With Love, A.I: Self-Driving Cars (Part 3 of 3)

“To self-drive or not to self-drive is not the question” __Madhav SBSS

Sensors play a key role in self-driving cars. Radars are widely used as they are good in different weather and lighting conditions and they are cheap. Lidars are high density sensors but are not cheap and are not good in poor lighting and weather conditions. Cameras are cheap, high density but don’t perform well under poor lighting or weather conditions. Our eyes work in a similar way to the camera, it might be the right device here in mimicking human visual perception.

Here is a visualization of where these sensors are being used today in developing self-driving car technology –

Source: selfdrivingcars.mit.edu

Here is a visual spider web representation of the effectiveness of each type of sensor –

Source: selfdrivingcars.mit.edu

Is driver state detection important in self-driving cars?, isn’t the driver supposed to be free to do whatever they want to do, as if they are sitting on a sofa at home?. Here is a chart from Lex Fridman’s talk on what to track and tracking difficult (increasing) going left to right.

Driver State Detection, source: selfdrivingcars.mit.edu
Challenges at the fork of Full vs Human-centered autonomy
Source: selfdrivingcars.mit.edu

As you can see in the above picture, there are still many areas in red (hard to solve), which means there are plenty of opportunities to make a difference in the field of self-driving cars. Be part of the dream that brings safety and access to humans trying to get from point A to point B.

Here are some of the companies that are worth following if you are interested in self-driving cars, technologies and most importantly the people driving the technology forward.

Companies working on fully autonomous self-driving tech –

Companies working on Human-centered autonomous self-driving tech –

Here are a few resources to further explore self-driving technologies –

Sources:

With Love, A.I: Self-Driving Cars (Part 2 of 3)

“To drive better than humans, autonomous vehicles must first see better than humans.” __Nvidia

How does the technology we briefly reviewed in part 1 of this blog actually work to make self-driving possible? before jumping into how the tech comes together, we should understand the leveling up to become fully autonomous –

Levels of autonomy

Different cars are capable of different levels of self-driving, and are often described by researchers on a scale of 0-5.

6 Levels of Autonomous Driving source: http://www.ukspa.org.uk
Adoption Forecast source: http://www.ukspa.org.uk

What are the challenges and how are they being addressed with AI and Tech. For example, the car needs to be able to “see” what is around it, how fast is it moving, how far is it and do it extremely well in terrible weather or poor lighting conditions, not just in good light. For example, here is a picture of the rearview wide angle camera that shows 3 objects moving, so first, the software on the car needs to see them, then figure out how near to the car they are, while also detecting if they are moving or stationary.

Car uses radar to detect the distance of the objects, radar works by sending out pulses of radio waves and receiving them back as they bounce off the surface of these objects. Using the time it took for them to bounce back and speed at which they travel, one can calculate the distance (S = D/T). Good thing about radar is that it can work in low or zero light conditions. A radar can tell distances and speeds but it cannot tell what the objects are, whether they are humans, animals, vehicles, lamp posts etc. Lidars are being used (360 degree light detection and radiating devices) to get a sense of what the object might be.

There is little research going on in terms of sound and smell. First, focus has been on sight (being able to “see”). Imagine if cars can sense sounds and smells in and around them, wouldn’t that be interesting? I digress….

So, the way cars see is by using the sensors (radars, lidars, cameras). These sensors capture images, distances, 3D mappings of surroundings and that data is fed into the CPU either in the car or the cloud. Software (image recognition, data processing and decision logic) interprets the data and sends commands to the accelerator, brake, steering controls to make decision on navigation, to slow down, brake, turn or speed up.

Sources:

With Love, A.I: Self Driving Cars (Part 1 of 3)

“Google is working on self-driving cars and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don’t have to be that good to be much better” __Marc Andreessen

What’s the big deal with self driving cars anyway. Why do we need them, can’t humans do any work anymore, are we so lazy that we just want to be transported from place to place without lifting a finger? If the car drives itself, what are we going to be doing? watch videos? chat? selfies? read a book? get more work done? Well, these are a few questions that popped up in my mind as I visualize a world where people are not driving their cars but cars are driving people to their destinations.

I was impressed by this image Lex Fridman presented in his MIT Self-driving lecture series on what’s the BFD with self-driving cars

source: MIT Self-Driving Cars Lecture

That’s not the point of this note though, I’d like to explore how Artificial Intelligence is helping cars drive themselves, what are some of the open challenges and how might A.I help solve these problems in the future? How might autonomous cars reduce accidents and give people who can’t drive an option to “drive”.

How AV technology works

There are 3 key things that make a self-driving possible –

  1. Sensors
    1. LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging)
    2. Radar (Radio waves to detect objects, angles, distance etc)
    3. Ultrasonic & Others (Odometer and other “close to vehicle” sensing)
    4. Cameras (To “see” signal lights)
  2. Software (To process all the sensor data)
  3. Connectivity
    1. Internet (to communicate with cloud or other vehicles)
    2. GPS (positioning system so the car knows where it is to the centimeter, which today’s GPS cannot support)

Hear an interesting podcast on the shift to self-driving cars

source: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/how-self-driving-cars-work

Sensors collect millions of data points including objects on the sides, front and back, other moving vehicles nearby.

Software and algorithms process the data collecting through sensors and make decision on acceleration, brake, turns, speed and so on.

Connectivity helps the car “know” road conditions, weather, construction, traffic (is that still going to be an issue? may be not as long as there are no man-made disruptions like construction, drunk person walking across the road, a sleeping cow.

Will self-driving cars look like the cars of today? Perhaps not, there is no need for steering wheel, windows, wipers, mirrors, lights and foot pedals, however, on the flip side, not everything on the car is there only for functionality, some of it is also for esthetic reasons.

So anyway, how does self-driving technology actually work? We will see in Part 2 of this writeup.