Brainstorms and Mindfarts by Tom Connor & Jim Downey

Author:Tom Connor & Jim Downey [Connor, Tom & Downey, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Vision System for an Autonomous Vehicle (self-driving vehicle)

US20070291130A1

Inventor: Alberto Broggi (et al.)

Patent Granted: June 22, 2006

What do a tank, a taxi, a limousine, and an off-road 4x4 vehicle have in common? They all require a driver. And, of course, scientific progress being what it is, it’s probable that the very day a motorized vehicle first rolled down the road, someone was trying to figure out a way to get it to drive itself.

Not an easy task. Imagine the variables that must be taken into account for a vehicle to drive autonomously. Is it light or dark outside? Where’s the road? Indeed, what’s a road? What’s a traffic light, a street sign, a pedestrian, how fast should you go, where to stop? You get the idea.

It would take until the 1950s and the advent of the computer to get things rolling. The first semiautomated car was developed in 1977 by Japan’s Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. It required specially marked streets, interpreted by two cameras on the vehicle, and an analog computer, which, by today’s standards, had the processing power of that $5 calculator in your desk drawer.

By 2006, the world had changed. That little calculator now had the power to compute Pi out to a few hundred places or to process enough information to drive a car down the road. Alberto Broggi and his team patented a system that was configured to receive, by way of multiple video cameras, information on the surrounding terrain, upcoming obstacles, or a particular path, and to automatically respond just as a human operator would. Today, we’re getting closer by the minute to a real-world, self-driving car, but there will never be a digital substitute for a kid in the back seat asking, for the fifty-third time, “Are we there yet?’

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