India and driverless cars?
Rakshitha Gopal
Technical Architect in Automotive Computer vision sector | Camera perception Expert | Innovation Lead | Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
For all of you who are wondering how autonomous vehicles cater to Indian transportation. I often get questions regarding how the vehicles deal with cattle on road or unscientific road geometries, road bumps surprising us every now and then.
ADAS contribution is not just driver less vehicles for future, as we get there the numerous subcomponents that addresses millions of such transport related challenges is astonishing.
I work on Level 4 automation, and I can certainly tell you that there is more beneath the iceberg that you are seeing. The Indian government is mandating more and more safety features for cars, like electronic stability control, anti-lock braking systems, airbags, reverse parking systems, speed alerts, etc. These are advanced driver assistive systems already customized for Indian needs. How much impact do you think these systems have on driving? They have been quietly saving numerous lives. With this trend, there will be a chain? reaction with respect to consumers’s needs, infrastructure development to adapt to technology, and encouraging car manufacturers to include more automation in vehicles. Also, L2 level automation is already in use with high-end cars; it is only a matter of time before we see L3 and L4 level automation on the roads.
I'm looking forward to seeing more and more safety features getting added to Indian vehicles, through this process having driverless cars on Indian roads is not very far!
Building intelligent imaging systems
8 个月When we hear levels of automation, we tend to focus on the active safety features rather than the passive such as ABS, ESC... In active safety, we've seen level-2 ADAS on 'mass-market' cars going from party-tricks to actually beneficial. Honda's EBA is too sensitive for Indian cities and there have been many rear-ending incidents, while the radar-based Hyundai seems better India-tuned. Features such as LKA & ACC do end up being as useful as a car's ability to hit 180kph, possible only in a limited set of scenarios. Whether active or passive, the tech sophistication-to-actual-safety-benefit ratios tend to be surprising with mandatory 3-point seat belts or decent rear-view & left-lane cameras providing outsized benefits. On the flip-side, non-technical factors of India such as poor driving sensibilities, overloading of vehicles, inept infra have orders of magnitude more adverse impact than any safety tech. Having said that we need to keep building. It'll help if instead of adapting tech to India, it's designed for India from scratch. Having a test town (instead of track) with everything you see on road in Cottonpet, B'lore will likely help ??