Self Driving cars, or autonomous vehicles, have the capability to sense its environment and navigate without human control. They use GPS, computer vision, odometry, radar, and lidar to detect their surroundings. Autonomous vehicles are able to navigate past, in between, or around cars on the road through control systems that analyze sensory data surrounding them. These vehicles are so popular right now because of all the potential advantages they could provide. Among the possible benefits is the potential reduction of traffic collisions caused by human errors. Other advantages include no age parameters for driving, higher speed limits, smoother rides, less traffic, and it could reduce car theft with the use of voice and fingerprint lock. In order to trust self-driving cars to transport us, we must understand how they operate.
Professor Sebastian Thrun, from Stanford University, guides the Google self-driving car project, and claims the heart of the self-driving car is the laser range finder mounted on the roof of the car. The Velodyne 64-beam laser is allows the car to map its surroundings by producing a 3D map of the surrounding environment. The car's control system uses the Velodyne laser to respect traffic laws and avoid obstacles by integrating the measurements from the laser with high resolution maps of the world to produce data models of the area its driving in. Self-driving cars also have radars on each side on the car, cameras to detect light traffic and pedestrians, and a GPS that determines where the car is going. Tesla recently launched their self-driving ability in their cars and for the most part it's been a success, except for one major accident that still ended up determining it wasn't the self-driving system's fault. I believe this is an important technology for the future that incorporates a lot of computer science programming and coding into these self-driving control systems.
How Google's self-driving cars work.
References:
https://youtu.be/YXylqtEQ0tk
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#History
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