How I'm developing my Self-Driving Cars Technology skills for the future, today!

Can you imagine a world full of cars that could drive themselves from point A to B, with no human intervention? Creating the opportunity to help people get around, not just those who can drive? I do, and I am not the only one...

I imagine a world where the transit system of our cities, will be purely made of a synced and efficient system of autonomous vehicles. With no more delays, or overcrowding. A system where one transit vehicle will know, based on interconnected sensors, the past, present and future locations of all other cars in the system.

I read somewhere that Rupert Stadler, CEO of Audi, said they would have fully autonomous cars deployed by 2025. Mark Fields, a former CEO of Ford, indicated 2021. And of course, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, said next year.

Having this due dates, it is hard not to get excited about self-driving cars, right?

Is it the end of Car Ownership?

Who knows me well… knows that I do not love cars, I do not even have a car, I do not drive, and I prefer to use as more as possible the public transport and Uber for two simple reasons: I save money and avoid so much stress on traffic.

If you own a car, you should consider that it is arguably one of the most underutilized, polluting, time-consuming and dangerous machines on Earth, if we think that cars on average are in operation for only about an hour each day, but they account for 45% of global oil demand and, on average, 3,500 daily deaths worldwide.

Let’s add the hundreds of billions of hours people spend annually driving and riding in cars instead of engaging in other, potentially more productive (or stimulating) activity, and automotive transportation as practical utility and time-consuming necessity seems ripe for a redesigned consumer experience and relationship. However, there is an alternative to the ownership: the sharing of self-driving cars.

In the future, I believe we will be sharing autonomous cars when needed and earn income in the shared economy renting them to others. But this disruption in the future will lead us to an important question: who will have the ownership of these autonomous vehicles and will there a need for car ownership like we see today?

Are you ready for autonomous cars?

Last week, one colleague asked me if I would feel comfortable having autonomous vehicles around every day. I quickly responded with an affirmative. I am a very enthusiast of technology, especially Artificial Intelligence and I believe that when Self-driving cars will be generally available, it will have been tested enough and all the most common bugs will have been resolved.

I believe that self-driving cars very soon will surpass human abilities in a rapidly shorter time frame. Which is good because It will release me from the stress of teaching my daughter to drive in the future! And not only this, with autonomous cars, delivery services will be simpler, there will be no traffic violations, and insurance will be definitively cheaper.

It is clear that a self-driving future would change so many aspects of the auto and transportation industry, but as major companies and automakers continue to push and spend time working on self-driving cars, trust is one of the most significant obstacles for the new technology.

How long we still have to wait?

It seems that every day we are seeing major automakers and technology companies team up to develop a self-driving system but unfortunately, self-driving cars are not a year or two away like Elon Musk used to say, well, at least not where I am living now.

An enormous amount of work has been done toward developing these systems, the goal for many of these companies is establishing a self-driving fleet which can take people to and from their destinations, much like the car sharing services like Uber do today.

Excepting me, most of the people love being able to drive themselves around, going for joy rides or showing off their classic cars, so it may result that consumers will not easily drop that habit, which is why I believe we will not see massively driverless car around for another five to ten years

Instead what we are starting to see in the next years is fleets of driverless shuttles working around cities, much like public transportation trains and buses operate today.

We must consider that a future of driverless vehicles will change the layouts of cities and so many aspects of the auto and transportation industry. For example, delivery services will be quicker and more efficient, bikers and pedestrians will have more room on the roads.

All the major companies are pushing toward self-driving vehicles, and huge steps are done, but completely driverless cars still have a way to go.

This is good because it is mean that I am at the right moment and I still have time to learn, and there are many things I need to learn about Self-driving cars… maybe I will not build a real self-driving car, but since I have started to study this fantastic technology, I collect all the information I need to build and to code my own (little) self-driving vehicle and learning some new AI concepts along the way.

Learning self-driving car’s technology

Since last year I decided to jump into self-driving cars technology and AI as one of my side-project. Even while working intensively as a Project Manager at IBM, having a newborn daughter and virtually no free time I decided to take some courses, read everything I can about it and achieve some essential technology skills regarding autonomous vehicles.

To go deeper into this fantastic technology I have just enrolled myself on the Udacity Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree program, this fantastic nano degree will help me to learn the essentials of building a self-driving car, including probability, C++, machine learning, and linear algebra. This introductory program is the perfect way to start my journey to a self-driving car career (Who knows... maybe one day IBM will decide to play a role in this revolution!).

In the meantime, I will learn the essentials of programming a self-driving car, from machine learning to object-oriented programming to probabilistic robotics.

And to put my hands on a basic but complex enough version of self-driving car technology, I am build during my free time a Smart, Autonomous, Self-driving remote controlled car based on Arduino and connected to Watson IoT platform that will be able to detect and avoid obstacles, keep itself on a track, and using Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence, in particular Deep Neural Network it will be able to follow a path planning based on Image Recognition. It's not a Tesla but it's a great starting point.

Of course, I will share everything here in my next article.

So, let's keep in touch an see you next week,

Jair Ribeiro