Does your Car have A Driver's Licence

People are, on average, terrible drivers. How do you solve this problem? Do not let them drive or put a machine in its place?

- Dilin Anand

Self-driving vehicles are not some futuristic automotive technology that we are yet to see. These are cars from the likes of BMW and Tesla with self-driving features on the road. There are two types that are being tested or that are on the road: semi-autonomous cars that we already see and fully autonomous ones that are expected anywhere between two to 14 years depending on whom you ask. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Google’s Sergey Brin are two people who believe that it will be sooner rather than later.

Chris Urmson, who heads Google’s driverless car programme, said in a talk, “My oldest son is 11, and that means in four and a half years he will be eligible to get a driver’s licence. My team and I are committed to make sure that does not happen.”

So when these arrive, what would enable cars to safely roam our streets by themselves?

Sense of sight

In order for your car to be aware of its surroundings, it first needs to see where it is standing.

LiDAR.

LiDAR, or Light Detection And Ranging, is one of the most popular and actively-used technologies that enable selfdriving cars to see. The most recognised version of LiDAR is the one you see on top of Google’s self-driving cars, and it is HDL-64E.

Velodyne’s HDL-64E enables obstacle detection and navigation with a 360° field-of-view. Enabled by 64 laser beams, this is probably one of the best and most expensive solutions available right now.

Another firm, Quanergy, recently announced a solid-state LiDAR named S3 that has no moving parts or micro-mirrors. Instead, it uses an optical-phased array as a transmitter, which can steer pulses of light by shifting the phase of a laser pulse as it is projected through the array. S3 is due to be available in September.