Autonomous Vehicles Are Our Future

With the current focus on self-driving cars, it's unsurprising that many have touted them as being the future. And they could be right. Autonomous vehicles are already on the road, and they offer significant improvements in infrastructure and safety, particularly given their ability to react to changing conditions much faster and much more accurately than humans can.

What's stopping widespread adoption, of course, is regulation. Humans — while fallible — still do not trust autonomous vehicles implicitly, reasoning that a computer component can fail and no one would know. However, that ignores the fact that 94 percent of crashes are caused by human error, many of which were due to inattention. Computers do not get distracted easily, which makes them far safer on the road.

This means that autonomous vehicles have to prove that they're better than humans on the road, and this involves overcoming a significant number of challenges.

An autonomous vehicle must recognize the road, the route, changes in signs and other road users. In addition, they need to respond to unexpected problems in a safe manner. That means they need to be extensively programmed to recognize changes in speed signs, pedestrian issues and so on.
They even need to recognize when a pedestrian might step out and risk colliding with the car. Essentially, they need to take multiple contradictory inputs and organize them in a cohesive structure to determine how they should respond.

Autonomous vehicles "recognize" all these conditions through a variety of technologies. Lidar, video and radar provide inputs that the vehicle can recognize, parsing text from road signs and recognizing other road users. In addition, data from GPS can predict which route to take. With the multiplication of autonomous vehicles comes more data — each vehicle can tell where the other is and indicate current road conditions at each point of the journey. Naturally, this would only be useful when the majority of the road vehicles on the network are autonomous.

All of these technologies produce a 360-degree view of current road conditions and adjust speeds, distances and routes based on precise metrics. This significantly reduces the risk of accidents caused by driver error.

Of the 6 percent of accidents caused by other factors, autonomous vehicles can deal with a significant fraction of them. Immediate correction within milliseconds can help a vehicle cruise to a safe stop, and other vehicles can react much faster to an issue to prevent further crashes. Similarly, autonomous vehicles can ensure that maintenance schedules are adhered to, reducing the likelihood of problems due to mechanical issues.

Self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles provide a significant leap in safety provided they are adequately programmed. A key factor is trust, however, but as they become more common, it may soon become unthinkable to have anything other than an autonomous vehicle.

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