Since a few years ago, Elon Musk has placed a bet on autonomous driving. Despite the few incidents that Tesla cars have been involved in this year, the company’s engineers kept going further and have now released a second video showing their achievements.
Just like Elon stated in 2013, the autonomous driving feature would not use Lidars, like Google, but a set of eight unobstrusive and relatively cheap onboard cameras. After the incident in which Joshua Brown died in May this year, Mobileye, the Israeli company that used to provide the self-driving solution quit the game and now the system is called “Tesla Vision.” It looks like Tesla learned how to do stuff in-house.
In the video you can see a normal image, a right and left rearview image with the objects detected on the way and a medium range camera. It’s interesting to see how they identify objects of various sizes and how the software manages to recognize them in real time.
The entire system is made not only of cameras, but also uses one radar, ultrasonics and a new supercomputer (that’s probably doubled for safety).
The hardware is already installed in all Teslas sold these days, but the actual advertised capabilities will become available through over-the-air software update when laws will be set up and the code will be as bug-free as possible.
I fear that once such technology is on the market, a lot of taxi, truck and bus drivers will lose their jobs. Machines will take their place, one at a time, sooner or later. That’s not good news, but I’m afraid it’s unavoidable.
I watched the video twice. You probably will, too, it’s really interesting:
image: youtube
