"Everyone who trusts LIDAR is doomed," says Elon Musk – TechCrunch
Today at Tesla's first Autonomy Day event, Elon Musk took questions from the press, but did not have time to ask questions about Lidar. Historically, he has been vocal about the technology, and this time he put it as clearly as possible.
"LIDAR is an idiot of honor," said Elon Musk . "Anyone who trusts LIDAR is doomed. Judged! [They are] expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It's like having a whole lot of expensive attachments. As an attachment is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them that is ridiculous, you want to see. "
The topic was raised by a question about Teslas just revealed self-propelled hardware could handle input from LIDAR. Tesla's vehicles currently use multiple sources of data to obtain autonomous driving: radar, GPS, maps, ultrasonic sensors and more. But not LIDAR like any of Tesla's chief competitors. Elon Musk explained earlier that he sees LIDAR as a crutch for self-driving vehicles. For Tesla, cameras are the keys to the future, and its CEO sees a future when cameras will allow Tesla to review the most adverse weather conditions.
Andrej Karparthy, Senior Director of AI, took the stage and explained that the world is built for visual recognition. LIDAR systems, he said, have difficulty deciphering between a plastic bag and a rubber tire. Large-scale neural network training and visual recognition are needed for level 4 and level 5 autonomy.
"In that sense, LIDAR is really a shortcut," said Karparthy. "It sidestep the basic problems, the important problem of visual recognition, which is necessary for autonomy. It gives a false sense of progress, and is ultimately a crutch. It gives, as, very quick demos!"
Uber, Waymo, Cruise and several others use the technology in their self-propelled technology table. As advocates of the technology, they point to LIDAR's ability to look through challenging weather and lighting conditions better than existing cameras. They are expensive. And often hungry for power. That's where the Tesla solution around cameras comes in.
Today, the company presented its current generation of self-propelled computer that works with all existing Tesla vehicles. When the software is ready, it will allow all Teslas to run autonomously with their existing sensor set ̵[ads1]1; at least that is what the company says – and that the sensor set does not include LIDAR. Instead, the sensors in the Tesla cars lean on a neural network trained by data collected by all Tesla vehicles.
"Everybody is training the network all the time," said Musk. "If the autopilot is on or off, the network is being trained. Every kilometer that is driven by the car that is hardware 2 or higher trains the network."
The resulting data is a bit creepy, Musk mused later in the press conference. But probably not as scary as relying on LIDAR.
