| The first step to good self-driving is full profiling of the terrain and road ahead, along with any obstacles. We did that in the DARPA Grand Challenge, and so did almost all the other teams. That's essential to off-road driving. That tells you where you can physically go. That was figured out by 1985. It's mostly a sensor problem. Next comes recognizing where the road wants you to go (lane markings and such), which works reasonably well now, especially if you have mapping information. That's automatic lane keeping. All the major manufacturers have that working. Then comes dealing with other road users. Google is putting a lot of effort into this, with some success. See Urmson's video from SXSW. Looking ahead, we need somewhat better and much cheaper sensors. The rotating Velodyne thing is still too clunky and too expensive. LIDARs that deal with rain and fog can be built; you need to get back more info than just the first return. "First and last" return is helpful; you'll get a solid "last" return from a hard obstacle in the rain, while "first" looks like noise. That technique is used in aerial LIDAR scans to get both the top of vegetation (the first return) and the ground surface (the last return). It's also possible to range gate through fog. Here's some range-gated imagery.[1] Solid-state flash LIDAR may be the way to go. Units today are still about $60K, but that's a consequence of low production quantity. The custom imaging ICs aren't inherently expensive. There's a startup claiming to do this, but their web site is all hype, no shipping products.[2] (Pro tip: Calling yourself "The leader in 3D sensing" when you haven't shipped makes you look fake.) Automotive is now using mostly 77 GHz radars. That's almost good enough if you have scanning in both elevation and azimuth. Even at 77GHz, you can see bicycles and people. Really good 3D radar plus vision might be good enough for serious automatic driving. Existing low-end 2D narrow vertical angle radar just keeps you from rear-ending the car in front. [1] http://www.obzerv.com/webfolder_download/bb0e026522747b003d9...
[2] http://www.quanergy.com/ |