Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 560 points –
Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists
kcl.ac.uk

Driverless cars worse at detecting children and darker-skinned pedestrians say scientists::Researchers call for tighter regulations following major age and race-based discrepancies in AI autonomous systems.

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Wouldn't good driverless cars use radars or lidars or whatever? Seems like the biggest issue here is that darker skin tones are harder for cameras to see

Tesla removed the LiDAR from their cars, a step backwards if you ask me.

Edit: Sorry RADAR not LiDAR.

They removed the radars, they've never used LiDAR as Elon considered it "a fool's errand", which translates to "too expensive to put in my penny pinched economy cars". Also worth noting that they took the radars out purely to keep production and the stock price up, despite them knowing well in advance performance was going to take a massive hit without it. They just don't give a shit, and a few pedestrian deaths are 100% worth it to Elon with all the money he made from the insane value spike of the stock during COVID. They were the one automaker who maintained production because they just randomly swapped in whatever random parts they could find, instead of anything properly tested or validated, rather than suck it up for a bad quarter or two like everyone else.

Seems like Tesla is really not going to be the market leader on this. IDK if anytime else caught those videos by the self driving tech expert going through all the ways Tesla is bullshitting about it.

Hey, they'll have full self driving tech next year!

Source: Elon Musk, every year, for like the last ten years.

Elon's bullshit aside, they are leading self driving and the company with most data to train machine learning models on, by FAR.

Their self driving challenges are not a result of data acquisition, adding LIDAR to the mix would not be helpful. Pedestrian detection is not the big unsolved problem this article makes it sound like.

If the latest FSD update is anything to go buy, they won't be a leader for much longer if every release makes it worse.

I think many driverless car companies insist on only using cameras. I guess lidars/radars are expensive.

They're basically the only one. Even MobilEye, who is objectively the best in the ADAS/AV space for computer vision, uses other sensors in their fleet. They have demonstrated camera only autonomy, but realize it's not worth the $1000 in sensors to risk killing people.

Even Comma.AI, which is vision-only internally, still implicitly relies on the cars built in radar for collision detection and blind spot monitoring. It's just Tesla.

To be fair, that's because most cars aren't equipped with cameras for blind spot detection.

Thats because cameras aren't good for blind spot detection. Moreover, even for cars that have cameras on the side, the Comma doesn't use them. AFAIK, in my car with 360 cameras, the OEM system doesn't use the cameras either for blind spot.