Should a self-driving car have a camera pole that extends to 13′ above the ground after startup?

by philg

Who here has experienced Tesla Full Service Driving 13.2? A friend who is very tech-savvy and skeptical says that it was awesome on a couple of trips that he did in a sister’s car in Los Angeles. As a joke I asked a venture capitalist/Bitcoin bro friend in Miami when he’d be getting a Cybertruck and, of course, it turned out that he already had one. He says that FSD 13.2 does not work reliably in Miami and also that he isn’t surprised that it works great in Los Angeles: “The software works best in places where there are a lot of Teslas because it needs a huge amount of training data.”

If the goal of self-driving is to beat humans at their own incompetent game, what about a pole that can extend from the roof of the car up to a maximum of about 13′ in height as soon as the car is on the road? With cameras mounted at roof level and above, the self-driving car will be able to do what human drivers can’t, e.g., see over plants in the median (a Florida problem), over monster SUVs (a problem everywhere in the U.S.), etc. Waymo gets part of the way there with a non-extendable roof-mounted camera (photo from San Francisco with homeless encampment in background):

Why not take it up to 13′ when the situation calls for a bird’s eye view (“drone’s eye view”?)? (have a map of low-clearance areas, of course, and the pole won’t get stripped off the car by a bridge)

Aside from stupidity, what’s the problem with this idea? When the car is moving, the pole can’t be sufficiently stabilized to yield high-quality camera images? If so, the pole would still be useful when waiting to make a left turn and it is otherwise difficult to see oncoming traffic. NHTSA says that left turn accidents account for 22 percent of total accidents.

What to name this device? Tesla likes aviation analogies (“autopilot”) so how about “The Lindbergh”? Charles Lindbergh had a retractable periscope that enabled him to see forward during his famous NY-Paris flight in 1927. Or, if it is only practical to use when the car is stopped at an intersection… “The Selfie Stick”.

(Although often portrayed as an admirer of Nazi Germany, Lindbergh might have been pro-Israel, at least in concept (source). On the other hand, he lived until 1974 and even AI can’t find any statement by him regarding the modern state of Israel. Maybe he was too busy with his three secret girlfriends and seven secret European children? (Wikipedia) These additional kids should make Elon/Tesla like Lindbergh even more!)

17 thoughts on “Should a self-driving car have a camera pole that extends to 13′ above the ground after startup?”

  2. Lions have long dreamed of a tethered quad copter that dodged obstacles. An alternative is a single gimbaled fan providing a static stabilizing force to a camera on a pole. It would be useful for all robots, but energy intensive.

  3. My model Y with FSD 13.2 works 50,% of the time in Tampa Bay area. I was in San Francisco for Christmas and took couple of Waymo rides and it worked perfectly even in complex situations in China Town.

    • 50 percent?!?! That’s not so good! Are the failures predictable so you have a good idea when you have to take control or does the system scare you with failures that you didn’t expect?

    • Most of the time i know where and when to take over. It always fails when getting on to I-75 ramp, immediately after the signal there is a separate line to get on to the highway and that line is separated by permanent white plastic cones. When exiting the highway it waits till last minute to go the right lane, in the peak hours the right line before that exist is always backed up(traffic fully stopped), so nobody gives way to merge and it gets confused and tries re route to next exit, but that exit also has similar issue. Some times it scares the shit out of me, especially at flashing yellow lights(in front of the fire house) sometime it just stops for no reason.

  4. Since an ethernet network is built on CSMA/CD, how come the Tesla can’t implement a similar protocol? I would encourage the development of a standard automotive protocol, but from what I read, each part is outsourced with it’s own code and getting them all on the same page would be a herculean effort. (https://www.thedrive.com/news/ford-ceo-explains-why-legacy-automakers-take-forever-to-issue-ota-updates). At the minimum no two Tesla’s should ever crash into each other making a left turn. With a Tesla specific ethernet protocol, cars just put in a “Firewall request” to pass from source to destination. The only issue we have now is getting rid of all of the cars that are still “Token Ring” (How I miss you Cabletron https://www.company-histories.com/Cabletron-Systems-Inc-Company-History.html) and each hold an individual token but refuse to pass it off to others.

  5. Should a self-driving car have a camera pole that extends to 13′ above the ground after startup? No.

  6. Overpass clearances are generally much less than 13 feet, but perhaps the camera can see them coming and automatically lower

  7. @philG off topic. As democrat hater you seems to be visiting blue states often and then make fun of them “(photo from San Francisco with homeless encampment in background)” or point how badly they are run. One would think you would visit deep red states like MS, LA, AL etc.. how point/praise how good these are run. Even if you are going to work, you can slowly move your business to well run deep red states. I am puzzled.

    • RH: MS, LA, and AL are “deep red”? Didn’t they have more than 100 years of Democrat rule following the War of Northern Aggression (perpetrated by the Republicans under Abraham Lincoln). Anyway, it is tough to take an exciting picture of a street without a homeless encampment. Florida is now considered “deep red”. Should I post a daily picture of the homeless-free perfect-condition sidewalks on the main streets around Jupiter? Who would be interested in that?

    • Thanks for that link. It shows that the incidence of homelessness in Florida is lower than the national average (5% of America’s unhoused are in FL according to the article that you cite while approximately 7% of Americans overall live in Florida).

      That said, I don’t know why there would be any homeless people in Florida. New York and Maskachusetts, for example, have “right to shelter” laws. I don’t think a homeless Floridian would have trouble getting a bus ticket to NY or MA. Why be on the streets when a lifetime of taxpayer-funded housing is just a day or two away in a more righteous state? Maybe the answer is that people identified as “homeless” in a survey actually have a couch to sleep on in a relative’s or friend’s air-conditioned apartment. One certainly doesn’t see them on the street as is common in LA, SF, Berkeley, etc.

  9. I figure it’s only a matter of time before each car gets a little fleet of quad-copters to follow it around, investigate obstacles, boost wireless connectivity, etc.

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