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Tesla Camera-Only Vision Predicted In 1930's SF
In 2021, Tesla began a transition to Tesla Vision by removing radar from Model 3 and Model Y, followed by Model S and Model X in 2022. In 2022 they took the next step by removing ultrasonic sensors (USS) from Model 3 and Model Y for most global markets, followed by all Model S and Model X in 2023.
Tesla's new vehicles rely entirely on Tesla Vision.
Musk was a firm believer in “returning to first principles” to make products simple. One of those principles was human eyesight. It mattered not to Musk that the state-of-the-art approach to sensing in self-driving employed by every other self-driving car manufacturer was multi-sensor.“Vision became so good that radar actually reduced SNR [signal to noise ratio], so radar was turned off,” said Musk in a tweet in October of 2021. “Humans drive with eyes & biological neural nets, so makes sense that cameras & silicon neural nets are only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving.”
(Via Engineering.com)
In his story Paradise and Iron, published by Amazing Stories Quarterly in 1930, Golden Age science fiction writer Miles J. Breuer described how automatic cars needed only visual sensors to drive safely:
(Autonomous Car from 'Paradise and Iron' by Miles Breuer)Our next step was automatic steering, bo that the machine could avoid obstacles in the road without attention from a driver at a steering-wheel.”
"I don’t understand how these machines can drive automatically,” I interrupted, very much puzzled, "unless they can see?”
"They can see!” He pointed to an excrescence on each headlight of the machine, like a bud on a potato.
“That’s the selenium eye,” Kaspar explained. “The electrical resistance of the metal selenium varies with the intensity of the light that strikes it; and that is a little camera chamber with a lens and a Selenium network. By its means, the machine can see.
(Read more about Vision-Based Autonomous Cars)
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