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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

Please correct me if I am wrong - I am under the impression that camera-based systems were getting good enough to make lidar moot, at least for self-driving car applications.

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Assuming this comment is in good faith - I have so far only seen Tesla make that claim. And they are also the only ones trying to do self driving without LIDAR.

Disclaimer: If I was a betting man, I'd short the hell out of TSLA.

They're definitely not the only ones, saw a presentation on a University team working on this just yesterday. After all, vision is the only system for which we know that it can be used to drive a vehicle as that's what we have been using all along. Also Tesla's do also have radar to detect the most important obstacles in front.

No self driving program is relying entirely on camera based systems otherwise they would struggle at night. Tesla for example is augmenting it with radar.

I am not an expert but I wouldn't trust a camera only solution purely on the fact you could never keep it completely clean and therefore you could have the car mistaking dust for an object.

If only they made cameras which worked at night...

The latter is a problem with LIDAR as well. In any system, you're going to need sensor fusion to get a robust result.

With LIDAR you would at least know that there's missing data, and the system could react accordingly (eg. sound an alert or stop when the road is no longer detected)

The problem with camera based systems is that they don't know that they are missing data, and the system just thinks the path is clear...

Why shouldn't a camera based system be able to do that. Dirt for example won't easily match up in a stereo vision system and even then dirt on a lense has a pretty specific look

Do you notice when a butterfly covers your eye? Without LIDAR?

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