"One way to the black"? Why did Tesla and musk abandon lidar?

汽车行业没有一家公司能像特斯拉那样带来自己的流量。一方面，这是因为特斯拉首席执行官埃隆•马斯克（elonmusk）经常发表惊人的言论。另一方面，也是因为特斯拉经常做出"不正常"的决定。

No company in the auto industry can bring its own traffic like Tesla. On the one hand, this is because Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, often makes amazing remarks. On the other hand, it is also because Tesla often makes "abnormal" decisions.

本月底，特斯拉再次成为舆论焦点，这次不是因为"刹车"，而是关于一款配置的命运。

At the end of this month, Tesla became the focus of public opinion again, this time not because of the "brake", but about the fate of a configuration.

而这种配置是智能汽车中最关键的传感器之一——雷达。

And this configuration is one of the most critical sensors in smart cars - radar.

近日，特斯拉宣布，从5月份起，北美市场的Model 3和Model Y将不再配备雷达传感器，车前的毫米波雷达也将取消。这款摄像头将作为自动驾驶系统的信息采集，这意味着特斯拉已经做好了"与世界抗衡"的准备，它已经成为第一家在量产车上实现"纯视觉"自动驾驶方案的车企。

Recently, Tesla announced that the Model 3 and Model Y of the North American market will no longer be equipped with radar sensors from May, and the millimeter wave radar in front of the vehicle will be cancelled. The camera will be used as the information collection of the automatic driving system, which means that Tesla is ready to "take against the world." It has become the first car company to realize the "pure vision" automatic driving scheme on mass production vehicles.

建立一个自动驾驶系统，离不开自动驾驶仪算法。为了实现计算，我们需要足够的信息。

To build an automatic driving system, it cannot do without autopilot algorithm. In order to achieve the calculation, we need enough information.

在驾驶过程中，车辆信息采集的源头是车身上的大小传感器。其中，要实现自动驾驶，最重要的传感器是摄像头和激光雷达（当然还有毫米波雷达和超声波传感器的辅助）。

In the process of driving, the source of vehicle information collection is the large and small sensors on the body. Among them, to achieve automatic driving, the most important sensors are cameras and lidar (of course, with the assistance of millimeter wave radar and ultrasonic sensors).

因此，在自动驾驶领域，一直以来都分为视觉学派和激光雷达学派。前者主张采用高清摄像机+视觉识别算法，后者主张增加激光雷达以保证系统的稳定性。

Therefore, in the field of automatic driving, it has always been divided into vision school and lidar school. The former advocates using high-definition camera + visual recognition algorithm, while the latter advocates adding lidar to ensure the stability of the system.

视觉学校，或纯粹的视觉感知方案，实际上是一个完整的模拟一个人驾驶汽车的状态。首先，"眼睛（相机）"看到图片，然后将其传送到"大脑（处理器）"进行处理和判断，然后给出"腿（驱动机构）"命令。

The visual school, or pure visual perception scheme, is actually a complete simulation of the state of a person driving a car. First, the "eyes (camera)" see the picture, and then transmit it to the "brain (processor)" for processing and judgment, and then give the "legs (driving mechanism)" commands.

除特斯拉外，氪星、百度等国内企业也采用纯视觉感知解决方案。

In addition to Tesla, domestic enterprises including krypton and Baidu also adopt pure visual perception solutions.

特斯拉的选择

Tesla's choice

事实上，特斯拉放弃激光雷达甚至毫米波雷达的一个重要原因就是实现更低的成本。

In fact, one of the important reasons for Tesla to abandon lidar and even millimeter wave radar is to achieve lower cost.

毕竟，激光雷达的成本很高。早期，机械激光雷达的价格从10万美元开始。现在，随着电子工业的发展，激光雷达的价格虽然有所下降，但仍处于几百到几千美元的水平。不过，与仅几十美元甚至几十美元的高清摄像头的价格相比，还是要高得多。

After all, the cost of lidar is very high. In the early days, the price of mechanical lidar started from 100000 US dollars. Now, with the development of the electronic industry, the price of lidar has decreased, but it is still at the level of hundreds to thousands of US dollars. However, compared with the price of high-definition camera head, which is only tens or even tens of US dollars, it is still much higher.

激光雷达成本高

High cost of lidar

不过，除了成本，特斯拉选择逐渐放弃雷达也有技术层面的权衡。

However, in addition to the cost, Tesla's choice of gradually abandoning radar also has technical level trade-offs.

首先，激光雷达无法判断物体的具体属性，容易造成误判。例如，当一个大塑料袋漂浮在车前时，摄像头可以将其识别为塑料袋而忽略，但激光雷达会将其判断为障碍物并将车停下。

First of all, lidar can not judge the specific properties of the object, which is easy to cause misjudgment. For example, when a large plastic bag floats in front of the car, the camera can identify it as a plastic bag and ignore it, but the lidar will judge it as an obstacle and stop the car.

其次，毫米波雷达也有许多局限性。毫米波雷达的频带损耗直接限制了其探测范围，既不能识别行人，也不能对周围所有障碍物进行精确建模。同时，由于获取的数据量很大，还需要带走处理器宝贵的计算能力。

Secondly, millimeter wave radar also has many limitations. The detection range of millimeter wave radar is directly restricted by its frequency band loss, which can neither identify pedestrians nor accurately model all the surrounding obstacles. At the same time, due to the large amount of data obtained, it also needs to take away the precious computing power of the processor.

最后，对于在视觉解决方案方面走得最远、做得最好的特斯拉来说，它在视觉算法方面投入了巨大的资金。如果要放弃之前这么大的积累，转而走另一条路线，从投入产出比来看，可以说得不偿失。

Finally, for Tesla, which has gone the furthest and done the best in terms of vision solutions, it has made a huge investment in vision algorithms. If we want to give up such a large amount of accumulation before and turn to another route, it can be said that the gain is not worth the loss in terms of input-output ratio.

当然，结合特斯拉与激光雷达技术公司luminar签署了使用激光雷达进行测试和开发的合同的消息，以及前一段时间在twitter上曝光的特斯拉在y型车上安装激光雷达的照片，据推测，马斯克可能"掌掴"，特斯拉未来可能转向激光雷达路线。

Of course, in combination with the news that Tesla has signed a contract with luminar, a lidar technology company, to use lidar for testing and development, as well as the photos of Tesla installing lidar on model y revealed on twitter some time ago, it is speculated that musk may "slap in the face" and Tesla may turn to the lidar route in the future.

当然，升级到最新的FSD需要一定的"牺牲"在这一过渡期的短时间内，配备特斯拉视觉系统的车辆的一些功能可能会被暂时限制或禁用，包括自动转向将被限制在75英里/小时（约120公里/小时）的最高速度和更长的最小跟车距离，"特斯拉说。智能呼叫（如有配备）和紧急车道偏离避免功能可能在交付时被禁用。"

Of course, upgrading the car to the latest FSD requires a certain "sacrifice". "In a short period of time during this transition period, some functions of vehicles equipped with Tesla vision system may be temporarily restricted or disabled, including automatic steering will be limited to a maximum speed of 75 mph (about 120 km / h) and a longer minimum following distance," Tesla said. Smart call (if equipped) and emergency lane departure avoidance may be disabled at the time of delivery. "

在未来，激光雷达是凭借其安全性优势赢得市场，还是凭借其低成本优势赢得视觉算法市场，都是一个难题。

In the future, it is difficult to decide whether lidar will win the market by virtue of its security advantage or vision algorithm by virtue of its lower cost advantage.

但从现有信息来看，特斯拉要"一路走黑"的纯视觉解决方案。

But judging from the existing information, Tesla is going to "go all the way to black" the pure visual solution.

Link：https://new.qq.com/omn/20210531/20210531A035HW00.html

update time：2021-05-31 14:53:38