Autonomous Vehicles

Must know

1. General Motors buys Cruise to fancy autonomous vehicle

2. Autonomous taxis in Singapore

3. Google sibling Waymo launches fully autonomous ride-hailing service

4. Uber's self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh

An autonomous car (also known as a driverless car, self-driving car, robotic car, autos) and unmanned ground vehicle is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input.

Autonomous cars use a variety of techniques to detect their surroundings, such as radar, laser light, GPS and computer vision.

Advanced control systems interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage.Autonomous cars must have control systems that are capable of analyzing sensory data to distinguish between different cars on the road.

How autonomous vehicle work

Technology behind Autonomous Vehicles

Modern self-driving cars generally use Bayesian Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms, which fuse data from multiple sensors and an off-line map into current location estimates and map updates. SLAM with detection and tracking of other moving objects (DATMO), which also handles things such as cars and pedestrians, is a variant being developed at Google. Simpler systems may use roadside real-time locating system (RTLS) beacon systems to aid localisation. Typical sensors include lidar, stereo vision, GPS and IMU. Visual object recognition uses machine vision including neural networks. Udacity is developing an open-source software stack.

Waymo is an autonomous car development company and subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. On November 7, 2017, Waymo announced that it had begun testing driverless cars without a safety driver at the driver position. There is still an employee in the car.