preface

We can often see self-driving cars and planes in movies and TV works. Nowadays, self-driving cars have gradually become mature and have been applied to our daily life. Now, self-driving technology has become the latest development direction of the entire automobile industry.

The definition of a self-driving car

Autonomous vehicles (Autonomous vehicles; Self-driving automobile, also known as driverless car, computer-driven car, or wheeled mobile robot, is an intelligent vehicle that realizes driverless driving through a computer system. It has a history of several decades in the 20th century, and appears to be close to practical trend in the early 21st century.

Autonomous vehicles rely on artificial intelligence, visual computing, radar, surveillance and global positioning systems to work together to allow computers to operate vehicles safely and automatically without any human initiative.

The development course

Self-driving cars are not a new concept, they have a long history of nearly 100 years. In the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, in August 1925, a wireless remote control car named “American Miracle” was officially unveiled. This car was operated by Francis P.Houdina, an electronic engineer in the United States Army, to remotely control the steering wheel, clutch, brake and other components of the vehicle by radio control. It’s a far cry from “self-driving,” but it’s the first documented self-driving car in human history.

Google’s self-driving car received its first self-driving vehicle license in the United States in May 2012 and is expected to go on sale between 2015 and 2017.

In mid-to-late December 2014, Google unveiled its first fully functional self-driving prototype.

In May 2015, Google announced that it would test its self-driving cars on the roads of Mountain View, California, in the summer of 2015.

In April 2014, Chinese search engine and Internet giant Baidu Inc. and BMW AG announced the start of a self-driving research project, testing it on the complicated expressways of Beijing and Shanghai.

The technical principles of autonomous driving vehicles

Autonomous vehicle technology includes video cameras, radar sensors and laser rangefinders to understand the traffic around them and navigate the road ahead using a detailed map gathered from a manned car. All this is done through Google’s data centres, which process the vast amount of information the cars collect about the surrounding terrain. In this regard, self-driving cars are the equivalent of remote-controlled cars or smart cars in Google’s data centers. Automotive autonomous driving technology is one of the applications of Internet of things technology.

The level of automation distinguishes four stages of unmanned driving: driver assistance, partial automation, high automation and full automation:

1. ** Driver Assistance System (DAS) : ** The purpose of the DAS is to assist the driver, including providing important or useful driving-related information and giving clear and concise warnings when the situation begins to become critical. Such as “lane departure warning” (LDW) system.

2, ** Partial automation system: ** The system that can automatically intervene when the driver receives warning but fails to take corresponding action in time, such as “automatic emergency Braking” (AEB) system and “emergency Lane Assistance” (ELA) system, etc.

3, ** highly automated system: ** can replace the driver in a long or short period of time to assume the responsibility of controlling the vehicle, but still requires the driver to monitor the driving activities of the system.

4, ** fully automated system: ** can driverless vehicle, allow all occupants of the vehicle to engage in other activities without monitoring the system. This level of automation allows for computer work, rest and sleep, and other recreational activities.

conclusion

The current application scenarios of autonomous vehicles include

  • Self-driving taxi

  • The main logistics

  • No distribution

  • There is no sanitation

  • No bus

  • Closed park Logistics

  • Autonomous valet parking

Although these application scenarios have not been popularized, but have gradually infiltrated into our life, I believe that the popularization of knowledge of these application scenarios is a matter of time.