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On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Tesla will hit walls with rain and snow. Cameras will fail before other sensors in those conditions.
Radar and Lidar also get a lot of noise from heavy rain or snow. Fog can be just as bad. Some conditions just aren’t safe to drive in, regardless of who’s driving. I don’t think either of them are trying to design a system for those conditions.
On a personal note, I have no interest in getting a ride in a self driving car. I do have an interest in an empty car that can drive itself. Drop myself off at the airport, valet parking downtown, easier to share one car per household, river shuttling, through hike shuttling - I would use it a lot. I understand the more profitable goal is taxi services, but I don’t want that. So in my narrow use case, I hope Tesla succeeds since that approach can be used on personal vehicles anywhere while Waymo is strictly city taxis, which I don’t use.
The USS they took out of Teslas were at least a second measurement system.
Wavelengths with decent water transmitability exist.
Sound and light don’t propagate well through changes in media. The reason rainbows exist is because light does not travel in a straight line through drops of water, across the full spectrum. Radar is used to sense how hard it’s raining so it obviously gets returns from rain (and through it). But it will depend on the processing they do from the sensors. But just so we’re clear, cameras also work in the rain and snow. I don’t think one is clearly better than others.