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> With its full 360° horizontal field of view by 26.8° vertical field of view, 5-15 Hz user-selectable frame rate and over 1.3 million points per second output rate, the HDL-64E provides all the distancing sensing data you'll ever need.

That's pretty interesting. I would have thought that they needed data at a faster rate than 15fps.




That is interesting! Looking into it, the estimated response time to an unexpected event for an average human driver is 1.9 seconds (i.e. time to notice, look, evaluate, decide, react).[1] Of that, 50 ms or 1/20th of a second goes to just processing the visual chemical stimulus into a usable signal.[Awesome Dinosaur Comics link] So if the robocar is getting a frame every 66 ms, that's probably not a significant factor making it better or worse than a human driver -- it's certainly not the key factor to optimize. On the plus side, the robocar is constantly looking in all directions rather than having to refocus on unexpected events, and can send signals to the car instantly, so it saves a couple hundred ms on each end. It probably ends up with a good bit more time than an average human to make decisions.

Of course the robocar isn't allowed to drive like an average human. It'll have to drive like a perfect human. Seems like that should be doable.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=YkNY6gjxnMIC&lpg=PA396 [Awesome Dinosaur Comics link]http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1806


I expect the forward and rear radar, well, the forward radar, are used on the highway where faster updates are necessary.

Human reaction time is only about 5-10fps, so its not like 15fps sensor acquisition is worse (assuming the machine can react very quickly once it has sensor input.)




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