Tesla Motors: Autopilot Driving without Lines on Firmware 8.0
----------------------
As we already know, Autopilot requires either Lines on the road, or to be following directly behind another vehicle to maintain a lock on.
I drive down this road daily. Firmware 7 would let me activate Autopilot right away, but fail requiring immediate take over once the road curves, and I could never get a lock after that.
I finally gave it a try with Firmware 8 (Actually, 7 try's due to my dash cam's footage getting corrupted with a faulty memory card), and once again, Tesla has surprised us!
As it had in the past, it locked on the to lane line, but instead of failing at the curve, once it lost the line lock (See the dash shot), it continued to drive all the way to the stop sign (at point I stopped the car since stop sigh stopping is not currently a feature of the cars) without a lane lock (accept for a brief fraction of a second).
The car (While driving like a intoxicated politician) did manage to remain in it's lane about 95% of the drive, and used it's Sonar to keep distance from the Curb, and to some extent the radar (Though how much, I cannot say as radar data is not displayed on the screen).
Still impressive. While it's not recommended at all to use Autopilot in these situations, or on regular surface streets at all, I do so for testing purposes only. Just the fact that it could keep going at all was just amazing! I wish I had some way to get a raw feed from the autopilot camera too with it's processing to see what it shows!