Mach-E ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems) Teardown by Sandy Munro

[eStang]

They are 100% wrong. Ford is using both system at the same time. The ford ward camara picks up speed limits signs and reads them in real time. It is only annoying when it reads the wrong sign so it either thinks the speed limit is way to high or way to low. I have a few around my house it miss reads all the the time.

https://www.macheforum.com/site/threads/speed-limit-sign-detection-room-for-improvement.5333/

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[noway]

It is probably right that there are much problems from fusing radar(or lidar) and camera based systems together. It is two different systems, and if they don't match who to trust? In computing it is always nice to have three independent systems doing the same thing, and then ignoring any input which is not verified by majority (that is two out of three). Having two systems means one system must be considered the primary and the other being the secondary. Trying to have both running actively will result in disaster if the two systems give two different outputs. It is enough to pull the emergency brake based on seing "something is wrong", but it cannot provide information about which system failed (in all cases).

The strange thing is that Mobileye was the company trying to implement pure vision AV in the first place, and Tesla did not, but Mobileye still do both, independently. Their idea is to have two systems working independently, one is vision only, the other is radar/lidar only and having both systems being capable off fully autonomous driving. The latter system will not be able to read things like traffic lights, lane markings, etc. but it will be able to drive without crashing into things with the assistance of the real time map generation (it will know the road layout without seeing it). The map could maybe in some way be considered the third system since it would be able to provide some feedback of expected result.

The pure vision system is going to be cheaper, but adding a radar or a lidar facing forward is not going to be very expensive and having this also will be able to replace the driver as a monitor. The pure vison system can drive the car while the radar/lidar system is verifying it is not doing anything wrong. If one system decides differently than the other system it could, literally, pull the emergency brake to avoid a crash (or safely stop). In current level 2 systems this monitoring, verifying correctness, is done by the driver, in a level 3 system it will have to be self-monitored, it will need to know by itself when something wrong has been done, both by itself or by other drivers.

So seeing cars having both lidar and radar based collision avoidance systems is kind of like building this monitoring system in the background and testing it, with human drivers being monitored. Humans make mistakes, and this is where these systems will prevent a collision while also providing feedback to the performance before this system would be used to monitor an autonomous driver using cameras only. I would say by seeing Tesla going for autonomous driver first and seeing others going for driver assistance first means they are just developing two different systems, but to do L3+ both systems are needed.

But probably most importantly in this context. Actually physically having one or more radars does not create sensor confusion. They could just as well have been there, but not being used actively. They still could provide feedback enough to pull the emergency brake if someone decides to paint some fake traffic on a big poster or a screen on the side or back of a truck.. They might not be an active part in driving the car, they could provide some feedback, but still be able to do important work.

 

[NoMoShocks]

But where was Sandy to tell me which way was right and which was wrong. Now I'm just left with my own thoughts....

Sandy has a different definition of Tear Down. I thought it was refreshing to have a Sandy video without Sandy.

 

[EVready]

Sandy has a different definition of Tear Down. I thought it was refreshing to have a Sandy video without Sandy.

What I find fascinating is that in his video today, he noted that a senior Ford engineer will be with him for a video discussing the MME cooling system. I've got to believe that after the video was posted thoroughly trashing their cooling system especially as compared to Tesla's, they had to do something - this could be interesting.

 

[Excited]

It is probably right that there are much problems from fusing radar(or lidar) and camera based systems together. It is two different systems, and if they don't match who to trust? In computing it is always nice to have three independent systems doing the same thing, and then ignoring any input which is not verified by majority (that is two out of three). Having two systems means one system must be considered the primary and the other being the secondary. Trying to have both running actively will result in disaster if the two systems give two different outputs. It is enough to pull the emergency brake based on seing "something is wrong", but it cannot provide information about which system failed (in all cases).

The strange thing is that Mobileye was the company trying to implement pure vision AV in the first place, and Tesla did not, but Mobileye still do both, independently. Their idea is to have two systems working independently, one is vision only, the other is radar/lidar only and having both systems being capable off fully autonomous driving. The latter system will not be able to read things like traffic lights, lane markings, etc. but it will be able to drive without crashing into things with the assistance of the real time map generation (it will know the road layout without seeing it). The map could maybe in some way be considered the third system since it would be able to provide some feedback of expected result.

The pure vision system is going to be cheaper, but adding a radar or a lidar facing forward is not going to be very expensive and having this also will be able to replace the driver as a monitor. The pure vison system can drive the car while the radar/lidar system is verifying it is not doing anything wrong. If one system decides differently than the other system it could, literally, pull the emergency brake to avoid a crash (or safely stop). In current level 2 systems this monitoring, verifying correctness, is done by the driver, in a level 3 system it will have to be self-monitored, it will need to know by itself when something wrong has been done, both by itself or by other drivers.

So seeing cars having both lidar and radar based collision avoidance systems is kind of like building this monitoring system in the background and testing it, with human drivers being monitored. Humans make mistakes, and this is where these systems will prevent a collision while also providing feedback to the performance before this system would be used to monitor an autonomous driver using cameras only. I would say by seeing Tesla going for autonomous driver first and seeing others going for driver assistance first means they are just developing two different systems, but to do L3+ both systems are needed.

But probably most importantly in this context. Actually physically having one or more radars does not create sensor confusion. They could just as well have been there, but not being used actively. They still could provide feedback enough to pull the emergency brake if someone decides to paint some fake traffic on a big poster or a screen on the side or back of a truck.. They might not be an active part in driving the car, they could provide some feedback, but still be able to do important work.

There are other data that could be taken into concideration as well, like weather conditions (open in numerous APIs) and how other drivers have recently responded to their cars reaction on the same spot. Not sure if Ford already is loading such variables into the system as of now …

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