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2016 has seen the breakthrough of
driverless car and truck technology
into mainstream use. After many years
of Google testing its autonomous cars,
major car makers have started testing
their own engineering prototypes and
regulators have been addressing the
legislative challenges. This has also
led to start-ups being acquired and
new, unexpected players entering the
market, such as ride-sharing pioneer
Uber.
The start of the year saw an A7 from
Audi drive autonomously from San
Francisco to Las Vegas, a 550-mile trip
that kick-started the demonstration
of driverless vehicles in the real
world rather than the lab. January
also saw Ford testing its autonomous
engineering prototypes in Michigan
in the snow, challenging the LiDAR
laser and CMOS camera sensors to
operate in highly reflective and dirty
environments.
Volvo also started trials in Western
Australia and announced plans to
lease driverless cars to the public in
Gothenberg, Sweden. The converted
Volvo XC90 cars are using the DRIVE
PX2 embedded processing card from
NVIDA with the latest Parker processor
to handle the fusion of the sensor data
from cameras, LiDAR and radar. The
Parker chip combines two of NVIDIA’s
second generation 64bit Denver ARM-
based CPU cores paired with four 64-
bit ARM Cortex A57 CPUs. These all
work together to provide up to 1.5
Tflops of performance alongside 256
of the latest graphics processor units
(GPUs).
French start-up Navya rolled out its
autonomous mass transit vehicle,
carrying up to 16 people at a time
around EDF’s nuclear power plant. The
vehicle, also called Navya, uses two
different types of LiDAR for detecting
pedestrians and the road ahead. The
shuttles run every three minutes,
replacing several conventional busses
and saving EDF over €3m a year in
running costs.
Elsewhere in Europe two other mass
transit autonomous systems are
rolling out. The WEpod electric pods,
designed by French manufacturer
EasyMile for the Citymobil2 EU
project, has already transported more
19,000 passengers in Vantaa, Finland,
and Lausanne, Switzerland. And
vehicles from Dutch system-maker
2getthere have also been on the road
in the Dutch city of Masdar. These use
virtual routes, defined in software,
continuously calculating their position
relative to their origin. The distance
is measured by counting the number
of wheel revolutions, and the position
is calibrated using external reference
points from simple, passive magnets
embedded in the road surface. The
small cylindrical magnets are spaced
2m apart and ensure the accuracy
is within 2 cm on straight sections.
This Free Ranging On Grid (FROG)
Autonomous vehicles break through to the
mainstream
Mark Patrick, Mouser Electronics
38 l New-Tech Magazine Europe