Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter
The U.S. automaker Tesla started Monday rolling out the 10.13 version of its Full Self Driving (FSD) technology bringing improvements related to in-lane positioning on wide residential roads, lane recall, animal detection recall, and more. In early June, the CEO Elon Musk tweeted the version would “smooth out intersection control, especially long lefts, and starts to handle roads with no map data at all”.

Check the list of the improvements below.
- Improved decision making for unprotected left turns using better estimation of ego’s interaction with other objects through the maneuver.
- Improved stopping pose while yielding for crossing objects at “Chuck Cook style” unprotected left turns by utilizing the median safety regions.
- Made speed profile more comfortable when creeping for visibility, to allow for smoother stops when protecting for potentially occluded objects.
- Enabled creeping for visibility at any intersection where objects might cross ego’s path, regardless of presence of traffic controls.
- Improved lane position error by 5% and lane recall by 12%…
- Improved lane position error of crossing and merging lanes by 22% by adding long-range skip connections and a more powerful trunk to the network architecture.
- Improved pedestrian and bicyclist velocity error by 17%, especially when ego is making a turn, by improving the onboard trajectory estimation used as input to the neural network.
- Improved animal detection recall by 34% and decreased false positives by 8% by doubling the size of the auto-labeled training set.
- Improved detection recall of far away crossing vehicles by 4% by tuning the loss function used during training and improving label quality.
- Improved the “is parked” attribute for vehicles by 5% by adding 20% more examples to the training set.
- Upgraded the occupancy network to detect dynamic objects and improved performance by adding a video module, tuning the loss function, and adding 37k new clips to the training set.
- Reduced false slowdowns around crosswalks by better classification of pedestrians and bicyclists as not intending to interact with ego.
- Reduced false lane changes for cones or blockages by preferring gentle offsetting in-lane where appropriate.
- Improved in-lane positioning on wide residential roads.
- Improved object future path prediction in scenarios with high yaw rate.
- Improved speed limit sign accuracy on digital speed limits by 29%, on signs with difficult relevance by 23%, on 3-digit speeds by 39%, and on speed limit end signs by 62%. Neural network was trained with 84% more examples in the training set and with architectural changes which allocated more compute in the network head.
“[The] car will navigate to a pin location, even if in a complex surface parking lot or hotel entrance. When in covered or underground parking lots, car will have to navigate using only inertial measurement, wheel movement & vision, as GPS signal is no longer available,” Tesla’s CEO tweeted in early June.
Tesla Full Self Driving technology “actively guides the car from a highway’s on-ramp to off-ramp, including suggesting lane changes, navigating interchanges, automatically engaging the turn signal and taking the correct exit,” Tesla says.
Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter