Wednesday 29 November 2017


What’s required to make a self-driving car work??

I am sure many of us are curious on how a car or lorry can function if there is no driver inside it. Okay, let’s take a look on how it will work.
In certain country, they have tried to undergo this technology for example Volvo has been working on self-driving technology under the guise of safety features for years and has explored the idea of road trains for commercial vehicles, where front lorry guides a convoy.

The Process – How It Will Work


The bulk of the technology required for driverless car which is not all futuristic, but it is the combination of different sensors with advanced computer vision systems that makes it works. Many of vehicle use Lidar (light detection and ranging). The function is to rotating laser, usually mounted on the roof, that continually scans the environment around the car. Besides that, traditional radar is also used for detecting distances to objects and cars, as are various cameras, accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS, which are all used in conjunction to build a 3D picture of the environment around the vehicle.




Those picture shows the example of Lidar which it can detect and scan the environment around the car. To be more understand, Lidar technology allows for high accuracy, larger coverage areas and increased speed and efficiency of data collection.

Next, the most difficult or complex part is the software that collects all the data, analyses it and actually drives the vehicle. The system must be capable to recognise and differentiating between cars, bikes, people, animals, and other objects as well as the road surface, where the car is in the build-in maps and can be able to react to an often unpredictable environment. If the system is failed function well, the vehicles might face the problem just not for the car but also the surrounding. It might be harmful to other people or environment. But with the help of the system that already implement in the car such as anti-lock brakes, cruise control, lane assist, and active parking assist, it can give a help for the system.

    The example of lane assist 


Other than that, we can use sensors which can give information to the GPS, cameras, radar. For cameras, it let the car’s computers see what’s around it. For the radar, however, allows the vehicle to see up to 100 meters away in the dark, rain or snow. If we use this sensor, it will provide you the raw information and the computer will work for it. These sensors are necessary because driverless car are adapting to a human driven world. Then in the future all cars would be able to talk to each other in a connected vehicle environment.



The example of radar.





The illustration on how
 the sensor works

No comments:

Post a Comment

 What will happ en in th e futur e? Driv e r, is it valid in 2022? Self-driving car prototype has no steering wheel, brake or accelerato...