Autonomous cars are a great and excitingly new leap in the automotive industry, but how does it work? The required equipment that is needed for a car to be completely autonomous is radar, optics, Lidar, GPS also known as Global Positioning System and a processor. Radar is used to detect whether or not there are any dangerous objects ahead within two hundred meters away.
Laird, Jeremy. Are Self Driving Cars Really the Future. Digital image. Tech Radar. N.p., 29 Aug. 2012. Web. 3 Jan. 2015.< http://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/are-self-driving-cars-really-the-future-1093368>.
Optics is used to identify street markers and road signals. Lidar is used to project a three dimensional view of the cars’ surroundings within a specified radius. How Lidar works is it has an emitter inside that directs a laser beam which reflects off a mirror that is rotating, along with the cylindrical housing, at ten revolutions per second. After the laser light bounces off the various objects within its specified radius it returns to the mirror and is sent downward where the light is focused onto a receiver where it can be interpreted into data. Once this is done, the car can then create a map of its general surroundings to know when to avoid specific objects.
Lidar. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Jan. 2015. http://www.cvel.clemson.edu/auto/AuE835_Projects_2011/images/Vallabhaneni_LIDAR.png.
GPS keeps the car on its projected route with an accuracy of up to thirty centimeters. Last but not least, the vehicles will need seven dual-core 2.13 GHz processors and 2 GB of RAM in order to make sense of the data the processors collect (How Autonomous Vehicles Work). TechCrunch also proposes that there will be position sensors on each wheel hub that determine how many wheel rotations have occurred to help the vehicle comprehend its location in the real world (Google’s Self-Driving Car Project). As of right now, as I stated previously, Google has come out with their own prototype that is completely autonomous. With their current technology they can detect an object up to two hundred yards away in all directions (Google’s New Self-Driving Car). Knowing that google has models that are already fully autonomous and can detect objects up to two hundred yards away we can expect in the future that the capabilities of these vehicles will only grow.
"Google’s Self-Driving Car Project Is A World’s Fair Fantasy Turned City Street Reality." TechCrunch. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Dec. 2014.http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/14/googles-self-driving-car-project-is-a-worlds-fair-fantasy-turned-city-street-reality/.
"How Autonomous Vehicles Work." DriveSteadycom. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. http://drivesteady.com/how-autonomous-vehicles-work.
"How Autonomous Vehicles Work." DriveSteadycom. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. http://drivesteady.com/how-autonomous-vehicles-work.