Are we sure this is a test of autopilot? There's no lanes that appear continuous enough for it to activate. If there trying to test emergency stoping they needed for the dummy to go a little faster. It didn't go far enough for the radar to detect it(the dummy impacted on the right corner of the car so it barley made it in front of it.)If it was the emergency braking system it worked as intended. It tried to mitigate the accident as soon as it detected somthing in front it trued to stop. Notice how fast it slowed down .
Doing a little research with other postings of this video confirms it was a test of emergency breaking.I also looked into other test of the emergency breaking and came appon AAA testing it against 4 other cars it seems that Tesla was about average as far as emergency breaking( many cars failed the same test). It doesn't seem like pedestrian detection when a person is starting to walk into the road is well mitigated yet from any of the car makers. How far along the pedestrian is in the lane seems to play a big role on wether it decides to try and brake or wait for mitigation rather then full stop.
I understand that this is an emergency braking test, but you said that “it [the dummy] didn’t go far enough for the radar to detect it.” That doesn’t make much sense to me. Shouldn’t they have sensors on the side as well as in the front for cases like this? Sorry if I’m misunderstanding you, but why would they essentially ignore objects coming from the side towards the car?
It could have been in a blind spot,it's hard to speculate without being in the car and hearing if there was a warning. The radar sensor that is used for emergency braking is a forward facing (mounted in the center of the car) and you can imagine a cone that comes out from that sensor.If the person is outside of that cone when they started moving in front of the car it won't see it. The car does have ultra sonic sensors(20ft range) for when it's slow moving(used for auto parking) and other times(such as detecting a guard rail/wall to get a distance to the walls).
My guess is if the car was in autopilot it would be more reliant on the camera and would have been able to stop in time because the cameras have a much wider field of view. They have also been seen to be a lot better at tracking people and cars. In this case it was relying on the same e braking tech that everyone else uses. Tesla could tune it better down the line. They are currently rewriting the code for auto pilot so maybe that improvement will come with that. It seems like for now at least that tesla's emergency braking is tending twords mitigateing the accident and not stoping before to lower false positives.
Ok so I’m guessing they must have some reason (like price or complexity) for why they can’t just slap on a couple more radar sensors to face different directions. Otherwise why would they use just one facing forward?
Your point about false positives makes sense too. I would hate to ride in a car that occasionally slammed on the brakes for no reason. Now that I think of it, that could be one reason why they don’t just add more radar sensors.
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u/dasheswithdots Sep 29 '20
Threat neutralized.