The jerky/jittery control inputs are interesting to me, I've noticed them or heard people mention them on several of these videos.
Makes me wonder why there wouldn't be some sort of smoothing function applied...to ensure nothing is in the way to modulate emergency maneuvers? Just really weird seeing the steering wheel snapping side to side and the car getting on and off the accelerator so quickly. I had the same thought about the "streetscape around you" display on the dashboard when I test drove a Model 3 a few months ago, things it was detecting nearby kept bouncing and jittering around. Just kind of unsettling.
This is one of those that unnerved me as well the one time I drove a Tesla - I don't know if the display is accurately representing the car's model of the world around it, but it seems to me that you'd want to assume that real-world objects don't just disappear when you can't see them anymore; they have a size and shape and velocity and you can estimate their location based on relative movement (with, of course, ever-increasing inaccuracy) even if you can't clearly see or identify them at the moment.
Though, it seems like such a basic thing that there's probably some tradeoff that I'm not thinking of.
Reality is all perception systems occasionally wink out, but they also have object permanence algorithms that know they are not actually doing that. Humans are not so different. You see a car coming up behind you, you look away, you presume it didn't vanish. A good visualization would be to show where you predict the object is in a different colour.
This is called tracking and it’s a common problem in robotics. Basically you are trying to figure out 4 things:
- If I stop detecting an object, is it still there?
- If I do detect something, is it noise or real?
- If I have multiple detections, are they the same objects or different ones?
- Do detections I’m seeing now correspond to an object I’ve seen in the past?
This is normally accomplished with a statistical model that takes noisiness of detections, physics of how objects move, etc into account.
Getting tracking right can be very hard, but based on this report, Tesla’s tracking is behind some of it’s competitors.
Makes me wonder why there wouldn't be some sort of smoothing function applied...to ensure nothing is in the way to modulate emergency maneuvers? Just really weird seeing the steering wheel snapping side to side and the car getting on and off the accelerator so quickly. I had the same thought about the "streetscape around you" display on the dashboard when I test drove a Model 3 a few months ago, things it was detecting nearby kept bouncing and jittering around. Just kind of unsettling.