Self-Driving Cars IEEE Spectrum, Apr 2014

Google's self-driving car Google's Autonomous Cars Are Smarter Than Ever at 700,000 Miles

What's that black box? It would be some sort of camera system with a 360-degree field of view. The cars always had cameras in the front to look for road signs and traffic lights, but detecting something like a cyclist making a hand signal as they blow past you from behind seems like it would require fairly robust vision hardware along with some fast and powerful image analysis software. Or, it could be radar. Or more lasers.

Self-Driving Cars You can Trust Autonomous Emergency Braking Self-Parking Adaptive Cruise Control and Traffic-Jam Assistants Lane Keeping

Autonomous Emergency Braking

Autonomous Emergency Braking (1/2) Humans are still a factor in the adaptation of automatic braking. The remarkable thing about letting a car do the braking for you is not that the car stops. It’s how late the car hits the brakes. 6

Autonomous Emergency Braking(2/2) Now the state of the art is to use more than one type of sensor to cross-check for obstacles. Some complement radar systems with optical cameras. Today’s S-Class has short-range and long-range radar, optical cameras, and ultrasonic detectors for the closest obstacles. Optical cameras can be fooled by sunlight, wet roads, and night, of course, and ultrasonic sensors work only at the shortest ranges and lowest speeds. Certain research vehicles also include lidar, a radarlike system that uses light rather than radio waves. As the instruments grow smaller and cheaper, carmakers may include lidar in production cars as well. 7

Self-Parking 8

Parking could be a difficult job for a fresh driver Carmakers keep trying to simplify the experience of self-parking. Most rely on wide-angle optical cameras that identify a parking space and ultrasonic sensors for close-in obstacle detection. They can now park parallel or perpendicular, as in a parking garage. 9

Adaptive Cruise Control and Traffic- Jam Assistants

Traffic-jam assistants or stop-and-go adaptive cruise control. Lock on to cars with radar, but switch to other sensors in traffic On the A-1 highway north of Madrid, Ford Spain’s press fleet manager, Eusebio Ruiz, locks his car’s radar onto another vehicle perhaps 75 meters ahead. BMW’s X5, 5 Series, and 7 Series can also handle low- speed steering, which is more sophisticated than most so-called lane-keeping aids, which tend to nudge the wheel once before requiring drivers to take over again. 11

Lane Keeping

A decade ago, Toyota’s first lane-keeping system took over the steering wheel and nudged wayward cars back into line when the driver would not. But because these systems relied on cameras and early image-processing algorithms, they worked only where the lines were clear and in good visibility. The Volkswagen Touareg can track a single lane stripe, and the company claims that the car can track lanes in the dark and in the fog. It manages the feat with a single camera, unlike some systems that use stereoscopic cameras or include information from a radar or other additional sensor.claims Stereo vision would give the car’s processors depth perception to a certain distance, and radar might help it work when the sun is low, blinding the camera. Image processing is just the start. A more interesting technical problem is the transition from warning to active control.

Hacking a Car is Easier Than You Might Think Vehicle architecture is shifting from “embedded” to “enabled.” However, the trend from an isolated closed-loop structure to more open systems might be a problem rather than a solution. The increasing complexity introduces security flaws The sophisticated electronic tools to hack cars are inexpensive and sold online. It’s easy to find YouTube videos detailing how to reengineer in-vehicle networks and reset air bags or evenerase crash data. Therefore, how to protect automobiles from malicious attacks, damage, unauthorized access, or manipulation will be the most important issue.