and Cars Art, Writing, and Self Driving Cars Work Self Driving Cars

DJ Franklin is a Research Engineer in the Robotic Platforms Section of Southwest Research Institute. He does design work with sensors and computers to fit them into the vehicles the company creates. He got his degrees (Bachelor’s and Master’s) in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M. He got an internship at SwRI, and got a full job there after his graduation. DJ Franklin thinks AI is “fascinating to learn about, and exciting to see in action.”

“AI is fantastic at classifying images and recognizing what’s in them. Of course, we’ve all seen how amazing generative AI can be through free online tools like ChatGPT as well. Generative AI isn’t used very often for autonomous vehicles though.” - DJ

Franklin

Roberto Martin Martin says that “AI is being used more and more everywhere, from making decisions, to correcting text, or predicting stock options prices.” Also a daily application of AI, self-driving cars are on the rise. Many people, like DJ Franklin, do work to further develop autonomous vehicles.

He works specifically as a research engineer at Southwest Research Institute. One of the main differences between autonomous cars and normal cars is that autonomous cars need to have sensors and cameras scattered around it, to use AI and make decisions on what to do in the moment.

Whether that be slowing down, increasing speed, stopping entirely, turning left or right, or something else, is up to the inner mechanics and AI within the car. Mrs Johnson says, “[Teslas have] been trained on data, lots and lots and lots and lots of data, not just the data that the engineers trained it with. Every time somebody gets in a Tesla, that data gets sent back to Tesla,” which is how these autonomous car companies get so much data, and are so accurate. DJ Franklin says one of the difficulties with his work is that the parts he makes “are often constrained by the available space in the vehicle. Any room [their] parts occupy is space that can’t be used by passengers and other parts in the vehicle.” He has to make the sensors as small as possible, so the passengers still have space for what they need to do.