Autonomous Vehicle Technology

The convergence of artificial intelligence, cameras, internet, and sensors has given rise to the self-driving car in recent years. Many companies from auto-makers to software companies are invested into the development of this technology. However there is still doubt in whether piloting a vehicle is safer in the hands of humans or AI.

LiDAR technology is what makes it possible for cars to navigate and detect obstacles without human assistance. Austin Russel's new LiDAR technology covered in this article New Technology May Help Self-Driving Cars See Better, claims that competing LiDAR systems are unable to process information fast enough for cars traveling at high speeds. Russel states that "the best performing LiDAR system can only see dark objects no more than 35 meters away," therefore leaving only one second for the car to respond when traveling at high speed. 

Russel believes that Luminar's creation maybe able to make self-driving cars a lot safer. The system enables the car to spot objects up to 200 meters away, even those hard to see such as black cars.

From this article we can tell that self-driving cars are being developed and are steadily becoming more sophisticated and secure. It seems like the day in which your average consumer is slowly approaching, considering a car requires 2 LiDARs at least while a single high-end LiDAR costs more than $75,000 (Rao, 2017)

Currently LiDAR systems are being road tested by many companies such as GM, where 300 units have been deployed (Coldewey, 2017).

Kha Pham.

References:

Coldewey, D. (2017). GM plans to deploy hundreds of autonomous vehicles across the country for testing, Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/gm-plans-to-deploy-hundreds-of-autonomous-vehicles-across-the-country-for-testing/

Rao, L. (2017). New Technology May Help Self-Driving Cars See Better. Available at: http://fortune.com/2017/04/13/luminar/