Building India’s Driverless Car

Dr. Roshy John

Practi ce Head Tata Consultancy Service

Q When did you start working on

driverless car?

A I started working on this project more than fi ve years ago, as a hobby, aft er having a near death experience in a taxi cab with an overti red and sleepy driver.

Q Is this project funded by any re

search insti tute or industry?

A The whole project is funded by my savings and the money I pooled in from my patents. I took up this project more as a social commitment as I aspire to do my part by coming up with a technology to reduce road accidents.

Q What were the guidelines in se

lecti ng the team of engineers to work with you on this driverless car project?

A The concept of autonomous vehicles is largely based on mobile robots, where we use soft ware algorithms on digital fi lters, probability theory and advanced mathematics. Apart from these, one should have deep knowledge in advanced electronics. When I started my career, one of the most important things I did was to groom up team members to gain experience in the above said domains. A robot typically has 20% of hardware and 80% of soft ware, irrespecti ve of its mechanical complexity. I have years of working experience in developing ro

bots for numerous industries starti ng from factory automati on to consumer electronics robots. My PhD was in the same domain on multi -mobile robot interacti on. This helped me in grooming up my team members to reach a competency on some of the niche areas in Roboti cs. On top of these, the enti re crew was passionate enough to develop a prototype at least to this scale.

Q What were the hurdles faced

during the years of leading this project? A The major problems we faced are:

The rapid rate of batt ery consumpti on of the driverless car computer Actuator latency and backlash for the pedal robots Hardware failure when tested for extreme test cases Inability of radars and LIDAR identi fying certain dynamic obstacles, viz. other moving vehicles or pedestrians Developing the AI algorithms on decision making to react during an emergency scenario Finding the probability of pedestrians, two-wheelers and autorikshaws taking unpredictable lane changes Q Having successfully demonstrated

the driverless car, what is the next step?

A We have made a small leap towards driverless car. There are numerous issues which have to be addressed, such as making cheaper and energy effi cient hardware and smarter soft ware which could handle Indian road scenarios. If the driverless car technology can successfully work in Indian roads, it will work in any part of the world!

Q What according to you is the fu

ture of driverless car or say assisted driving?

A There would be tremendous development in this domain since the price of electronic components and sensors are coming down drasti cally. Almost all the car manufacturers are going to adopt ADAS and limited self driving as a feature within the next 5 years. Apart from these, the infrastructure to support these technologies is getti ng developed in an exponenti al rate. For instance, faster mobile networks, more precise GPS, etc.

This project is funded by my

“

savings and the money I pooled in from my patents.

Q In our regional context of India,

what is the uti lity you see for driverless car or semi-autonomous cars/assisted driving?

A There are tremendous opportuniti es in India and there are two ways to look at it. One is for catering the local market - here the growth is exponenti al where every manufacturer is releasing newer versions/variants of vehicles every year. The second aspect is bringing more jobs to India. Throughout my career, I have focused on bringing these types of high-tech jobs to India. We can develop all these advanced technologies for supporti ng the foreign manufacturers or OEM suppliers to do this at a fracti on of the cost.

Q

Would you like to comment on the ecosystem in India for such projects?

A We need to scale up our capabiliti es, resources and investments to execute projects like these which have a lot of potenti al in the internati onal market. If my small team can contribute this much by making a driverless car, imagine what the bigger research groups in India are capable of!