In a blog post titled "Upgrading Autopilot," Tesla (TSLA) outlined the enhancements coming to version 8.0 of its Autopilot feature:
"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... After careful consideration, we now believe it can be used as a primary control sensor without requiring the camera to confirm visual image recognition."
The company goes on to describe several challenges in radar technology, saying:
"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 dips underneath, this often looks like a collision course. The navigation data and height accuracy of the GPS are not enough to know whether the car will pass under the object... 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 compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database. If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist. When the data shows that false braking events would be rare, the car will begin mild braking using radar, even if the camera doesn't notice the object ahead. As the system confidence level rises, the braking force will gradually increase to full strength when it is approximately 99.99% certain of a collision."
Additional upgrades in Autopilot 8.0 include "much more prominent" interface alerts and an inability to reengage Autosteer until the car is parked if the user ignores repeated warnings.
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