Tesla embraces sensor fusion

What could go wrong? I'm waiting for the first time an airbag is deployed due to shadows.

Just hope no innocent drivers/pedestrians get hurt. Tesla owners getting picked off doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Agreed. It's all us non-Tesla drivers and pedestrians than are unwilling guinea pigs due to Tesla's decisions.

Wow that is such a bad idea. Using Cameras to determine wether to deploy air bags will result in false flag air bag deployments. Pre collision air bag deployment is a bad idea in general because there will always be false positives which can injur people or block the drivers view of the road

All this to save a few bucks on sensors no doubt.

More unsafe BS from Tesla. FSD thinks a shadow is a brick wall....air bag deploys. 🥴

As the article points out, there are issues with e.g. wipers and phantom braking that they've not managed to resolve. Changing a critical passive safety system to a software based trigger seems like a misuse of priorities. That said, it seems unlikely that it's purely a software trigger. It must still have a G sensor, right?

Surely, the mechanisms already in place to deploy airbags at precisely the moment of impact work perfectly. How could cameras possibly improve on this.l? The point is to deploy when definitely needed AND AT NO OTHER TIME. Deploying even slightly early creates totally unnecessary extra provlems, some of which may even be incredibly dangerous.

>That said, it seems unlikely that it's purely a software trigger. It must still have a G sensor, right? After trying to reinvent the wheel plenty of times for no reason already, Tesla is trying to reinvent the airbag. If I had to bet... That's just gonna be an unsafe Tesla beta experiement on their passengers. Those legacy kind of sensors are just cluthes anyway, right?

It’s a try to save money and it will backfire seriously

... Right?

That first lawsuit after someone gets punched in the face with their air bag for a non conclusion is gonna be 🔥

"hey my air bag deployed when making a left turn, is this normal has anyone had this happen to them. Other than that I love this M3"

Nah. Yes, Elons take on FSD image only is clearly not working out and it has been obvious since many years. But here I am pretty sure the Engineering team knows what to and not to do here.  Most likely there is a hard limit for the timing influence of the camera, and it rather serves to increase certain probabilities, for example when a crash is already detected but the car has to decide about the timing of individual airbags. So even in a total misinterpretation of camera, the max offset is limited. And due to their testing, they think that they can improve a sufficient number of scenarios that it's worth it.

>it will backfire seriously Or facefire...

Yeah, those things hurt! I’ve only experience an air bag deployment once, as we T-boned a city bus that had run a red light. I instinctively put up my hands before impact and when we hit, that airbag came out violently and slammed both hands into my face, breaking my pinkie in the process. The bags did work as designed but I hope I never need that kind of help again. And for one to go off accidentally would not be fun at all.

No. It's most likely that the offset derived from the camera data is small and will yield better "sub-timings", so to say, in that certain hardcoded time constants in the airbag algorithm are slightly tweaked based on camera data. The current use of crash detection sensors works well, but there is inherently an incomplete understanding of crash details, and it's at least theoretically plausible that using camera data can yield better timings when it's e.g. known that the other car is impacting in a certain angle.

Low value article, the author obviously is not familiar at all with how such things are engineered and how risk is dealt with. Instead refers to Reddit armchair speculation. It's fear mongering without having a clue how the system works. Even reading the readme would have made it clear that it works *together* with the existing sensors.  Very likely, it's still the existing sensors that are the precondition, but they can optimize certain small timing parameters that are currently hardcoded or  calculated based on simpler input.

Building on top of regulatory and industry crash testing, this release enables the front airbags to begin to inflate and restrain occupants earlier, in a way that only Tesla’s integrated systems are capable of doing, making your car safer \_over time\_. what do the mean by ‘over time’? arent they safe day1?

Imagine people tossing colored foam obstacles in front of Tesla’s just to wreck them and force airbag replacements…

Man this shits idiotic

lol

Save money on what though?

Oh look another useless feature that will save a small amount of money and probably literally kill a few people. Boy I can't until 3 years from now when the NHTSA gives Tesla a slap on the wrists as a result and Tesla will argue in court that it isn't liable to all this because there weren't comparable industry standards at the time since no one else was stupid enough to implement a camera trigger airbag system.

New revenue stream for Tesla. Airbag replacement for false positives. Should pump the stock 15%!

It would work as well as their auto wipers do.

As well as those repair bills for the wrecks it causes. Crashes up, profits up!

Testing? You mean like “full self drive beta”? Itll just be rolled out to the sheep who buy those apartheid Yugos. Others take them, so long as their jalopies don’t hurt people in the process.

Imagine driving down the street and a plastic bag flys by so your airbags deploy and now you crash into a wall.

Too bad no lidar.

I think don't you understand how an airbag works (at all). It's not a funny balloon that explodes when some trigger is pulled. Airbag deployment strategies are non trivial, covered by patents etc.  It's perfectly possible to improve those strategies and using camera data as an additional input to make small improvements regarding timing parameters is a valid way. It's just not on the mental realm of many reditors. Fun fact: NCAP ratings for Teslas are on the absolute top, so it's even more retarded to think those safety engineers guys don't know what they're doing.

>It's just not on the mental realm of many reditors. Maybe they've driven a Tesla and experienced the "vision" based auto-wipers. Frankly, given TSLA's track record of phantom braking, lousy wipers, and failed Wiley Coyote tests, vision based airbags is positively bonkers

"restrain occupants earlier" says to me they're doing what Mercedes, BMW, etc have done for a while now - which is pretension the seatbelts earlier. If you look into the more minor collision safety systems that Mercedes have, they will also do things like close the windows before a collision happens, or play a loud white noise sound to prepare your ears for impact (and supposedly cause less damage to your ears).

Ahhh. Second airbag time. Lol

This is very interesting. I didn't know this. Are these becoming industry standard techniques, or are they only available on high end vehicles?

I want to build a truck with a giant tv on the back to show hostile scenes to telsas

The same safety engineers that allowed the CT to be released? The vehicle with finished edges so sharp they cut people (and pets), with no crumple zone at the front, with no way for rescuers to retrieve people after crashes? Those safety engineers?

Normal collision detection is also going to be software. Almost everything in a modern car is software, it's just so much cheaper. The difference is these are simple control laws that can be validated with modelling, implemented with an operating system, hardware, sensors, and both electrical and mechanical components that can all be tested in isolation from one another to cover every foreseeable situation. Computer vision, though impressive, is from a safety perspective still in the ["pile of linear algebra"](https://xkcd.com/1838/) stage.

Airbag control modules and sensors

I understand that they want to use vision INSTEAD of crash sensors to reduce costs, right? As they did with their auto wipers which is a meme at this point. It sounds extremely unsafe but not surprising at this point. An airbag being deployed when you're not ready to take it could kill you.

What could possibly go wrong. Driving along a nice sunny road, Tesla Vision spots a shadow in the road and predicts a crash. Deploys all the airbags so the driver can't see to correct the error and mows down a crowd of people on the sidewalk. Brilliant.

So glad I came to my senses and got rid of my Tesla. It’s a death trap in many ways. I do miss the self driving tbh but the adaptive cruise control on my Bolt is pretty good and better than nothing

It's why I said "sensor fusion" in the submission title. Elon's been fudding that concept for years so I found it ironic.

Doesn’t Tesla buy airbags just like everyone else, or is that yet another area where Tesla has “innovated”?

Unlimited demand!

My VW pretensions the seatbelt if I push the accelerator hard

> Changing a critical passive safety system to a software based trigger seems like a misuse of priorities. No car uses a passive system for its SRS airbags. They're all software controlled and always have been. Multiple stages are available, different kinds of airbags for events such as rollovers, whether or not a seat is occupied, weight of the occupant in the seat to determine deployment force. > That said, it seems unlikely that it's purely a software trigger. Of course it is a software trigger. Do you think there is a button sitting at the front of the car ready to initiate the airbags if pressed by an impact all by itself? Multiple sensors need to agree, and all sensors need to be functioning, and pass their startup testing in order for the SRS to be active in the first place. Meaning software is involved in every single step of the process. > It must still have a G sensor, right? Yes, but a g sensor alone can only detect an impact after the fact, it can't pre-detect an impact, except maybe if the car is falling since a car shouldn't experience 1G in the z direction for a sustained period of time. The implication from "fusion" is that multiple sensors will be used together to make a determination, and extrapolate new information which individual sensors could not provide alone. This is already done on all cars anyway. Just without fancy buzzwords. Multiple sensors are involved in airbag use. What's new here is adding the cameras into the mix. A g sensor alone can't tell you that an impact is coming, but a g sensor can tell you if the car is braking hard or spinning out of control or possibly tell you the car is falling from a great height, or tell you the car isn't undergoing any g forces at all when it definitely should be (i.e. it should be braking but it isn't). Couple that data with a camera which sees what looks like an approaching obstacle, and theoretically you can predict with high confidence whether or not a collision will occur. Better yet, restrict that obstacle detection to only acknowledge objects within range to hit the car within a tiny time window, say 100ms. > wipers and phantom braking that they've not managed to resolve. Wipers are a different issue. They're not a software issue, they're a fundamental design issue. There's no possible way for the front cameras to see what the driver sees with regards to rain. They're positioned too high, and can't focus on the windshield glass well enough. Software will never fix this, and software is not to blame here. Omitting a rain sensor is the issue there. Phantom braking is definitely a software issue, however there's a fundamental difference in objective and uncertainty between trying to prevent any possible or predicted collision from occurring within the next 5-10 seconds (phantom braking), vs. reacting to a possible collision that will occur within 100ms or so (airbags). Braking to prevent a collision that might occur far in the future, has a lot more uncertainty tied to it, and has a lot lower opportunity cost tied to its misuse vs. an airbag. Deploying an airbag because of a detected obstacle that the car will hit in 100ms has a lot less uncertainty involved, since you don't have to predict very far in the future what will happen. Regardless, this seems like a nutso idea to implement with 2D cameras.

Wut? I mean here’s an idea, why not have the AI vision avoid the crash if it can predict it? 🤣

Considering how bad their auto wipers are I can't imagine the problems this is going to cause.

Early airbags (1970s) were triggered by a simple accelerometer consisting of a ballbearing in a tube. It took two decades before any electronics were involved.

Heaven forbid this please! I don’t want vision to deploy my air bag. Phantom braking is already bad enough to make me avoid using the cruise control. I would very much prefer to avoid phantom air bag deployments thank you very much.

Elon "too many sensors- there is conflict and they get confused!" (about lidar etc Elon "lets use multiple sensors for a safety system - it will work flawlessly!" After shadow breaking, he literally asks for shadow deployment, just after they consider fixing the easiest thing in the world - door handles. Congratulations. Fix 1 thing (perhaps), introduce 1 other worse flaw.