Short excerpt from a podcast-style YouTube clip (George Hotz: Elon is the iOS) discussing sensing approaches for self-driving cars. Speakers debate Elon Musk’s claim that LiDAR is a “crutch,” note that many L5 teams use LiDAR primarily for centimeter-level localization rather than perception, argue cameras/radar can handle dynamic-object perception, and point out GPS cannot reliably provide centimeter accuracy (especially under tree cover). The clip also mentions poor fusion between LiDAR and vision in some systems.
Chapters
Foreign. Elon's the iOS.
By the way, he paved the way for, for all of us. It's not.
Ios. True. I would not be doing comma AI today if it was not for those conversations with Elon and if it were not for him saying like. I think he said like, well, obviously we're not going to use LiDAR. We use cameras. Humans use cameras.
So what do you think about that? How important is lidar? Everybody else is on L5 is using LIDAR. What are your thoughts on his provocative statement that lidar is a crutch?
See, sometimes he'll say dumb things like the driver monitoring thing, but sometimes he'll say absolutely, completely, 100%, obviously true things. Yeah.
Of course lidar is a crutch.
It's not even a good crutch. You're not even using it. Oh, they're using it for localization.
Yeah.
Which isn't good in the first place. If you have to localize your car to centimeters in order to drive.
Like. Yeah, they're not driving currently not doing much machine learning. I thought of LIDAR data meaning like to help you in the task of general task of perception. The main.
Goal of those lidars on those cars I think is actually localization more than perception. Or at least that's what they use them for.
Yeah, that's.
True. If you want to localize to centimeters, you can't use gps, the fanciest GPS in the world. Can't do it. Especially if you're under tree cover and stuff. Lidar, you can do this pretty easily.
So you really. They're not taking on, I mean in some research they're doing, they're using it for perception, but. And they're certainly not, which sad they're not fusing it well.
With vision. They do use it for perception. I'm not saying they don't use it for perception, but the thing that they have vision based and radar based perception systems as well. You could remove the lidar and keep around a lot of the dynamic object perception. You want to get centimeter accurate localization. Good luck doing that with anything.
