Tesla is actively striving to develop an Autopilot that will fully and independently drive a car without human intervention. In general, autopilot is much safer than a human-pilot, so the company's desire is reasonable and justified.

Tesla’s new patent 'System and methods for training machine models with augmented data' generally relates to systems and methods for training data in a machine learning environment and, in particular, to increasing training data by including additional data, such as sensor characteristics, in the training data set.

This patent describes a system that teaches a computer model of images that have been enlarged to support the camera properties of the originally captured images. These camera properties may include internal or external camera properties. They can affect the camera’s appearance with respect to objects and other aspects captured on the image, while adding augmented images to the training data. The extension can provide a generalization and greater reliability of forecasting the model, especially when the images are foggy, closed or otherwise do not provide a clear idea of ​​the detected objects. These approaches can be especially useful for detecting objects in autonomous vehicles.

As an additional example, images can be supplemented with a “cut” function that removes part of the original image. Then, the deleted part of the image can be replaced with other image content, such as the specified color, blur, noise or other image.

Thus, a computer model can be trained with images and augmented images and distributed to a device having the characteristics of a camera of captured images to use the model in the analysis of sensors. In particular, this data addition and model training can be used for models trained to detect objects or bounding boxes in images.

Tesla seeks to launch the Robotaxi fleet by the end of 2020, but for this the company's cars must have Full Self-Driving and be able to drive without human intervention. That is why the company's cars collect data all the time and transmit it to Tesla, who, using various methods, and trains its cars completely independent driving. Patents show that the company is very successful in achieving its goals.