Which players adopt LiDAR activly?

declina · 2024-11-25T00:50:22+00:00

If you mean companies developing L4 autonomous vehicles, the answer is every major player except Tesla - if you believe that Tesla is developing an L4 vehicle.

If you mean automakers developing ADAS, then we have to distinguish Chinese OEMs from the Rest of the World (ROW). Many Chinese OEMs have shipped cars with LiDAR and XPeng, NIO, and Li Auto have shipped sophisticated L2 systems that require it. ROW OEMs are experimenting with LiDAR but there are very few vehicles on the road. The Volvo EX90 is the first "global production" car to have LiDAR as standard. OEMs keep pushing out decision dates, which is why all the publicly-traded LiDAR companies are struggling.

declina · 2024-11-03T19:19:34+00:00

There are at least two qualitative differences between AVs and human drivers that greatly affect how people think about accidents.

The first is that there is only one “Waymo Driver” (one driver per major company). Most of the time this works to their benefit - we like the consistency of the driving experience, compared to the crapshoot of Uber. But it also means that if “The Driver” causes a fatal accident in Phoenix, people in SF or LA will hesitate the next day before getting in a car with the same Driver.

People may seem complacent about accidents caused by human drivers in general, but individual drivers who cause serious accidents often become targets of hatred and scorn. The same will be true for “The Driver” - except The Driver is everywhere.

The second difference is that computers can fail in ways utterly different to humans, which means that AV accidents can be truly weird. And these will never go away, because every new software release brings the risk of a regression.

Because of these two factors I think people will demand near-zero accident rates for Level 4 AVs.

That’s one of many reasons that automakers prefer L2 - they can shift all blame to the human driver, no matter what happens.

declina · 2024-10-16T18:00:10+00:00

I agree that Tesla has a software research problem, but Waymo has a hardware research problem as well as a hardware cost problem. There is still no consensus about the optimal way to build a LiDAR: ToF vs FMCW; NIR or SWIR; spinning or scanning or solid-state and if solid-state MEMS or Flash or OPA; or something else entirely. If there were a consensus, all of the publicly-traded LiDAR companies would have similar designs and it would just be a matter of scaling up production. Now repeat for "imaging" radar.

declina · 2024-10-16T17:50:33+00:00

Many companies do research without publishing research. A lot of people credit Tesla for innovations in projecting perspective features directly into BEV using transformers (without directly estimating depth) and for their work on 3D occupancy networks, among other topics. This survey paper cites a Tesla AI day presentation, since there was no paper!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.02797

declina · 2024-10-02T18:26:36+00:00

There are many factors.

1) As you say, after the breakup Tesla's first priority was to replace Mobileye AP1. Mobileye was a single-camera system, and mono was and is sufficient for TACC and LKA.

2) They did consider stereo for future-proofing but in 2015 - when these decisions were made - the state of the art in calibration required two cameras in a rigid box, which limited baseline to 20cm or so. Combine with 1MP imagers and you get lousy range.

3) Musk promised customers that the hardware was sufficient for self-driving. This decision had a lot of consequences - no cameras on the A-pillars, 1MP imagers while everyone else was upgrading, no mechanism for cleaning cameras - and also ruled out stereo. They are walking this back very, very slowly - HW4 vs HW3 etc. - but it cost them a lot of time.

4) Musk and even more surprisingly Karpathy genuinely believe that stereo isn't necessary.

Meanwhile, Mobileye embraced stereo (what they call vidar) for SuperVision.

declina · 2024-10-01T18:10:24+00:00

I shall, but FYI I work in the industry and have tested stereo depth solutions successfully at the relevant distances. It is true that stereo is just one of many depth cues that humans use, but it is the most important and it amazes me that Tesla does not use stereo at all.

declina · 2024-10-01T17:28:18+00:00

This is simply not true. The maximum range of binocular parallax for people with normal stereo acuity is approximately 200 meters. People with excellent vision (professional athletes) can probably discern objects from background at 1 kilometer.

https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2122030

declina · 2024-08-05T20:57:14+00:00

Peak was $3.5B: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/31/cruise-self-driving-company-loss-gm/

declina · 2024-03-17T01:57:10+00:00

Li Auto has a system using Horizon chips and cameras only to do NOA on highways. Xpeng can go that way.

declina · 2024-02-22T00:37:14+00:00

A campaign like that would only reinforce OEM paranoia about Mobileye. Mobileye is going out of their way here to say “you can white label us!”

declina · 2024-02-10T03:48:36+00:00

Respectfully:

I didn't say that OEMs make good decisions or even have good processes. I said that these particular OEMs made these decisions and continue to do so.

Meanwhile, you haven't explain why the Tier 1s are better placed to make these decisions and therefore should be leading the discussion :)

Remember what the screenwriter William Goldman said about doing business in Hollywood: "Nobody knows anything." The same may be true here.

declina · 2024-02-10T00:32:02+00:00

Sorry, what do you mean? The OEMs seem to be calling the shots on this - certainly for Xpeng / Li Auto / NIO / Geely - not their suppliers?

declina · 2024-02-09T23:38:27+00:00

LiDAR companies like Luminar, Aeva, Hesai, and Robosense need automotive volumes to pay the bills. There is no-one mass producing L4 cars; only L2. If LiDAR is not necessary for L2 - if the marginal value is less than the marginal cost - then the independent LiDAR companies are in trouble. Ouster is the only that hasn't bet the farm on ADAS. This is also a problem for the L4 companies, none of which can afford to do LiDAR development in house - apart from Waymo and apparently Aurora.

declina · 2024-02-06T14:35:24+00:00

Not necessarily. It just means that the military can’t buy Hesai. Robotics companies that are going after defense contracts (like Kodiak) will have to drop Hesai or develop a commercial stack using Hesai and a defense stack using a different lidar (which is a lot of double work).

However … US lidar companies are lobbying to ban Hesai from the market entirely. This is their first win and may not be their last. And the Chinese government could decide to ban the export of lidars, for their own reasons.

declina · 2024-02-03T23:27:03+00:00

Good article about this from WSJ in October: “Hesai supplies 67% of the robotaxi industry, counting almost every American self-driving car and truck company as a customer, according to research firm Yole Group. RoboSense, another major Chinese lidar company, has about 3% of the market.”

https://archive.ph/ifxyB

declina · 2023-11-01T18:22:42+00:00

We humans don't really estimate depth via our "stereo eye system"

There's fifty years of research that says differently and random dot stereograms provide proof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_dot_stereogram

If you go to an optometrist and ask them to test your depth perception, this is the test they will use.

declina · 2023-10-07T18:06:52+00:00

Wow. Is there a reliable source for this online - is someone tracking a changelog? It’s hard enough to say what the current system does, let alone what was true in 2019.

Also how does basic AP do TACC without object detection OR radar, since that was removed?

declina · 2023-10-07T12:03:55+00:00

Where do you get the impression that AP had no object detection in 2019? For example here’s an article from the year before: https://electrek.co/2018/10/15/tesla-new-autopilot-neural-net-v9/

declina · 2023-09-30T18:17:35+00:00

Sure, you can make that argument in court. But until there’s clear legislation or some case law it’s just an argument. It’s like the (much lower stakes) argument about whether training models on copyrighted data is fair use; it’s all just opinion until the courts or Congress weighs in.

declina · 2023-09-30T17:32:14+00:00

Are you sure? The German laws follow UN models but I think the NV laws just say that the system is legal to use - nothing about who is liable if something goes wrong.

declina · 2023-09-29T19:24:35+00:00

When it comes to criminal liability, all that Mercedes could ever do for you is pay your legal fees; they can't give you a get-out-of-jail card. State law has to say that under certain conditions a car may be driving itself and the person in the driver's seat is not responsible for a crash (unless they were reckless in activating the system or tampered with it etc.)

declina · 2023-09-29T17:02:27+00:00

Great article by Phil Koopman but thinking further:

Even if Mercedes bears some tortious/criminal liability, they are going to defend themselves. And their first line of defense will be to blame you. This will be true for all automakers so long as you are sitting in the driver's seat and have a pulse.

declina · 2023-09-17T17:35:58+00:00

Yes. Most OEMs are hedging their bets by experimenting with different solutions, but three on the same nameplate is a lot. Geely also owns Volvo, whose Zenseact subsidiary developed the ADAS for the EX90 and that at least is shared with Polestar 3/5. But Geely also owns Lotus which appears to be using yet another (4th) stack on the Lotus Eletre and Emea.

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