Elon Musk announced that Tesla Vision would soon detect turn signals on other vehicles, hazard lights, police and ambulance lights, and even hand gestures.
The move comes as the automaker tries to cover every possible driving situation on the road to delivering a full self-driving system.
As we reported on Saturday, Tesla finally released its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta v9 software update.
It’s the most significant update to Tesla’s FSD Beta program since it now relies solely on Tesla Vision, the automaker’s computer vision system using only optical images from cameras instead of readings from its radar sensor.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has touted the software update as “mind-blowing” and as having the capacity to improve faster through machine learning.
Now Tesla owners who received the update in the early access program are starting to test it and some have noticed specific improvements, like detecting taillights.
Musk added that Tesla’s vision system would soon also be able to detect more when it comes to lights on vehicles in its surroundings:
“It will soon capture turn signals, hazards, ambulance/police lights & even hand gestures.”
This development is crucial for Tesla’s self-driving system to be able to react to emergency vehicles when needed.
The CEO then added that after detection and rendering of the lights are added to the system, the automaker will add reactions to those new inputs.
Musk also noted that Tesla is working on listening to sirens and alarms.
The automaker has been known to be betting on cameras and neural nets for its self-driving system because it’s the closest thing to the only known driving system today: humans.
Musk told Electrek last month:
“The whole road system is designed to work with optical imagers (eyes) and neural nets (brain). That’s why cameras and silicon neural nets are the solution.”
But some did note that humans don’t just use their eyes since we can also listen to the driving environment. It looks like Tesla is taking a step toward that direction with siren detection.
Tesla is currently only testing FSD Beta v9 in its early access program with roughly 2,000 Tesla owners, but it plans to move the update to a wider release in “about a month” depending on the feedback.
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