A recent update from Elon Musk has revealed that Tesla wants to finally upgrade its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving suite to a camera-based system. This means that in the future, Tesla’s fully electric vehicles will navigate themselves and perform driver assistance functions without the use of components such as radar.
Musk’s update was in response to a message from Tesla owner and FSD Beta user @WholeMarsBlog, who shared a clip of his Model 3 sailing away from a parking lot to his destination, without the input of the driver. In his response, Musk noted that FSD Beta V9.0, much anticipated by the EV community, is almost ready.
Almost ready with FSD Beta V9.0. Improving step changes is great, especially for odd angles and bad weather. Pure vision, no radar.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 9 April 2021
Musk further expanded and explained that the V9.0 update should improve the performance of the FSD Beta in corner cases and bad weather, which is still a challenge for the advanced driver system today. But that was not all, as Musk noted that the update would be ‘pure vision, no radar’. When the Tesla CEO was further urged, he admitted that Tesla finally intends to do so. get rid of radar completely in his future vehicles.
It is not surprising that Musk’s statements about Tesla’s imminent removal of radar have attracted its own fair share of critics, many of whom have argued that a pure vision approach is a step backwards. This is particularly noteworthy, as Tesla already uses fewer sensors for its driver assistance systems compared to competitors such as Cruise and Waymo, who both rely on lidar and high-definition charts to navigate.
Musk responded to these concerns, emphasizing that vision can ultimately have the potential to be better than radar.
Sensors are a bit current and cameras have a number of sizes more bits / sec than radar (or lidar).
Radar must meaningfully increase the signal / noise of bitstream to make the complexity of its integration worthwhile.
As vision processing gets better, it just leaves radar far behind.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 10 April 2021
‘If radar and vision do not agree, which one do you believe in? Vision has much more precision, so better to double the vision than to fuse sensor. Sensors are a bit current and cameras have a number of sizes more bits / sec than radar (or lidar). Radar must meaningfully increase the signal / noise of bitstream to make the complexity of its integration worthwhile. As vision processing improves, it leaves radar just far behind, ”Musk explained.
Tesla’s approach to full self – driving is based in part on the idea that people do 100% of their driving through vision alone, without any radar or lid use. This has been emphasized by Tesla executives since Autonomy Day in 2019, when the company unveiled its custom FSD computer. As for whether cameras can offer the same safety as the radar to provide multiple cars, Musk noted that vision can probably perform just as well.
These things are best considered probabilities. There are 5 forward-facing cameras. It is highly likely that at least one of them will see several cars ahead.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 10 April 2021
‘These things are best considered probabilities. There are 5 forward-facing cameras. “It is very likely that at least one of them will see several cars in front,” said Musk.
Tesla is not the only company in the market to explore a vision-only approach. Last year, Intel Corp released a video of a MobilEye autonomous car traveling around Jerusalem for about 20 minutes. Unlike other self-driving vehicles, MobilEye’s car was only equipped with a series of cameras and nothing else. The short video was impressive, with the autonomous MobilEye car going through four-way intersections without traffic lights, as well as downtown lanes requiring the vehicle to avoid pedestrians.
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