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Ford Tests Its Self-Driving Car In Total Darkness Using LiDAR Tech (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Using a combination of radar, cameras, and light-sensitive radar called LiDAR, one of Ford's self-driving cars has successfully navigated a winding road at night and without headlights. LiDAR works by emitting short pulses of laser light -- 2.8 million laser pulses a second -- so that the vehicle's software can create a real-time, high-definition 3D image of what's around it to determine the best driving path. Ford's self-driving cars come equipped with high-definition 3D maps, which include information about road markings, signs, geography, landmarks, and topography. If a vehicle isn't able to see the ground due to inclement conditions, it will detect above-ground landmarks to locate itself on the map. Ford's self-driving cars equipped with the LiDAR radar system are particularly noteworthy because they can operate without the usual cameras that depend on sunshine and street lamps.
So one of the problems with modern depth sensors is handling sunlight. Blackbody radiation can cause all kinds of noise in the signal that is bounced back at the camera from a laser. This makes it harder, not easier, for a lot of depth perception tech to work in good lighting conditions.
Driving at night should, for the most part, be easier for many systems than driving during the day.
What happens when all the other cars around it are also emitting the same pattern?
Why is this such a breakthrough? Google self driving cars have been using LIDAR for years: http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Do not look into lidar with remaining good eye...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Not necessarily. Lidar can use multiple beams and multiple wavelengths to work around this.
http://velodynelidar.com/faq.h...
"Velodyne's LiDAR sensors work well in snow, sleet, and rain. The multiple beam approach of Velodyne's LiDAR sensors with laser beams with millions of laser beams at different angles enables to find "holes" in-between the snowflakes to "see" the environment. An inferior LiDAR with only one or a few laser beams would not work as well as one with 16, 32 or 64 laser beams."
Total darkness implies the Li of the Lidar was turned off.
No. It implies that "total darkness" is a term applied to human visual acuity. Near infrared is still considered light, even though human visual sensitivity to it is nil.
You don't say that the pitch black night where you cannot see your hand in front of your face is actually brightly lit, do you? After all, there is all kinds of EM radiation all over the place, so your "total darkness" exists only because you cannot see it, not because it was turned off.
Nope: your detector typically detect radio waves (as used by some doppler based speed traps).
It can't detect laser (in advance) because it's highly directional. The only situation where it could detect a laser is once the laser is already pointed at your car, at which point it is already too late, you're already being measured and eventually fined.
So no detector will try detecting lasers and thus no detector will get set of by a Ford.
Same with the other "avoid.speeding tickets" gadgets which are based on GPS technology
(along tables of speed limitation for roads,
and (hopefully kept up-to-date) tables of known radar positions).
Those will alert you of laser-based or plate-reading camera-based speed-traps, even when it can't sense them.
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If the car uses technology that can see better in darkness it can react to things that the human driver might have missed.
It seems like one good use of this technology would be to integrate it with some sort of HUD overlay on the windshield so that a driver can see things in the dark. I would love to have a car that put red outlines around things like deer in the road or even the lines on the road. All the self driving cars are using enhanced features to make them safer than human drivers but many of these enhanced features like super accurate mapping of the roads and seeing things in the dark could also be used to make human drivers safer as well. I think self driving cars may some day be safer than human drivers but let's not forget to improve the human driver too while we're at it. It's very possible that by giving some of these safety features to humans as augmented reality that we can make human drivers considerably safer than they currently are.