Discussion on starting with more sensors and then reduce as safety is demonstrated.
Waymo gen 6 hardware reduces sensors from the prior generation.
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As a retired control system engineer, what I remember is once you choose your boundary conditions (in this case map/no map, overlap/no overlap of sensors, no redundancy/redundancy) you run your tests and hope to converge. Since the first 3-4 nines are pretty easy, your early results are quite deceptive regardless of your approach. The reality is many times your original decisions mathematically determine whether your approach can converge to inherently safe or not. No one knows when they begin so the sensible [approach is to] overspec in the beginning and prune as necessary when reality converges. In my experience the worst scenario is oops, we should have been measuring pressure and temperature at these locations and our model has a big gap as a result. Back to the drawing board. Much easier to start with 3 pressure transducers and 3 thermocouples and trim them later once the science reveals it was overkill. Installing a plug for the extra sensors when you know is trivial. The opposite is always a nightmare.
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