Is Autopilot more reliable in cities with lots of Teslas traveling the highways?

[calisnow]

My guess is as follows - even if GPS data is limited to a 3.5 meter lateral "box" - that is enough to give the car additional confidence as to which lane it is in when combined with other signals such as surrounding cars and poor, but not "completely absent" lane markings.

You would not need GPS data to tell you within inches where you are for the car to be able to use that data to keep it in its lane. You would simply need to know that cars tend to stay centered in a lane, and so if the GPS data is reading within plus or minus X feet then it is most likely the case that the car is in the number 2 lane, for example. Then that little bit of confidence can be combined with a little bit more confidence given by faded, but perhaps not "non existent" lane markings to add up to more confidence, etc. So in this way current GPS could in fact at least increase the likelihood of the car staying in its lane in the absence of clear guidance from the lane markings - especially if there are nearby cars for the Model S to add to its confidence picture.

If this is the case then it would make sense that over time, thousands of Teslas tracing "I am plus or minus X meters going in a straight line" combined with the knowledge that cars tend to travel in the center of a lane, more or less - would allow Tesla to use the statistical average of that imprecise GPS data to build high precision maps of a highways individual lanes.

What Tesla has not told us of course is just how much data they need from the user base on a given stretch of road to build out those maps. 10 passes? 100 passes? More?

 

[GSP]

Calisnow,

GPS is rated at +/- 3.5 m (+/- 11.5 feet). Are you sure that Elon claims it is better? Perhaps he was talking about the accuracy of the map itself, not the position of the car on the map.

The map accuracy should improve with multiple passes of autopilot equipped vehicles. However, I don't see how this can improve the accuracy of your car's position at all.

For more info about the nature of autopilot's maps and how they are improved, I highly recommend watching Mobileye's CES presentation, linked below.

GSP

GPS.gov: GPS Accuracy

Mobileye N.V. - Investor Relations - Events & Presentations - CES 2016 Presentation

 

[ShotgunF15E]

what musk says and what is in the cars today are two different things.

What I think people are confusing are statements Elon may make regarding something they've done with a test car perhaps vs what is out in the operational, fielded fleet of customer cars. Often two VERY different things.

I've flown some pretty high tech aircraft over the course of my life and we've always been able to achieve 'parlor tricks' with test jets that would never see the light of day to the rest of the world.

I do believe they are creating a high resolution map of every road they can, in order to hopefully one day have a GPS receiver capable of the accuracy they'd need to navigate in a lane by GPS alone. However, I do not believe that hardware currently exists in any Tesla sold today.

Would love to hear someone prove me wrong. I'd love to see it happen myself.

 

[calisnow]

...Are you sure that Elon claims it is better? Perhaps he was talking about the accuracy of the map itself, not the position of the car on the map.

The map accuracy should improve with multiple passes of autopilot equipped vehicles. However, I don't see how this can improve the accuracy of your car's position at all.

For more info about the nature of autopilot's maps and how they are improved, I highly recommend watching Mobileye's CES presentation, linked below.

Thanks for the link - watching the video now. I'd seen Mobileye's presentation from about 6 months ago but not this one - watching now.

 

[calisnow]

GPS is rated at +/- 3.5 m (+/- 11.5 feet). Are you sure that Elon claims it is better? Perhaps he was talking about the accuracy of the map itself, not the position of the car on the map.

The map accuracy should improve with multiple passes of autopilot equipped vehicles. However, I don't see how this can improve the accuracy of your car's position at all.

For more info about the nature of autopilot's maps and how they are improved, I highly recommend watching Mobileye's CES presentation, linked below.

Okay I've watched the video - thanks for the link - very fascinating. But what Mobileye is explaining in this video is not what Tesla has told the world they are doing. Mobileye's name for its mapping project - which has yet to begin, btw - is called REM - Road Experience Management. The video clearly states that this crowd sourced mapping project is starting later in 2016 with GM and Volkswagen and one other partner which is on board for a 2018 launch.It is completely different technology from what Tesla claims to be doing.

Mobileye is going to build a high resolution map based off of visual camera data - it has nothing whatsoever to do with Tesla's GPS mapping project which Tesla claims has been in process for a couple of years already. It sounds like great technology and an ingenius plan - have crowdsourced high resolution maps built by thousands of cars identifying landmarks (road signs, road direction markers etc.) which are then used for localization to add confidence to and cross-check with a car's sensors.

But this is not what Elon Musk says he is doing - he has repeatedly said Tesla is creating high precision maps using GPS data. It's an entirely separate project.

Will Tesla reverse course and join in on Mobileye's REM mapping project? Who knows - but this video still does not answer the question of what technology Tesla is using to create its high precision maps. And so far Tesla has told the world it is using GPS.

I still see your point however - you could maybe create high precision maps using averaged GPS data - but how could you use that data to localize an individual car during driving? I don't know.

 

[calisnow]

GPS is rated at +/- 3.5 m (+/- 11.5 feet). Are you sure that Elon claims it is better? Perhaps he was talking about the accuracy of the map itself, not the position of the car on the map.

No I am not sure that Elon claims GPS receivers can localize a smaller footprint than +/- 3.5 meters - what I am sure is that Elon has said that Tesla solved the I-405 corner case problem before launching Autopilot's public 7.0 beta using GPS to localize the car's position within lanes. It's in the video earlier in this thread - directly out of his mouth.

But perhaps the other poster on this thread is correct in his speculation that the 405 localization issue was solved using some kind of other sensor not available to the public.

However - if Tesla has built a positional high precision map - then we still have the question of how the car finds its position on that map. If GPS is out, and there are no lidar scanners nor a visual landmark map like Mobileye is planning to build - then how does Tesla use or plan to use its high precision map?

 

[GSP]

I could be mistaken, but I think Tesla is using Mobileye's hardware and software, including building a map of landmarks with the Tesla autopilot equipped fleet. Tesla is also writing the autopilot software, in colaberation with Mobileye. I think this is the how all of the automakers (except Daimler and Toyota) are working with Mobileye.

GPS is used when making the maps, but Mobileye's compressed data from their camera/chip/software is also used along with the GPS coordinates.

It will be interesting to see if automakers share map data. Tesla probably has the most data now, from the autopilot fleet. However, soon (did Mobileye say 2016?) GM will equip all of their cars with Mobileye cameras/chips/software and start uploading compressed data using the OnStar cellular transceiver already in all of their cars.

GSP

 

[Panthers1521]

I would assume the work better when there is a lot of them together. The company NXP Semiconductors, makes a chip for the google car that allows them to talk to each other.

 

[brkaus]

Did some reading in techniques to use inertial systems to simulate multi-point GPS for higher accuracy. I would think that would require integrated hardware. Not clear how accurate it could get.

Still feel like hurling down the road at 70mph even a ft isn't close enough nor would a compass provide enough angular accuracy. Lots of systems have to be combined and I don't feel like gps alone would ever solve the driving problem.

 

[Lex]

So, it seems like...

Tesla claims they are collecting this "high resolution" data but they haven't done anything with it, yet.

Civilian GPS alone is not supposed to be accurate enough to find a car's position in a lane.

And the Tesla Model S/X Autopilot cannot "see" the MobilEye camera, just the resultant data.