Downward angle icon Downward angle icon. Billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Picture Alliance/Getty Images Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes self-driving car technology must be based on human senses. According to The New York Times, Musk claimed Tesla’s self-driving technology will use cameras instead of radar technology. Many self-driving car makers use a combination of cameras and radar technology to “see” the world.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes self-driving cars should navigate the world using the same senses as human drivers.
According to Musk, humans use their eyes and intellect to navigate three-dimensional space, so self-driving cars should do the same.
“Humans drive using their eyes and biological neural networks.” Musk said in October“So [it] Cameras and silicon neural networks [the] It’s the only way to achieve a universal solution for autonomous driving.”
What’s more, he reportedly puts that philosophy into practice at Tesla.
The New York Times reported on Monday that Musk has repeatedly told the company’s Autopilot team, which is developing self-driving car technology, to do away with radar and use cameras only.
Musk said in October that the reason for this approach was to centralize the data being fed into the car’s computer systems. Tesla’s camera-based “vision” self-driving technology has “gotten so good” that adding radar data would actually give the system more information than it needed, hurting the software, Musk said.
But internally, some Tesla engineers were opposed to Musk, according to a New York Times report.
Some Tesla engineers have argued that self-driving technology should include radar, LIDAR (more advanced radar) and other sensing technologies, rather than relying solely on cameras, which can be affected by weather and lighting conditions.
And until earlier this year, Tesla’s self-driving system was equipped with radar, but as of May, Tesla’s cars no longer have the hardware that enables radar detection.
Tesla announced earlier this year that Model 3 and Model Y vehicles manufactured for the North American market will no longer be equipped with radar after deliveries begin in May 2021.
It’s worth noting that nearly all of the self-driving technology from Tesla’s competitors, from Audi to Waymo, employs sensor technologies like radar and LIDAR, which are commonly used for features like adaptive cruise control in cars from a variety of manufacturers.
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