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Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

Because the actual change is driven by supply chain issues w/ radar gear, and the vision-is-better party line is just to make it sell better.

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I don't know about that. Musk and Karpathy have always been pretty gung-ho about solving self driving with nothing but cameras.

We'll know for sure if they ever re-add radar to the Model 3/Y in the US. I think they won't. My main source of, "WTF are you doing, autopilot?" is phantom braking due to the radar incorrectly perceiving an overhead sign as an obstacle.

To me it's such a strange argument. Why wouldn't you want CV + additional sensors? CV has made all kinds of progress in current years, but it's certainly not fool-proof, doesn't do well in low-light or extremely high-light scenarios, can be slow, difficult to debounce between frames, subject to motion blur, difficult to get depth from, subject to optical illusions, etc. There are solutions that aren't full-blown LiDAR that can do a great job of depth estimation, collision detection, etc. Wouldn't you want more sensors in the mix? To me it's a really odd 'party line' to adhere to.

Can someone tell me if SpaceX's tail-landing rockets are vision-only systems?

Street vehicle navigation seems at least as difficult as nailing a rocket landing.

They are not. Cameras would not be all that useful. See [1] for an estimated system diagram - the main sensor stacks are based on AHRS and GPS.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/64ew8x/falcon_9_a_s...

It's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison regarding "as hard as," but the answer to your question is that the rocket uses a combination of GPS for gross aiming followed by radar for fine-grained approach. Vision might be possible but presents challenges radar may not (including that as the rocket gets close to the pad, the back-blast form the exhaust obscures the pad).

Not a chance, at the very least they have a hot shit inertial nav unit if not a full imaging landing radar

Humans are proof that's its possible to safely drive a car with pure vision. Pretty sure no human has ever propulsively landed a rocket on earth using nothing but vision.

I don't think humans are a good benchmark for what we should expect from FSD.

Not in the short term for sure. I've been pretty impressed with the FSD beta videos circulating youtube though. It's better than you would expect for a non-geofenced, vision based self driving system.

Better than I would have expected? I guess we didn't watch the same videos. I expected to see the system repeatedly trying to kill people and that's exactly what I saw in those videos.

I guess we haven't seen the same videos. I've watched many hours of FSD beta footage and if anything its excessively cautious.

Not saying it never makes dangerous mistakes, but the mistakes I've seen it make seem solvable. For example it has trouble with unprotected left turns when there are trees or fences obscuring the view. That to me is understandable and could probably be fixed with an update to the vision stack, maybe train the object detector on cars partially obscured by trees.

From what I saw, it drives worse than an intoxicated teenager on the first week of their learner's permit.

> Humans are proof that's its possible to safely drive a car with pure vision.

Humans also have eyes with a lot more than 1.2 megapixels of equivalent resolution and vastly more dynamic range, attached to a brain with damn near infinite more compute power than any computer.

> Pretty sure no human has ever propulsively landed a rocket on earth using nothing but vision.

Neither has SpaceX. On the other hand, humans have been using their plain jane eyeballs to land helicopters for years.

Driving with headphones is illegal in 17 states. Can Tesla's Autopilot hear a horn or siren?

I mean what would you expect it to do with that data? When a person hears a siren it's a signal to check their mirrors for emergency vehicles. Auto pilot doesn't need to check mirrors, it always has a 360 view of its surroundings.

Of all the potential criticisms of fsd this is an odd one.

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