Autonomous Driving: Future of Automotives

In this post, we will discuss about the ethical issues of autonomous vehicles: what if an accident happened to human (driver or pedestrian) within or out of the AVs, who to blame, driver, pedestrian, sellers, manufactures or the state (government)? As an engineering student, I couldn’t say I can properly analysis this problem from the ethic point of view, I can more discuss it from technique point and share some of my views. Say, if such accident happens as described in the pre-assignment requirement, the first thing to do is to find out the real reason of causing this accident: is the vehicle really acting as it should be? Or is it because of the poor road and environment condition? Of course the driver Alice should take some responsibility for this accident. Seems that she put too much trust on this autonomous vehicle and even turn into most aggressive mode in bad environment condition. It also could be the reason that seller Bob didn’t fully explain the function of vehicle,...

In this week's CDIO assignment we will look deeper into autonomous vehicles and gain some understanding about the technologies used to achieve autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles are packed with technology. These wide range of technologies can be divided based on their main function area. To properly understand these technology, let's first look at the normal structure of an autonomous vehicle. As a complex intelligent system, the structure of autonomous vehicle or robot are usually divided into three parts: environment detection, decision making and vehicle motion control. Based on these three parts, different technologies are investigated relating to environment sensing, localization, path planning, path following and vehicle dynamic control. Many ADAS systems and functions are a combination of several technologies. For the autonomous vehicle development nowadays, most important focus are on environment sensing, which give the control unit of intelligent enough and ac...

With fast development of automated technologies and computational ability, the aunomous driving of vehicles has become one of the hottest topics among both coventional autonomous companies (eg. GM and Ford) as well as IT companies (eg. Googleand Baidu). The first autonomous driving vehicle system is called "NavLab" from Carnegie Mellon University in USA in 1980s. After the autonmous vehicle competition called "Urban Challenge" in Amercian soon become famous and spread the fast development of autonomous technologies all around the world.  From modifying coventional vehicles to design autonomous systems from beginning of vehicle development, the autonomous driving technologies have seen many impressing breakthroughs over the 30 years. And it is even changing faster these five years than ever. Within this post we will discuss some basic ideas about autonomous driving, like the legal classification of AD (autonomous driving) levels and analysis some example...