Progress in Self Driving Cars
By: Syona Gupta
Imagine stepping your car on your daily commute. You plug in the location and sit and back relax. Perhaps you read a book, watch a movie, or get a few hours of sleep. That sounds amazing but obviously self-driving cars are way in the future. Think again, autonomous cars may not take that long.
There are 5 different levels of autonomous cars with 0 being no automation and 5 being completely autonomous. The types of autonomous cars that we want and I just discussed were levels 4 and 5.
With humans not needed to drive these self-driving cars, the number of car crashes will significantly go down. According to the https://www.thewanderingrv.com, over 1.25 million people die from car crashes each year but with self-driving cars, the number will go significantly down.
Numerous companies are competing to make the first self-driving car. With this, there have been many different approaches to this.
- LIDAR
LiDAR, short for light detection, works by using laser lights to survey areas. The laser lights hits its objective and then measures the amount of time it takes for the laser light to bounce back. LiDAR then uses this information to try to illustrate the surroundings. LiDAR is being used by companies such as Waymo and Uber.
2. Computer Vision
Computer vision is another tool used to approach self-driving cars. Computer vision is being used a Tesla. Computer vision uses Artificial Intelligence for self-driving. Specifically, computer vision uses machine learning to see and understand images similar to how humans perceive things. It uses bounding boxes to classify things and estimate its size. YOLO is an example of a computer vision algorithm.
Self-driving cars are coming soon but not anytime in 2020 or 2021. The pandemic has not stopped the progress for these cars.
Many companies are trying to make self-driving cars a part of our near future. One example of this is at Tesla as they just recently finished making a training system for self-driving cars.
For now, we are just going to have to settle with our regular cars and only dream of what the future may be like.