> As I've been saying for years now, the first job is to determine that the road ahead is flat enough to drive on. Then decide where you want to drive. I did the DARPA Grand Challenge 16 years ago, which was off-road, so that was the first problem to solve. Tesla has lane-following and smart cruise control, like other automakers, to which they've added some hacks to create the illusion of self-driving. But they just don't have the "verify road ahead is flat" technology.
This matches my perception as well and it continues to blow my mind. Like it just seems like it would require full-on incompetence to use only specific pedestrian/car/sign/lane classifiers rather than splitting the world first into ground/obstacle by reconstructing geometry and then assigning relative velocity, acceleration, and curvature to coherent obstacle segments irrespective of their identification. But the videos always make it look like this is exactly what's happening. And worse it always appears to be happening on an instantaneous frame-by-frame basis with things flickering in and out of existence as if "thing there" and "nothing there" are somehow equally safe guesses.
This matches my perception as well and it continues to blow my mind. Like it just seems like it would require full-on incompetence to use only specific pedestrian/car/sign/lane classifiers rather than splitting the world first into ground/obstacle by reconstructing geometry and then assigning relative velocity, acceleration, and curvature to coherent obstacle segments irrespective of their identification. But the videos always make it look like this is exactly what's happening. And worse it always appears to be happening on an instantaneous frame-by-frame basis with things flickering in and out of existence as if "thing there" and "nothing there" are somehow equally safe guesses.