CHANGING LANES:
THE FUTURE OF TRAVEL Around 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci wound some springs up, added a brake and installed them into a cart. When the brake was released, the springs would uncoil, pushing the cart without human assistance. It’s considered the precursor to the car, as well as the robot. We’re more used to the concept of flying cars and super-fast global travel thanks to the silver screen these days but realistically, how will you get to where you’re going in the near future? MVPro’s writer, Joel Davies, peers into his crystal ball.
CARS
fossil fuel vehicles by 2027i. Self-driving cars, the next major evolution of automotive vehicles, is less assured.
Let’s start with the most popular. Let’s start with something we know. It’s a fact that we’re switching to electric cars. Most manufacturers, depending on the country and government, have to stop producing traditional fossilfuel reliant vehicles and start making electric-only ones by 2030. Ten years is the blink of an eye for a company to overhaul its product. It involves the logistical terror of sourcing new materials, adapting production facilities, designing new concepts and finally making and marketing the end-product. You will have noticed by the adverts over the past five years or so that it is happening, however. All major automotive manufacturers - even Harley Davidson – are doing as they’re told because they simply have to. And it’s not so bad for the makers - the Guardian recently found that electric cars will be cheaper to produce than
How on earth is a car able to drive itself? Thanks to good old fashioned machine vision. Invented in 1961, LiDAR, or light detection ranging, is a remote sensing method that can be used to map objects and structures including height, density and other characteristics across an area. Light is emitted from a rapidly firing laser and reflects off of objects like buildings or in this case, cars, people, roads and pavements. The reflected light energy returns to the LiDAR sensor where it is recorded and with machine learning algorithms creates a 3D map of the surroundings. Covering all angles of a car, it is, in effect, how self-driving cars “see” where they’re going. It’s then up to the onboard computer, packed with AI algorithms, to decide what to do with what it sees, just as a human brain would.
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