Last April, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shocked everyone with the announcement that future autonomous driving wouldn’t even require radar sensors—instead, “pure vision” would lead the way there, i.e. without sufficient artificial intelligence. Evaluate camera images with. Since then, Tesla has debuted in the US with the Model 3 and Model Y. Worldwide pre-installed radar eliminated, However, this departure may not have been intended, as the company has now registered a more modern radar sensor with the responsible authority in the United States.
Tesla’s new radar with a famous name
Tesla’s interest in internal and external development was repeatedly pointed out before CEO Musk announced a complete abandonment of this technology. In October 2020, supervisor @greentheonly drew attention to a product from the Israeli company Arbe Robotics, Which was decided by Tesla on the basis of his assumption: A high-resolution radar sensor that provides a 3D point cloud of the environment, similar to lidar instruments used by most other autonomous developers. And this January, shortly before Musk’s rejection, Tesla itself applied for approval for a new radar sensor.
Its details have been largely classified, as is the new Radar filing that a Twitter user saw this week. At least, according to @greentheonly, you can tell that the frequency of the new sensor (shown in the sketch above) is roughly the same as the Bosch and Continental devices Tesla used in the past. In his estimation, it is an “imaging radar” like Arbe, providing detailed information with high resolution. In fact, Tesla could have used Israeli technology for this, because the new sensor, like its product, is called “Phoenix”.
Frequency analogous to external radars from Bosch and Continental.
The imaging radar we’ve been waiting for? https://t.co/EGxinBMvRA
— green (@greentheonly) 7 June 2022
CEO Musk himself confirmed in August 2021 that current hardware equipment development at Tesla is not the end. “Obviously” there will be a version 2 of an internally developed FSD computer in the future, even though the current one will be at least as safe to drive as a human and maybe even two to three times as safe, they said. I said day. So far With Cybertruck HW4 (ie the fourth computer hardware for the autopilot system)) which is four times as powerful. The Tesla boss also mentioned that new cameras are also planned for the next generation.
Software notice for new Autopilot hardware
Earlier this March, @greentheonly mentioned the HW4 in Tesla Software. The new Autopilot computer is expected to be not only faster and with more memory than previous ones, but also arguably fundamentally different, he wrote based on his limited amount of information. There appears to be no indication of new cameras in the code analyzed, nor a return to radar (in a more modern form). However, the current new sensor registration with the FCC shows that the technology is not yet done for Tesla.
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