How do autonomous cars work?

Roads filled with self-driving cars may stop existing solely in fantasies and become real, thanks to research innovations in the technology industry.

Advancements needed to produce self-driving cars have been moving quickly, and industry giants predict self-driving cars will soon be available to the public. Nissan, for example, announced it will produce self-driving cars by 2020, while Google is aiming to do so by 2018, according to robohub.org.

Designing a self-driving car is no small feat. The car has to be able to do everything a human driver does, such as navigating, determining its surroundings, predicting what will happen with the surroundings and what the car should do next, according to the website for Google’s Self-Driving Car Project.

To do this, the car uses a global positioning system (GPS), an inertial navigation system (INS) and a series of sensors, according to robohub.org. Information from the GPS and INS are used to position the vehicle while the sensors produce a three-dimensional image of the environment.

GPS works by having satellite signals sent to the vehicle to find the vehicle’s position and velocity. However, this signal can be jammed, the reading is not very precise and can give errors due to background noise and signal reflection, according to a paper submitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

INS uses accelerometers in the vehicle to determine its orientation while still capturing positional information. Using INS and GPS together not only provides redundancy but lets the vehicle continue to navigate when the GPS signal is jammed, decreases noise and gives more accurate information, according to the paper.

A control system is used to make navigation decisions based on the filtered information the vehicle receives from the sensors and positioning systems, according to the site.

Most control systems use designs that make decisions by producing and maintaining a map of their immediate world, and then using it to find the optimal route to the destination while avoiding obstacles such as pedestrians and construction, according to the site.

The path is then broken down into individual commands, controlling the actuators, which determines how the vehicle steers, accelerates and brakes. This whole process is repeated many times every second until the destination is reached, according to the site.

A map of the vehicle’s environment is produced by using sensors such as cameras and lasers. Laser Illuminating Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) shows the vehicle its surroundings by reflecting laser beams off of the objects around the vehicle to determine their distance and size, according to makeusof.com.

LIDAR is extremely accurate for mapping surroundings, but cannot give real time updates on the velocities of surrounding objects. For this reason, radar units are in the front and back of the vehicle, helping prevent the risk of accidents, according to the site.

Cameras are also present not only to provide redundancy, but give the vehicle a sweeping view of its surroundings. This helps provide information such as the dimensionality and depth of objects, according to the site.

The GPS and INS systems provide a broad view of the vehicle’s surroundings while these sensors provide a more in-depth perspective, according to the site. All of the information gathered by these systems is aggregated and used to produce a map.

Obstacles are categorized by the vehicle based on the obstacle’s characteristics, such as the number of wheels and velocity, which are then compared to a preexisting database of obstacles. Knowing the type of obstacle ahead helps determine how the vehicle should react to it, according to the site.

Knowing whether a motorcycle or pedestrian is entering the intersection is important to deciding how to react. The vehicle uses past, present and predicted future paths of all immediate obstacles to determine the best path to take, according to the site.

The vehicle plans its path by first determining a long-range path, such as a major highway to take. It then produces a series of shorter-range paths that can be taken, such as lane changes and making a turn, according to the site.

Safety is taken into consideration when making these decisions, ensuring that the vehicle is actually capable of completing its path given its speed and direction while also avoiding obstacles, according to the site.

The whole process of planning a path, removing unsafe paths and telling the actuators how to behave takes about 50 milliseconds, according to the site.

There are still advancements to be made, such as overcoming limitations in understanding road scenery, functioning in various weather conditions and driving through unstructured detours, such as accidents, according to the site.

Self-driving cars also require new laws to be put into place, as there are inconsistencies across the nation. Companies like Google are pushing for laws to allow self-driving cars to be legal, according to hg.org, a legal resource website.

While pushing for more accepting laws and making new advancements, Google is also proving the worth of self-driving cars, safely driving over 1.5 million miles, according to their website.

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Apple could be building autonomous car in Berlin

Apple has long been believed to be building a self-driving car in secret to compete with the widely-publicized version from Google.

But the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Monday reported that the tech giant has turned to Berlin as the site of an undercover lab to work on the project, citing anonymous “informed sources”.

Between 15 and 20 men and women - “high-fliers from the German car industry” - are working on the project, FAZ further reports, adding that the team of mostly young people aims to have the project finished by 2020.

How believable is it?

“I think it's feasible to find the talent that you'd need [for a self-driving car] in Berlin,” recruiter Mengühan Ünver told The Local.

The founder of tech recruitment platform StartupCVs, Ünver has years of experience in the capital's tech scene, where he had a past incarnation at Google as well as recruiting for his own startup projects.

“You need high-tech talent for something like this, machine learning, visual computing, artificial intelligence,” he went on. “You have that in Berlin, there are very strong tech companies working in this field.”

Apple would likely have hired a headhunting firm bound by confidentiality to quietly find engineers for the project, he speculated, as well as sending some engineers from the USA – perhaps hired away from Tesla or Google - to form the core of the project.

'Engineers' don't just write code

So much for the technology side – but what about the hardware?

Berlin isn't really a hub for the car industry - but “it wouldn't be a problem to bring the people you need from Stuttgart [Daimler and Porsche], Wolfsburg [Volkswagen], Ingolstadt [Audi] or Munich [BMW] – Berlin is a very attractive city for young engineers,” Ünver said.

SEE ALSO: Reports suggest Apple car will be built in Austria

While it's tough to seduce senior managers away from big German companies, he said, young and ambitious engineers are a different story.

But there are two big questions over the Apple rumours: where to hide the lab? And why Berlin?

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Who Responsible When An Autonomous Car Crashes?

Valentine's Day was a bummer in Mountain View, Calif. For the first time, one of Google's self-driving cars, a modified Lexus SUV, caused a crash. Detecting a pile of sandbags surrounding a storm drain in its path, the car moved into the center lane to avoid the hazard. Three seconds later it collided with the side of a bus. According to the accident report, the Lexus's test driver saw the bus but assumed the bus driver would slow down to allow the SUV to continue.

It was not the project's first crash, but it was the first caused in part by nonhuman error (most incidents involve the driverless cars getting rear-ended by human drivers not paying attention at traffic lights). The episode shines a light on an ever looming gray area in our robotic future: Who is responsible—and pays for damages—when an autonomous vehicle crashes?

The sense of urgency to find clear answers to this and other self-driving vehicle questions is growing. Automakers and policy experts have worried that a lack of consistent national regulation would make rolling out these cars across all 50 states nearly impossible. To spur progress, the Obama administration asked the Department of Transportation to propose complete national testing and safety standards by this summer. But as far as the question of accountability and liability goes, we might already be homing in on an answer, one that points to a shift in how the root cause of damage is assessed: When a computerized driver replaces a human one, experts say the companies behind the software and hardware sit in the legal liability chain—not the car owner or the person's insurance company. Eventually, and inevitably, the carmakers will have to take the blame.

Self-driving pioneers, in fact, are starting to make the switch. Last October, Volvo declared that it would pay for any injuries or property damage caused by its fully autonomous IntelliSafe Autopilot system, which is scheduled to debut in the company's cars by 2020. The thinking behind the decision, explains Erik Coelingh, Volvo's senior technical leader for safety and driver-support technologies, is that Autopilot will include so many redundant and backup systems—duplicate cameras, radars, batteries, brakes, computers, steering actuators—that a human driver will never need to intervene and thus cannot be at fault. “Whatever system fails, the car should still have the ability to bring itself to a safe stop,” he says.

The proliferation of vehicles already on the road with partial automation shows how quickly the scenario that Coelingh describes is coming about. A growing number of cars include crash-imminent braking systems, which rely on optics to detect potential front-end impacts and proactively apply brakes. Audi, BMW and others have developed cars that can parallel park themselves. And later this year Volvo will roll out the U.S.'s first semiautonomous highway driving feature, called Pilot Assist, on the 2017 S90 sedan. The system uses a windshield-mounted computer equipped with a camera and radar to automatically accelerate, decelerate, avoid obstacles and stay in a lane at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour.

Features such as Pilot Assist exist in what tech policy expert and University of South Carolina assistant professor Bryant Walker Smith calls the “mushy middle of automation,” where carmakers still require human drivers to pay attention. “It's not always clear where the line between the human and the machine falls,” he says.

For the time being, some automakers are aiming to keep human drivers clearly on the responsible side of that line. General Motors' forthcoming Super Cruise, which will launch on a Cadillac in 2017 and is similar to Pilot Assist, comes with caveats that the human driver must remain alert and ready to take over steering if visibility dips or weather changes. With Pilot Assist, Volvo puts similar onus on the driver; touch sensors on the steering wheel ensure the person remains engaged.

By the time fully autonomous driving becomes a reality, however, carmakers such as Volvo, Mercedes and Google are confident that they will have these technologies—and many more—so buttoned up that they will be able to take the driver out of the operation and liability picture almost entirely. What is more, a 2014 Brookings Institution study found that current product liability law already covers the shift, so the U.S. might not need to rewrite any laws for automation to continue moving forward.

It is a relatively safe bet for driverless carmakers to say they will foot the bill for everything from fender benders to violent crashes because semiautonomy is showing that computer drivers are likely safer than human ones. Data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, for instance, have found that crash-avoidance braking can reduce total rear-end collisions by 40 percent. And Volvo's Coelingh notes that a study of the European version of Pilot Assist revealed that the computer maintains safer follow distances and has fewer harsh braking incidents than human drivers do.

In the long run, “from the manufacturer's perspective,” Smith says, “what they may be looking at is a bigger slice of what we all hope will be a much smaller [liability] pie.”

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Comma.ai snags Tesla engineer to work on autonomous car tech

Comma.ai, the autonomous car startup founded by George Hotz — "Geohot" of iPhone and Playstation hacking fame —has snagged a senior engineer from Tesla. That engineer, Riccardo Biasini, will work on integrating the autonomous software with the car, allowing the computer to control the vehicle, says Forbes.

The company raised $3.1 million earlier this month from Andreessen Horowitz and others, lending some legitimacy to the startup's efforts. Still, $3.1 million won't get you far in the self-driving car world. Nearly every car company has autonomous research underway, with many spending billions of dollars to develop the technology, not to mention huge investments from non-traditional companies like Google and Uber, which have their own self-driving aspirations.

It's possible that Comma.ai has technology that it is looking to develop and then sell to a major carmaker, much like Cruise Automation did with GM earlier this year for a rumored $1 billion.

Hotz has said he wants to develop an aftermarket autonomous driving kit to sell direct to consumers for around $1,000, though it's likely that regulatory bodies from the State of California to NHTSA would have some concerns about such a product, never mind the significant technical hurdles that he'll need to overcome. Still, Comma.ai is making hires and has some cash to burn to try and get there.

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Autonomous Car Successfully Drives Itself 1200 Miles Across China In Six Days

Chinese automaker and Ford's partner Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. announced the successful road trip of its self-driving car. The vehicle traveled from Chongqing in Southwest China to Beijing, which is in the northeast.

The journey covered more than 1,200 miles (almost 2,000 kilometers) and lasted for six days - that's an average of 200 miles (321.8 kilometers) a day. At least two of the company's self-driving cars accomplished the journey where they took routes in a live environment.

In a statement given to the Shenzhen stock exchange, the Chinese automaker said that its self-driving cars have used cameras and radar that allowed the pair to test a number of varying functions. According to the company, the driverless cars were able to assess automatic cruising, assisted driving when there's traffic congestion, lane keeping or changing and speed reduction by way of voice control and traffic sign recognition.

Li Yusheng, the project's chief engineer, said that one car had even reached up to 75 mph on the nation's open highway and managed to adapt to the changing road surface.

"The cars ran up to 120 km per hour on the highway, and adapted to the changing road surface," said Li.

Kong Zhouwei, a car tester, said that when the self-driving cars passed through small tunnels that have dim or zero lighting, their response time was slower. Kong attributed the cars' slow response rate to the difficulty in recognizing the road markings when the cars used their in-vehicle cameras after the external lights changed.

Kong said that the company plans to employ laser radar techniques in order to address this difficulty that the two cars encountered.

Other challenges that were seen during the road test included trucks that seemed wider than the lane and a couple of road sections and gas stations that required the cars to be under assisted driving.

Chongqing joins other Chinese companies such as Baidu, BYD, SAIC Motor, GAC Group and BAIC group in a global race to create self-driving cars with occasional or zero human intervention. The automaker plans to produce self-driving cars designed exclusively for traveling on highways and make them commercially available by 2018. It also plans to mass produce self-driving cars capable enough to navigate the nation's complicated urban roads by 2025.

Around the globe, there are at least 18 companies that are developing autonomous cars. These include Toyota, Audi and BMW to name a few.

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Beverly Hills plans to use autonomous cars for public transport

The swanky California neighborhood of Beverly Hills is planning to introduce a fleet of  self-driving cars to help facilitate public transportation.

Beverly Hills' City Council recently passed a resolution to create the autonomous vehicle program, and is hoping that its efforts will help it gain a reputation as a leader in the self-driving car space.

The idea is that people will use their smartphones to request an autonomous vehicle, which will then take them from point A to point B within the city limits.

The program is still very much in the early stages, but the City Council said in a press statement that they are already working to develop the infrastructure to support autonomous vehicles.

According to a Beverly Hills press statement, the city is currently designing a citywide network of fiber optics cables, which will help smart cars communicate while on the road.

No word yet on what cars will be used in the fleet, but the statement mentions that the city will work to develop relationships with manufacturers of self-driving cars like Google and Tesla.

Beverly Hills, of course, isn't the only city looking to introduce autonomous vehicles into its public transportation system.

Singapore already has a program in place that enables people to hail an autonomous shuttle via smartphone app. Amsterdam has a similar program and London will be introducing a trial this year that uses driverless pods.

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