“The car in front might hit the UFO in dense fog, but the Tesla will not”

After the fatal crash incident that occurred in May this year, Tesla Motors is giving major update for its Version 8 Software within next two weeks. There will be dozens of small refinements with Version 8 Software but the most significant upgrade to Autopilot will be the use of more advanced signal processing to create a picture of the world using the onboard radar.

The radar was added to all Tesla vehicles in October 2014 as part of the Autopilot hardware suite , but was only meant to be a supplementary sensor to the primary camera and image processing system. After putting thought in this, the company now believes it can be used as a primary control sensor without requiring the camera to confirm visual image recognition. It becomes counter-intuitive problem as the world looks strange in radar.

The first part of solving that problem is having a more detailed point cloud. Software 8.0 unlocks access to six times as many radar objects with the same hardware with a lot more information per object.

The second part consists of assembling those radar snapshots, which take place every tenth of a second, into 3D “picture” of the world.

The third part is a lot more difficult. When the car is approaching an overhead highway road sign positioned on a rise in the road or a bridge where the road is underneath, looking like a collision course. This is where fleet learning comes in handy. Initially, the vehicle fleet will take no action except to note the position of road signs, bridges and other stationary objects, mapping the world according to radar. The car computer will then silently compares when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database.

The radar will now see through most visual obscuration, is that the car should almost always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions. Other additional updates are TACC braking max ramp rate increased and latency reduced by a factor of five, Car offsets in lane when overtaking a slower vehicle driving close to its lane edge, With further data gathering, car will activate Auto steer to avoid collision , Approximately 200 small enhancements that aren’t worth a bullet point and much more.

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