Autonomous Vehicles - KPIT

Guest Editorial
Dr. K. P. Soman
Centre for Excellence in
Computational Engineering
and Networking,
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham,
India
In 1953, US Air Force drew a plot on a piece of paper, the rate of change of aerospace industry in US starting from wright
brothers. The curve rose exponentially starting from thirties and as per the curve a trip to the moon was possible within the
next two decades. But nobody then knew how to achieve the feat with the prevailing technology. The curve proved to be
right, though not politically, as USSR put the first satellite into space in 1957. It was followed by a series of manned and unmanned
moon-mission by both USSR and US culminating in the historic landing of man on the moon in 1969, four years
ahead of predicted date. Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler in their book “Abundance – The future is better than you
think” draw similar curves for us to peek into the future. As per the book, mankind is going to enter into a new phase of
civilization in which many resources which we assumed will be scarce forever is going to be abundant. Once aluminum –
the third most abundant element on the earth's crust- was a costly metal but the emergence of the technology of
“Electrolysis” enabled us to “access” it, almost freely. An array of exponentially growing and enabling technologies are now
converging on to make Energy, drinking Water, Health care and Education“accessible”to all at no cost (almost). A similar
picture of the future can also be seen in the book “Makers, the new industrial revolution” by Chris Anderson. Solar and
Synthetic algae (producing hydro carbons) based power sources are likely to be the main motive force of vehicles in the
near future. Space exploration – land, under water and interplanetary – will be one of the major occupation of the future
generation.
Though there are several driving forces behind this revolution, ever spreading Internet, open source culture, DIY (Do It
Yourself) movement and crowd funding (like kickstarter) are the main drivers. Web democratized the tools both of invention
and of production. It brought people with similar ideas together. It also brought people with ideas for product/services and
people with money for the same product/services bringing out the so called “network effect”. One such network effect is
ever spreading crowd funding movement where a few individuals could beat multinational organizations on innovative
product development with the cost unimaginable to multinationals. The “rising billions” – the common man with internet
access whose ideas were never accessed so far for innovation are going to be main source of future innovations – not the
top universities and giant R&D organizations- in this new world order. Ideas are biological in nature. It meet, mate and
mutate producing new innovations. More the interactions, more the pace of innovations. Internet is enabling such
interactions on a global scale.
How is this going to impact automotive industry? The ability to go where we want, whenever we want is an eternal dream of
the mankind. Self-driving vehicles will make that dream a reality. Mankind may achieve this target by 2020. The
implications of such systems would be profoundly disruptive for almost every stakeholder in the automotive ecosystem.
Companies are already into developing sensor-based, driver-assisted solutions, which use stereo cameras, lasers,
LIDARS and software and complex algorithms “to compute the three-dimensional geometry of any situation in front of a
vehicle in real time from the images it sees”. Connectivity based system that uses wireless technologies to communicate in
real time from vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and from vehicle to infrastructure (V2I), and vice versa is other path to know the
environment. What is needed further is the convergence of these solutions and a human-like cognitive system for learning
and taking decisions on the spot. Current, Artificial intelligence systems cannot yet provide that level of inferential thinking
though Google achieved it partially with exorbitant cost.
The hurdles in the path of convergence are 1) improved positioning technology, 2) high resolution mapping, 3) reliable and
intuitive man-machine interface, and 4) standardization. A look at the video in youtube titled “Spy drone can see what you
are wearing from 17,500 feet” is already a viable solution to the first two hurdles especially in crowded cities. Further
innovation by the “rising billions”, probably through balloon based multi-camera surveillance or similar system can provide
ultra low cost solutions. The research in “deep learning networks” and ever-increasing computational capabilities of
modern day computers is forging ahead to solve the problems in inference thinking. At present computational capability of
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our lap-top computers are of the order of 10 where as human brains have capability of the order of 10 . Moore's law then
indicate that it only takes 30 years for computers to become more powerful than human beings putting the upper limit for an
autonomous vehicle to happen in 30 years. Wish all of you a happy ride on that type of car to your dreamland.
2 TechTalk@KPIT, Volume 6, Issue 4, 2013