Autonomous Vehicles - KPIT

I. Introduction
In the past century mainly two types of
industries enjoyed glamor. The first one was
cinema, which has retained its numero Uno
Position even now, and the second one was
automotive. Automotive industry thrives on
developments in other disciplines. Today there
is a major development taking place in
electronics, computers, embedded systems,
and software applications. The automotive
industry is taking a big leap to embrace
technological advancements in web
technology, telecommunications, faster
processing power, more stable and reliable
image processing applications. It is on the brink
of a new technological revolution simply put as
“Self Driving Vehicles”.
It is well over a century now that we have
invented, pioneered, and driven cars at our will.
However, as dramatic as it may sound, the fact
is that for the majority today, the car has
transformed from a symbol of power to nothing
but a mere contraption. To top it, driving today
brings out the worst in drivers; and is beyond a
doubt, one of the major causes of human
fatality. Efforts are on to develop intelligent
traffic controls, prevent accidents, incorporate
s o p h i s t i c a t e d s e n s o r s a n d s e n s i n g
mechanisms for the car to 'know' its
surroundings, assist the driver, and (in some
cases) control the car. However, as long as
there is a human behind the wheel,
assist/control systems cannot completely
eliminate accidents that are caused due to
driver fatigue, recklessness, drowsiness etc.
The irony lies in the fact that the cars that we
created can be driven at a stretch for a much
longer time interval than typical biological
human endurance levels. Having said this, the
future does look promising.
We have now provided intelligent sensing and
high processing capability to the car. In addition,
we have also 'wired' the brain of the car so that it
can understand what the sensed data means,
how to interpret it, and how to analyze the data
in order to 'know' its surroundings. With this
powerful combination of sensors, processors
and algorithms, we have been successful to
evolve the car with 'contraption' into an
'autonomous' car.
II. Future of Autonomous Vehicles
The concept of autonomous driving has caught
attention from different strata of consumers and
technologists alike. The wide spread coverage
of Google's fleet of autonomously driven Toyota
Prius vehicles have now convinced people
beyond a doubt that this technology is not too far
away from voluminous acceptance. There are
still noteworthy limits to the state of the art as far
as autonomous (self-driving) vehicles are
concerned. Some of the areas that need to be
looked into at a much deeper level are stated
below and elaborated.
A. Safety of Passengers
Only if proven beyond a doubt that self-driving
cars are very reliable, and they actually have the
potential to reduce the number of accidents and
economic losses. There is a possibility of
technical issues, software glitches, and other
issues that need to be closely monitored. In
addition, the car needs to follow all traffic rules
and oblige to all critical safety constraints. We
remember someone jovially saying that if a
traffic cop gets hold of a self-driving car that has
just broken a signal, who would he penalize –
the car, the passengers, the OEM, or the
software provider. Jovial as it may sound, but
the fact of the matter remains that new
legislation, rules, regulations and standards
need to come in place. It is also debatable if the
strictly 'algorithm' following self-driving car can
actually (and reliably) drive in environments that
are actually chaotic with the current
conventional cars with human beings as
drivers. In addition, one more aspect of selfdriving
cars is the absence of human judgment.
Though powerful computers in the cars do
faster processing than human beings, it still
lacks the 'human feel' element in it. As an
example, what would a self-driving car do if a
child suddenly comes onto the road without
prior warning? Would it decide to move itself
into a different lane and risk life of the
passengers in the car? What if the classification
was wrongly done by the car – wherein it was in
fact an animal, and wrongly interpreted as a
human child? This would not just be a
technological issue but it would also be a
legal/legislative issue when we consider mass
usage of self-driving cars on roads.
The Technological S curve that depicts failure
distance for autonomous vehicle technology is
as shown in the Fig. 1. As per David Stavens,
who obtained his PhD under the guidance of
Prof. Sebastian Thrun – the director of
Stanford's AI laboratory, if the mean failure
distance for a self-driving car reaches the order
of a million miles or more, it would be more
commercially viable and would enable it poised
for use in the mainstream.
Figure 1: Mean failure distance for
autonomous vehicle technology [6]
54 TechTalk@KPIT, Volume 6, Issue 4, 2013