Tesla Autopilot detects and avoids family of ducks caught on video, owner says

A Tesla owner claims that Tesla Autopilot detected and avoided a family of ducks in the middle of the road and the whole incident was caught on the TeslaCam.

At a presentation about Tesla’s latest self-driving and computer vision capability earlier this year, Tesla Sr. Director of AI Andrej Karpathy said that they are currently working to identify and react to corner case scenarios that vehicles encounter on the road.

Karpathy says that they are pooling a lot of different rare events from their entire fleet of vehicles equipped with cameras in order to teach their Autopilot system to react to them.

With the release of TeslaCam, Tesla’s integrated dashcam feature, we are starting to see some more examples of these corner cases.

Earlier this year, we saw a video of Tesla Autopilot stopping for a rabbit on the road.

Now a Tesla owner claims that Tesla Autopilot managed to detect a family of ducks crossing the road and initiated the action to avoid them:

Electrek’s Take

Like the claims of Autopilot causing accidents, I like to take these with a grain of salt. Some owners are understandably not sure whether or not Autopilot initiated an action or not.

However, it does appear that Tesla is improving in detecting and avoiding objects on the road, which is a very important part of achieving full self-driving.

We have also recently noticed an increase in Tesla owners reporting Autopilot doing impressing maneuvers to prevent accidents.

A Tesla Model 3 owner claimed ‘Autopilot saved his life’ by swerving away in a near-miss on the highway and another similar incident was also caught on video earlier this year.

Later, we reported on a Tesla owner claiming that Autopilot saved his family from a crash in a near-miss caught on video.

The fact that Tesla introduced its TeslaCam feature also helps people record those events.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of near-misses, they will never be as popular as crash videos even though they are most-likely happening way more often.

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