Autonomous Vehicles - KPIT

I. Background
Human beings have been driving cars since
as early as the seventeenth century. Most of
us have driven a car from one place to other.
Cars have become a convenient and
preferred mode of transport for people all over
the world. However, the increase in number of
vehicles has also increased the number of
accidents and casualties. Some statistics by
'Association of Safe International Road Travel'
on road accidents have been listed below:
lNearly 1.3 million people die in road
crashes each year, on average 3,287
deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million
are injured or disabled.
lRoad traffic crashes rank as the 9th leading
cause of death and account for 2.2% of all
deaths globally.
lOver 90% of all road fatalities occur in low
and middle-income countries, which have
less than half of the world's vehicles.
lRoad crashes cost USD $518 billion
globally, costing individual countries from
1-2% of their annual GDP.
lUnless action is taken, road traffic injuries
are predicted to become the fifth leading
cause of death by 2030.
Table 1 shows the percentage break up for
different reasons which caused the accident
and percentage break up for people who were
injured in the accident.
Table 1: Percentage Break-up
Based on these statistics, it has become very
important to come up with solutions for road
and vehicle safety. One of the proposed
solutions could be the use of autonomous
vehicles. The current century has presented
cars that drive human being from one place to
other. Autonomous vehicles are the topic of
research and everyone is trying their best to
move closer to bringing fully autonomous
vehicles on road. In the next couple of
decades, we will see autonomous vehicles on
the road everywhere.
II. Introduction
Everyone who has driven a car knows how
and what it takes to drive a car. Various
functions and aspects of the human body are
utilized when we drive a car. When we drive a
car, we use our brain, our nervous system, our
senses, our reflexes, our thoughts and our
intuitions. Our brain is the CPU which receives
messages from all over the body and
transmits them through the nervous system to
the proper body parts, which act upon it. The
thoughts in our brain are only ours and
completely secure, the instructions given by
the brain to different body parts are fail-safe
and the execution is instantaneous. By using
all of these, we are able to drive well in various
traffic conditions and various terrains.
Human beings are able to multi task while
driving a car we can drive and talk on the
phone, we can drive and listen to music, we
can drive and look around, we can drive and
surf the internet and so on. While doing all this,
we are still able to concentrate on our driving
as our senses and reflexes are tuned to the
vehicle speed, the traffic, the surroundings,
the road signs, etc.
For an autonomous vehicle to be successful, it
needs to emulate the human system. The
autonomous vehicle needs to have a brain, a
nervous system, various senses, thoughts
and reflexes just like the human body to
process information and data from various
sources and undertake multiple tasks. The
autonomous vehicle needs to have an ECU as
efficient and intelligent as the human brain, a
processing system as strong as the human
nervous system, sensors as sharp as the
human senses and data and information as
secure as the human thoughts- which no one
can hack.
14 TechTalk@KPIT, Volume 6, Issue 4, 2013