flight

l... https://images.nvidia.com/content/tegra/automotive/images/20... I mention that paper so often in these kinds of discussions, that I am sure people are getting sick of it. Note that in that paper, only a single camera is used - like driving with one eye closed (or blind in one eye), yet it still was able to do so properly. Part of Nvidia's purpose here is to advance self-driving vehicles, but they also are trying to sell self-driving vehicle manufacturers on their tech as well: http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html If the need for expensive and exotic LIDAR systems can be overcome, and simpler systems like cameras and radar can instead be used, it will both be a cheaper way to manufacture these cars, as well as being more reliable (as the article noted, it's one thing to make a LIDAR - making a reliable LIDAR for automotive use over 100s of thousands of miles/kilometers is a different ball-o-wax - but manufacturers already have experience with making radar and cameras for vehicles robust). For another take on using cameras for autonomous navigation - there's this project using high-speed winged drones (and completely open source - including the drone design files): http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/mit-drone... https://github.com/andybarry/flight That one only uses a couple of small cameras for stereo vision. These two projects (and others if you care to search) both show that such a system is possible; we probably don't need LIDAR for the majority of driving scenarios. Radar can probably cover other areas, and you mention the concept of humans using hearing - but honestly I am not aware of any self-driving vehicle research on that potential kind of sensing, but if none exists, it seems like it might be a fascinating and promising area of study for someone! Audio sensors would also be another one of those "simple and robust" sensors for automobile usage that manufacturers would like. That said: If they can make a simple but robust LIDAR system, with no moving parts (such designs do exist, like flash LIDAR, for instance), and a low-cost (that part is key), having that on a vehicle certainly can't hurt. There are areas (particularly at night, or in inclement weather, or in other low-visibility situations) where a camera alone will have a similar trouble as a human would (though I wonder if a camera operating at other wavelengths (FLIR, Near-IR, and Near-UV for instance) could help?) In those situations, having a LIDAR might be the key to a safer driving experience for a self-driving vehicle, whereas a human without that ability might make a wrong (and potentially fatal) decision.