30.10.2018 16:28

There is a lot of buzz around electric vehicles with a huge debate going on in society on the viability of electric vs. fueled vehicles in the marketplace. At the same time, there is another big technology change that is often conflated with EV, and that is the move from human driven to autonomous vehicle systems.

This move towards self-driven vehicles will occur independently from the debate on what will be powering those vehicles (spoiler alert - EVs will win). Eventually every vehicle on the road or on the campus, from self-driving forklifts on a factory floor to cross-country buses on the highways will be self-driving to some extent, regardless of the motive force under the hood.

No precision without feedback

So how do you migrate from a manual system to an autonomous one? The first step is to automate the subsystems that can be enhanced and work your way towards a total system. In vehicles, examples of that subsystem automation include transmissions, cruise control, and traction-management systems.

These systems are driven by advanced sensor suites that communicate with the system controller to provide the critical feedback needed to control the systems involved. Transmissions have hall sensors in them, cruise control systems now use radar and other distance-detection technology, and traction control needs precise wheel-speed information.

However, to permit full autonomous operation in the real world, a vehicle needs what is called proprioception. It’s the sense living creatures have that helps them keep track of their physical presence, actions, and navigation in the real world. Humans and other animals have a variety of sensors and an organic brain to integrate the data (Figure 1), and the challenge to autonomous vehicles is to mimic all that functionality in an organic system, without many of the organic senses we take for granted.

Read the entire article here - https://www.autonomousvehicletech.com/articles/1211-imus-help-move-avs-forward

www.autonomousvehicletech.com