Tesla Autopilot collided with a painted road on a fake wall located in the middle of the road. This happened during a test comparing cameras and lidar.
Most companies developing autonomous driving technologies use a combination of different sensors (cameras, radar, lidar, and ultrasonic sensors). However, Tesla insists on using only cameras. The automaker has removed radars from its models and even disabled those that were already installed in cars.
So far, this strategy has not yielded the expected results, as Tesla’s systems remain only at Level 2 in the autonomous driving classification, which means that the driver must constantly monitor the movement.
The company’s CEO Elon Musk says that Tesla’s main advantage is the ability to quickly scale the technology once the problem of autonomous driving is solved. According to him, the vision system based on cameras and neural networks works like a human driver, and therefore will be able to adapt to any road.
Critics disagree with this statement, especially after Musk said that Tesla will achieve Level 5 autonomy, which means full self-driving in all conditions. Cameras have limitations that can be solved with the help of lidars, so his words are questionable.
A new video from engineer and YouTuber Mark Robert vividly demonstrated this problem.
In the video, Robert tested a Tesla Model Y with autopilot compared to a car equipped with a lidar system in various conditions.
The Tesla with Autopilot was able to stop in front of a child’s dummy in the middle of the road when it was standing still, moving, or illuminated by bright headlights. However, the car did not stop in fog or heavy rain.
Not surprisingly, lidar, a system based on lasers, is better at recognizing objects in thick fog than cameras.
The result in heavy rain was more unexpected, but it is worth noting that the downpour in the test was very intense.
Source: Electrek
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