Tesla Semi program Director teases main enhancements

Tesla is aiming to fight a standard Full Self-Driving drawback with a brand new patent.

One concern with Tesla’s vision-based strategy is that daylight glare can change into a difficult ingredient of on a regular basis journey. Full Self-Driving is actually an incredible expertisehowever there are nonetheless issues Tesla is aiming to determine with its growth.

Sadly, this can be very tough to get round this concern, and even people want methods to fight it once they’re driving, as we generally use sun shades or solar visors to provide us higher visibility.

Cameras clearly don’t have these methods to struggle sunglare, however a brand new patent Tesla lately had printed goals to struggle this by way of a “glare protect.”

Tesla writes within the patent that its autonomous and semi-autonomous automobiles are closely reliant on digicam programs to navigate and work together with their atmosphere.

The flexibility to see environment is essential for correct efficiency, and glare is one ingredient of interference that has but to be confronted.

Tesla described the patent, which is able to make the most of “a textured floor composed of an array of micro-cones, or cone-shaped formations, which serve to scatter incident gentle in varied instructions, thereby lowering glare and bettering digicam imaginative and prescient.”

The patent was first noticed by Not a Tesla App.

The design of the micro-cones is the primary ingredient of the puzzle to struggle the surplus glare. The patent says they’re “optimized in measurement, angle, and orientation to reduce Complete Hemispherical Reflectance (THR) and reflection penalty, enhancing the digicam’s means to precisely interpret visible information.”

Moreover, there’s an electromechanical system for dynamic orientation adjustment, which is able to permit the micro-cones to maneuver primarily based on the angle of exterior gentle sources.

This isn’t the one factor Tesla is mulling to resolve points with daylight glare, because it has additionally labored on two different methods to fight the issue. One factor the corporate has mentioned is a direct photon rely.

CEO Elon Musk mentioned through the Q2 Earnings Name:

“We use an strategy which is direct photon rely. If you see a processed picture, so the picture that goes from the kind of photon counter — the silicon photon counter — that then goes by way of a digital sign processor or picture sign processor, that’s usually what occurs. After which the picture that you just see appears to be like all washed out, as a result of in case you level the digicam on the solar, the post-processing of the photon counting washes issues out.”

Future {Hardware} iterations, like {Hardware} 5 and {Hardware} 6, may additionally combine higher options for the sunglare concern, comparable to impartial density filters or heated lenses, aiming to unravel glare extra successfully.