this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
945 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
59456 readers
3102 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You are making it far simpler than it actually is. Recognizing what a thing is is the essential first problem. Is that a child, a ball, a goose, a pothole, or a shadow that the cameras see? It would be absurd and an absolute show stopper if the car stopped for dark shadows.
We take for granted the vast amount that the human brain does in this problem space. The system has to identify and categorize what it's seeing, otherwise it's useless.
That leads to my actual opinion on the technology, which is that it's going to be nearly impossible to have fully autonomous cars on roads as we know them. It's fine if everything is normal, which is most of the time. But software can't recognize and correctly react to the thousands of novel situations that can happen.
They should be automating trains instead. (Oh wait, we pretty much did that already.)
That's why they use LIDAR and not just visual cameras. They don't need to know the difference between different objects; they just need to know an object is there, in the way, or even moving in a way that could potentially put it in the path of the vehicle.
They're making it more complicated by working on both autonomous driving, and also image recognition for use by AI.
I agree that LIDAR or radar are better solutions than image recognition. I mean, that's literally what those technologies are for.
But even then, that's not enough. LIDAR/radar can't help it identify its lane in inclement weather, drive well on gravel, and so on. These are the kinds of problems where automakers severely downplay the difficulty of the problem and just how much a human driver does.
It isn't a matter of which is better - you use both, and more.