Tesla hires Andrej Karpathy
What this really reflects is that Tesla has painted itself into a corner. They've shipped vehicles with a weak sensor suite that's claimed to be sufficient to support self-driving, leaving the software for later. Tesla, unlike everybody else who's serious, doesn't have a LIDAR.<p>Now, it's "later", their software demos are about where Google was in 2010, and Tesla has a big problem. This is a really hard problem to do with cameras alone. Deep learning is useful, but it's not magic, and it's not strong AI. No wonder their head of automatic driving quit. Karpathy may bail in a few months, once he realizes he's joined a death march.<p>If anything, Tesla should have learned by now that you don't want to need to recognize objects to avoid them. The Mobileye system works that way, being very focused on identifying moving cars, pedestrians, and bicycles. It's led to at least four high speed crashes with stationary objects it didn't identify as obstacles. This is pathetic. We had avoidance of big stationary objects working in the DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005.<p>With a good LIDAR, you get a point cloud. This tells you where there's something. Maybe you can identify some of the "somethings", but if there's an unidentified object out there, you know it's there.  The planner can plot a course that stays on the road surface and doesn't hit anything. Object recognition is mostly for identifying other road users and trying to predict their behavior.<p>Compare Chris Urmson's talk and videos at SXSW 2016 [1] with Tesla's demo videos from last month.[2]
Notice how aware the Google/Waymo vehicle is of what other road users are doing, and how it has a comprehensive overview of the situation.  See Urmson show how it handled encountering unusual situations such as someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom.  Note Urmson's detailed analysis of how a Google car scraped the side of a bus at 2MPH while maneuvering around sandbags placed in the parking lane.<p>Now watch Tesla's sped-up video, slowed down to normal speed.  (1/4 speed is about right for viewing.)
Tesla wouldn't even detect small sandbags; they don't even see traffic cones. Note how few roadside objects they mark. If it's outside the lines, they just don't care.  There's not enough info to take evasive action in an emergency. Or even avoid a pothole.<p>Prediction: 2020 will be the year the big players have self-driving. It will use LIDAR, cameras, and radars. Continental will have a good low-cost LIDAR using the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts at an affordable price point.<p>Tesla will try to ship a self-driving system before that while trying to avoid financial responsibility for crashes. People will die because of this.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik</a>
[2] <a href="https://player.vimeo.com/video/192179727" rel="nofollow">https://player.vimeo.com/video/192179727</a>