[W9TR]

I am currently working with a company that is developing the advanced LiDAR sensors needed for autonomous vehicles. The performance today is good enough to detect a black tire sitting on a black road 150m ahead of the vehicle. Pretty impressive.

The cost is coming down significantly - it’s economically viable for large trucks now, autos by 2020 as every Tier 1 supplier is in a race to build the best mousetrap.

The amount of R&D pouring into autonomous driving is staggering.

To a prior post - it is easy to conflate electric vehicles with Autonomous Vehicles because Tesla is doing both and is always in the news.

As for GPS System failure - every autonomous solution has its own 3 axis inertial system running in parallel so if GPS fails for any reason the inertial will safely guide the vehicle for some period of time. These systems also use pulse counting from the wheel sensors on the ABS system to determine vehicle speed and relative position.

GPS is easy to jam but very hard to ‘spoof’ so it is either there or not there. With one exception. The US Gov’t has the ability to degrade GPS system accuracy (selective availability) and does so when the tactical need arises, like Desert Storm.

The military uses its own location service carried on the same satellites as the civilian service. Much more accurate and robust.

Anyway some rambling thoughts - “objects may be closer than they appear”

Tom