Autonomous vehicles
Amjad Khan
Introduction
There are different levels of autonomy in terms of self-driving vehicles. However, the hunger for autonomous travel will only be satisfied once the highest level is achieved, where ‘a vehicle [is] capable of sensing its environment and operating without human involvement. A human passenger is not required to take control of the vehicle at any time, nor is a human passenger required to be present in the vehicle at all. An autonomous car can go anywhere a traditional car goes and do everything that an experienced human driver does’ ( What is an autonomous car? Synopsys 2020).
6 levels of automation have been established by The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) that dictate which category self-driving cars fall under.
The 6 Levels of Vehicle Autonomy Explained. Synopsys. 2020
Note that: emergency braking systems do not count as automation as it does not physically drive the car. At level 3 automation, the vehicle can make decisions by itself, and vehicles which are restricted due to geofencing are limited to level 4 automation. Geofencing is where a vehicle can only operate at maximum capacity when in specific areas, usually urban areas with an average speed of 30mph.
Hardware
For an autonomous vehicle to react to the surrounding environment, the hardware and software it uses must act in unison, otherwise information would be misinterpreted; calculations would include significant error and the vehicle would threaten the safety of the occupants and other people in the immediate area. Put simply, the hardware (or external sensors) must convert what it reads from its surroundings into data, which is then processed by algorithms in the on-board computer to provide a coded duplicate of the world outside the vehicle. Viewing the world from data provided by sensors, the algorithms calculate and predict the movement of objects in the vicinity to then determine the
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