need to find a way to do it with cheap
If the goal is to make roads safer. Aiming for cheap is good, it means aiming for more people who can afford that safer car. If it's not safer than humans, it should not be on the road in the first place.
5 hours ago [-]
tgaj 9 hours ago [-]
Theoretically if a human can drive a car using a pair of eyes connected to brain, it should be possible to do that using two cameras connected to some kind of image processing unit.
itishappy 9 hours ago [-]
In theory. In practice neither the cameras nor processors available in cars function anywhere near human level.
knifie_spoonie 8 hours ago [-]
In practice humans aren't particularly safe drivers.
xdmr 7 hours ago [-]
Is that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely? Or is it due to distraction and/or poor judgment? I don't actually know the answer to this, but I assume distraction/judgment is a bigger factor.
I'm not a fan of the camera-only approach and think Tesla is making a mistake backing it due to path-dependence, but when we're _only_ talking about this is _broadly theoretical_ terms, I don't think they're wrong. The ideal autonomous driving agent is like a perfect monday morning quarterback who gets to look at every failure and say "see, what you should have done here was..." and it seems like it might well both have enough information and be able too see enough cases to meet some desirable standard of safety. In theory. In practice, maybe they just can't get enough accuracy or something.
tgaj 1 hours ago [-]
I totally agree, I think most accidents are caused by human nature (especially slow reaction time in specific conditions like being tired or drunk) and ignoring laws of physics (driving too fast). And some are just a pure bad luck (something/someone getting on the road right in front of the car).
ra7 7 hours ago [-]
> Is that because their vision fails to provide the information necessary to drive safely?
In certain conditions, yes. Humans drive terribly in dark and low light, something lidar excels in.
tgaj 1 hours ago [-]
Still, millions of humans drive every night and only a miniscule percentage cause any accidents. So maybe we are not so bad at this.
carbotaniuman 7 hours ago [-]
Theory isn't really all that applicable to this though - in theory nothing is stopping anyone from writing all code in assembly, but obviously that doesn't happen.
I think more practically cars have adding driver assistance feature for a while now - more cameras, blind spot monitoring, ultrasound for parking, lane drift indicators.
It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that adding more sensors is helpful (but even the old adage of more data is better than less would probably say that).
tgaj 1 hours ago [-]
To be honest, it's possible that having too much data can only cause problems in quick decision-making. Any redundant data will only slow down processing pipelines.
fragmede 9 hours ago [-]
If we want the sell driving computer to be only possibly as good as a human. I can't see in the dark, can't see through fog, and have trouble with rain. Why is human visibility the bar to meet here?
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
Oh and the sun. I get blinded when the sun is in my eyes at sunrise and sunset.
tgaj 1 hours ago [-]
And how many car accidents did you cause in your life? Probably still no a lot even with your flawed vision.
jdhwosnhw 8 hours ago [-]
Imagine that same reasoning applied to the car itself. Ugh, wheels?? Humans get around just fine bipedally, so cars should have legs too.
dawnerd 4 hours ago [-]
Explains the Tesla robot actually
UltraSane 5 hours ago [-]
Because Musk thinks is much much smarter than he actually is and refuses to listen to anyone. And between how many people he fired at Twitter, Tesla, and soon the US Federal Government I think he gets off on it.
r17n 11 hours ago [-]
So there's a video of him addressing this - he doesn't hate the tech. He mentions that it's wildly expensive for cars. But, they use it heavily for SpaceX
threeseed 11 hours ago [-]
The issue isn't that it's wildly expensive for cars. But rather for Tesla.
Because the company has promised that existing Tesla owners would be able to use FSD.
Having to retrofit them to add LiDAR sensors would be cost-prohibitive.
stormfather 10 hours ago [-]
Also he wants to reuse the foundational machine vision tech in Optimus bot, which probably won't have lidar.
threeseed 10 hours ago [-]
Based on presentations we've seen what sets Tesla apart are its datasets not the core technology.
And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.
sroussey 7 hours ago [-]
Optimus should probably have LiDAR more than a car…
10 hours ago [-]
jaimex2 9 hours ago [-]
Musk has said several times Lidar is great. It's just a stupid idea for automotive use and he's not wrong.
There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.
bobsomers 9 hours ago [-]
Airplanes don't flap their wings and boats don't wag their tails.
Assuming that all technology should imitate nature is a naive engineering principle. The solution should solve the problem within the given constraints.
itishappy 9 hours ago [-]
Time of flight ranging is used in nature by bats and whales/dolphins.
My back of the napkin estimate is that a human using time of flight ranging would be unable to distinguish between an object directly in front of their face and 8.6 meters away[1]. I think human echolocation uses a different mechanism (presumably relating to amplitude)?
Skimming the Wikipedia article[2], it seems like animals do use time of flight, but also Doppler shifting.
(As a side note, some animals have apparently evolved active countermeasures to echolocation!? It seems obvious in retrospect but incredibly cool.)
There's interesting research into the mechanisms of human echolocation [3], but it was over my head. My impression was that the jury is out as far as the precise mechanisms involved but that there's a lot of evidence to be considered, I'm sure someone with a better background would get more out of it than I did.
(I'm just curious about the mechanism, I agree that LIDAR has natural analogs.)
[1] Speed of sound * 25ms, 25ms being the rule of thumb I've memorized for the minimum interval for two sounds to register as distinct from each other. This is just folk wisdom I've picked up hacking on audio, so perhaps I'm mistaken.
Rotorwings are also not found in the nature yet they give us ability to navigate in a short distance 3D space better than fixed wing.
3 hours ago [-]
edm0nd 5 hours ago [-]
Bats kinda have Lidar.
bluGill 5 hours ago [-]
Nature makes for bad drivers. for some age groups cars are the largest causeof death. I self driving can do better.
7 hours ago [-]
rightbyte 11 hours ago [-]
"Its particular superpower is that it can generate high resolution images of its surroundings much better than radar can."
Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers.
A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples?
I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects, where as radars flatten the view.
ender7 11 hours ago [-]
The issue isn't one of fixed vs rotation, it's that radar can't fundamentally achieve the resolution necessary to distinguish important features in the environment. It's easily fooled by oddly-shaped objects, especially concave features like corners, and so while it's great for answer the question of "am I close to something" it's not reliable for telling you what that something is, especially at longer ranges.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
I believe automotive radar has a cone of sensitivity that is read as a single "pixel" worth of data. Even if the radar spun like lidar, the radar cone of sensitivity is thousands of times wider than the lidar beam so you can't make much of a picture with radar.
0_____0 10 hours ago [-]
IIRC the data coming out of the Conti radars was preprocessed to give bearing, distance, and size of an object in the FOV of the unit. I don't know if I ever saw the true raw data out of one of them, but I'm curious what it looks like.
rightbyte 50 minutes ago [-]
Ye I have a hard time imaganing how a car radar image looks like.
On boat radars it seems like the radar have really high resolution (can see much further than lidars) but have worse accuracy. I.e. things looks like blobs.
A lidar image at 50+ meters is very sparse.
itishappy 9 hours ago [-]
I'd be curious if the design of the Cybertruck affects readings at all. It's got angles straight outta an F-117.
rightbyte 1 hours ago [-]
I think "stealth" planes assumes the radar is under the plane on the ground? For the geometry. And they have some color or alloy that reflect less.
0_____0 7 hours ago [-]
I reckon it's probably not that bad, there are big surfaces that are almost normal to what would be incoming radio energy. Stealth shapes tend to reflect energy in a completely different direction from the source.
itishappy 6 hours ago [-]
Here's the closest thing to data I've been able to find. I have no idea what to do with this info.
Very high tech radars can generate amazing imagery, but they'll never top what lidar can do. Conceptually they're both doing the same sort of thing using EM radiation, but lidar uses a much smaller wavelength which gives it an intrinsic resolution advantage. Particularly at distances and with hardware sized relevant to cars.
slt2021 6 hours ago [-]
LIDARs can be blinded by consumer grade laser pointers, I wonder if there are systems that protect LIDARs against adversarial attacks or DOS attacks
elictronic 6 hours ago [-]
Drivers can also be blinded by consumer grade laser pointers.
If someone starts attacking safety systems physically I would expect they will get quite a bit of jail time.
rightbyte 39 minutes ago [-]
Messing with machines have a way lower ethical threshold for most people.
Like fooling vending machines to give you soda. Nothing 'my teenage friend' lost sleep over.
rightbyte 43 minutes ago [-]
They can be blinded by the sun too.
I worked as a reaserch engineer at a uni playing with a 16 beam Velodyne when those were fancy.
Put it on a car for a demo day, drawing the dots in 3d and marking obstacles red, and during sun set there was artifacts with no obvious way to filter out.
Strangely, I was never able to recreate this. I think was some specific athmospheric condition.
One of the cool thing about the Waymo Driver is that it can be configured to work with different degrees of quality depending on the sensors available. In a low risk environment (e.g. closed to humans) like operating forklifts in an autonomous warehouse, it would work fine with just cameras. Waymo hasn't been very boastful to date, but some of the capabilities are hinted at in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE
brcmthrowaway 8 hours ago [-]
Is there a lidar unit I can take home and scan my house at high resolution (than iphone)?
twelvechairs 7 hours ago [-]
You can, they are just expensive (other than iphone). Maybe 8k for a handheld basic one (e.g. Trion P1), $15k for a drone attachment (e.g. DJI Zenmuse L1) - more for the ones surveyors use proper including the tripod-mount ones.
At the consumer end photogrammetry tends to just be so much cheaper that its preferred unless you really need defined accuracy at a high level of detail. Lidar tends to work currently much better in an industrial/professional context because its more accurate. Whether Lidar will make the jump to lower cost / consumer level is the big open question (and basically the same issue as for cars here)
brcmthrowaway 7 hours ago [-]
iphone has actual lidar not photogrammetry right?
beeburrt 7 hours ago [-]
I was wondering this too, although for a different use-case. A couple years ago I was walking through a field/vacant lot not far from Centralia, WA and I came across what I think is a grave.
The (supposed) "grave" was roughly human-sized and human-shaped, the ground was concave, sunken in and deepest at the center, and it was encircled with stones that were slightly larger than grapefruit.
The reason I suspect it's a grave is because I stumbled upon a very similar-looking thing at a historical site in Tooele county Utah named Mercur cemetery.
With Lidar I could prove/disprove my grave theory, correct?
edm0nd 5 hours ago [-]
I think Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) would be better usage for this grave scenario vs LIDAR.
qiqitori 6 hours ago [-]
I think this depends on your budget and what exactly you want to do. Do you want to scan your house from outside? Sounds expensive, would probably have to be drone-mounted, and the drone would fly around for a while (depending on the shape of the house.) Inside, and don't mind some minor inaccuracies? Not Lidar, but a Kinect from yesteryear may be enough.
tgot 4 hours ago [-]
Lookup the RPLidar family of devices. Cheap 1D, easy to work with. By 1D I mean that it measures ranges in 360degrees around the plane that it is spinning in.
Rendered at 08:41:37 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
I'm surprised that rotating scanners are still used. It's been twenty years since Velodyne built their first one. They work OK, but cost too much. I was expecting flash LIDAR or MEMS mirrors to take over. Continental, the auto parts company, bought the leading flash LIDAR company over a decade ago, but the volume market a big parts company needs never appeared.
Waymo is still using rotating LIDARs even for the little ones at the vehicle corners. Those need less range. There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things. The location is too vulnerable. Maybe millimeter phased array radar mounted behind Fiberglas body panels. Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York.
The LIDAR on top may not be a problem. Insisting that it has to go away to "look like a car" is like insisting that cars had to have the form factor of horse-propelled buggies. Early cars looked like buggies, but that didn't last.
One big advantage of pulsed LIDAR over continuous is that the interference problem between identical units is much less. The duty cycle is tiny. Data from one pulse round trip is collected in less than a microsecond. Just put some randomization in the pulse timing and getting multiple conflicts in a row goes away.
The old Velodyne units were actually susceptible to damage if you left two units running right next to each other. I did hear a proposal at some point for a different but similar unit to use GPS time to sync the rotations of all the units we had live so they wouldn't be pointed at each other, but in practice it seemed to not be a huge issue.
BTW I once gave you guff about continuing to bring up Conti's flash LIDAR, and in retrospect I wish I hadn't, I really enjoy your contributions here.
Most automotive Lidar already operate in a “photon starved regime”, ~200-300 photons per return[0]. If you spread that over the entire scene, your snr drops quickly.
This forces you into 1550nm, and a large detector array and high power laser at 1550nm is extremely expensive.
As for MEMS, it’s been a while but I think FOV/steering angle range , steering speed and even maximum beam power were concerns
EDIT: my Lidar friend Jake reminded me that the appetizer size is also an issue with MEMS- smaller aperture = less light collected = lower SNR
[0] https://www.hamamatsu.com/content/dam/hamamatsu-photonics/si...
Costs have dropped dramatically in the past 20 years and continue to do so.
> There needs to be a cheap, flush-mounted replacement for those things.
Why? Corners are the optimal mounting position for maximum visibility. It allows the car to -in-effect- see around corners in ways no centrally mounted sensor can.
> Waymo needs to solve that problem before they do New York.
What? Because of vandalism?
Also, having the sensors stick out from the corners makes the car's collision box and turning radius bigger. That doesn't help in any tight situation, but I imagine that's not that different between e.g. SF and New York. What is different is the sheer volume of cars and pedestrian activity.
Cruise had an accident where another vehicle knocked a pedestrian into a Cruise car, and the pedestrian was dragged. Cruise lost their California DMV autonomous license for that. So there's a good case for full perimeter coverage.
Humans don't have that. The same week as the Cruise incident, a NYPD tow truck dragged a pedestrian some distance because they were in a blind spot for the driver.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...
It’s quite funny seeing the number of cars that have bumper skirts in NYC to help minimize damage from inevitable close encounters with other vehicles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554679
Lidar obstacle detection algorithm from a Git repo leaked onto Tor
This is a drivable region mapping (obstacle detection) algorithm found in what appears to be a git repo leaked from an autonomous vehicle company in 2017. The repo was available through one or more Tor hidden services for several years.
The lidar code appears to be written for the Velodyne HDL-32E. It operates in a series of stages, each stage refining the output of the previous stage. This algorithm is in the second stage. It is the primary obstacle detection method, with the other methods making only small improvements.
The leaked code uses a column-major matrix of points and it explicitly handles NaNs (the no-return points). We've rewritten it to use a much more cache-efficient row-major matrix layout and a conditional that will ignore the NaN points without explicit testing.
This is an amazingly effective method of obstacle detection, considering its simplicity.
Asking for a friend...
The rating is for you to stick your eyes right up to it for a long period of time and still be fine
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) would have been my guess, but I'm not finding much there. They have a spec for LIDAR speed measurement devices, and one for the required sensors in vehicles, but nothing on the the output of said sensors.
> For manufacturers of laser products, the standard of principal importance is the regulation of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which regulates product performance. All laser products sold in the USA since August 1976 must be certified by the manufacturer as meeting certain product performance (safety) standards, and each laser must bear a label indicating compliance with the standard and denoting the laser hazard classification.
https://www.lia.org/resources/laser-safety-information/laser...
https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/home-busines...
https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-organization/center-device...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6RndtrwJKE&t=1119s
Mercedes Drive Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front.
BMW Personal Pilot: Uses a lidar (and a dummy unit) up front
Honda SENSING Elite: Uses 5! lidars
They all use lidar, and some of the placement locations are downright hideous (Mercedes EQS). I think further development will require even more/better sensors, and manufacturers tend to agree on this point.
If the goal is to make roads safer. Aiming for cheap is good, it means aiming for more people who can afford that safer car. If it's not safer than humans, it should not be on the road in the first place.
I'm not a fan of the camera-only approach and think Tesla is making a mistake backing it due to path-dependence, but when we're _only_ talking about this is _broadly theoretical_ terms, I don't think they're wrong. The ideal autonomous driving agent is like a perfect monday morning quarterback who gets to look at every failure and say "see, what you should have done here was..." and it seems like it might well both have enough information and be able too see enough cases to meet some desirable standard of safety. In theory. In practice, maybe they just can't get enough accuracy or something.
In certain conditions, yes. Humans drive terribly in dark and low light, something lidar excels in.
I think more practically cars have adding driver assistance feature for a while now - more cameras, blind spot monitoring, ultrasound for parking, lane drift indicators.
It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that adding more sensors is helpful (but even the old adage of more data is better than less would probably say that).
Because the company has promised that existing Tesla owners would be able to use FSD.
Having to retrofit them to add LiDAR sensors would be cost-prohibitive.
And those don't translate across to the Optimus bot.
There's nothing similar in nature for a reason.
Assuming that all technology should imitate nature is a naive engineering principle. The solution should solve the problem within the given constraints.
Skimming the Wikipedia article[2], it seems like animals do use time of flight, but also Doppler shifting.
(As a side note, some animals have apparently evolved active countermeasures to echolocation!? It seems obvious in retrospect but incredibly cool.)
There's interesting research into the mechanisms of human echolocation [3], but it was over my head. My impression was that the jury is out as far as the precise mechanisms involved but that there's a lot of evidence to be considered, I'm sure someone with a better background would get more out of it than I did.
(I'm just curious about the mechanism, I agree that LIDAR has natural analogs.)
[1] Speed of sound * 25ms, 25ms being the rule of thumb I've memorized for the minimum interval for two sounds to register as distinct from each other. This is just folk wisdom I've picked up hacking on audio, so perhaps I'm mistaken.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation
[3] https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/1375913/1963...
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18208334
Is this true tough? Car radars are fixed. I guess a comparable lidar would be fixed too and have n points for n lasers.
A rovolving radar would have continuous resolution around while a lidar samples?
I thought the advantage of lidars were accuracy and being better at measuring heights of objects, where as radars flatten the view.
On boat radars it seems like the radar have really high resolution (can see much further than lidars) but have worse accuracy. I.e. things looks like blobs.
A lidar image at 50+ meters is very sparse.
https://x.com/jwt0625/status/1848218860513628203
If someone starts attacking safety systems physically I would expect they will get quite a bit of jail time.
Like fooling vending machines to give you soda. Nothing 'my teenage friend' lost sleep over.
I worked as a reaserch engineer at a uni playing with a 16 beam Velodyne when those were fancy.
Put it on a car for a demo day, drawing the dots in 3d and marking obstacles red, and during sun set there was artifacts with no obvious way to filter out.
Strangely, I was never able to recreate this. I think was some specific athmospheric condition.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/10/30/waymo-...
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23262
At the consumer end photogrammetry tends to just be so much cheaper that its preferred unless you really need defined accuracy at a high level of detail. Lidar tends to work currently much better in an industrial/professional context because its more accurate. Whether Lidar will make the jump to lower cost / consumer level is the big open question (and basically the same issue as for cars here)
The (supposed) "grave" was roughly human-sized and human-shaped, the ground was concave, sunken in and deepest at the center, and it was encircled with stones that were slightly larger than grapefruit.
The reason I suspect it's a grave is because I stumbled upon a very similar-looking thing at a historical site in Tooele county Utah named Mercur cemetery.
With Lidar I could prove/disprove my grave theory, correct?