Tesla Autopilot prevents an average of 40 collisions from drivers accidentally stepping on accelerators instead of brakes every single day, Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Software, Ashok Elluswamy, said during a keynote presentation in June. His talk was uploaded to YouTube on Saturday.
Elluswamy presented some of the Autopilot team’s recent work at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022 in June. The talk largely focused on “Occupancy Networks,” Tesla’s approach to solving general obstacle detection and using it to enable sophisticated collision avoidance.
One product of this approach is that Autopilot is able to detect when the driver accidentally floors the accelerator instead of the brake, which in many cases would cause a collision. In such cases, Autopilot is able to intervene and prevent a collision.
Eluswamy’s presentation included a few videos that showcased this Autopilot capability.
Lot more collisions can be saved but requires more smarts to be both smooth & fast while being safe. Implicit neural networks help with this planning problem by providing quick queries for probability of collision. (8/12) pic.twitter.com/W7cETT1yG9
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) August 21, 2022
Tesla’s work with Occupancy Networks can be similarly used to prevent a lot more collisions. However, Elluswamy stressed that beyond being safe, a self-driving car also needs to be comfortable and reasonably fast.
According to Elluswamy, this technology progression will eventually allow Tesla to “build a car that literally never crashes.”
Elluswamy added that many of the Autopilot team’s latest improvements are shipping out to Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta testers as part of version 10.69. Tesla started rolling out FSD beta 10.69 on Saturday evening.
You can check out Elluswamy’s full keynote presentation below (the section on collision avoidance starts at around the 23-minute mark):
Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD technologies have recently caught some flak from regulators and the U.S. government. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is currently looking into the marketing surrounding these features for being misleading.
