Driverless Cars Research Paper

Christian Uhlig

Professor Tynes

Writing 150

5 October, 2017

Driverless Cars Research

Intro:

Body 1: Technical Aspects, history, how it works

        There is a lot of technology and planning that needs to go into self-driving cars. If people cannot trust self-driving cars, they will not be able to be integrated into society. The planning for these cars started as an idea in 1958 when Disney aired a show called “Magic Highway USA”, where a colored highway had cars that drove themselves(Anderson). An attempt was made to bring this idea into reality in the mid 1980’s, when the technology needed to make this a reality started to become available. From 1980 until 2003, there were multiple different teams working on self-driving cars in Munich, Germany, and at Carnage-Melon University.  From 2003 to 2007, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) decided to hold 3 different self-driving car competitions, which would challenge teams to create the best version of their car that they could. The first two challenges were off road challenges, and none of the teams completed it the first time, but only 7 completed it the second time. The third challenge, and most interesting, was called the “Urban Challenge”, where the teams were required to have their self-driving car drive through a city. This proved to be successful, as 6 teams did complete this course. These different challenges spearheaded research and design on different sensors and computing algorithms, that could navigate roads, follow street signs, and obey traffic laws. Since then, DARPA has started to partner auto manufactures and those teams that made their self-driving vehicles (Anderson). There is a lot of complicated technology that goes into making the self-driving car possible. One aspect of the technology is called vehicle-to-vehicle(V2V) communication. This is what allows all of the self-driving cars on the road to communicate with each other. This is important, because all of the cars need to be able to know to avoid other cars, as well as allow the cars to know what traffic may be ahead, so that it can take the fastest rout possible. Another important aspect is called 5G technology. This is a wireless communication technology, which is faster and more modern than 4G, which is what we use now for our phones. This is needed so that all the car can communicate with each other with very small delay, because all of the cars will be traveling at high speeds, and peoples lives could be in danger. The more efficient the cars can communicate with each other, the faster the cars will be able to make decisions based on what information is receives. There are also other way that self-driving cars can function, but this way will be most efficient if every car on the road is autonomous.

Body 2: In progress, Tesla, Present Day

        Believe it or not, there are some companies that are very close to having a fully autonomous driving experience. There are a few companies that are far into testing, and even have models available for purchase that use important aspects of self-driving cars. One of these companies is Tesla, which has a mode in their car called Autopilot. The car can be put into Autopilot, and the driver does not need to do anything to drive the car, but it is not fully autonomous. “[Autopilot mode] is meant to assist highway driving”(Reese), which means that it is not meant for city driving yet, which is much more complicated. “All Teslas produced on or after October 19, 2017, will have ‘fully self-driving capability’"—which can be activated as soon as the software is ready”(Reese). With the fully self-driving capability, “[drivers] can simply ‘get in and tell [their] car where to go’” (qtd. in Tesla's Autopilot). This technology is revolutionary and fascinating, but it is not what was described earlier, with the V2V communication using 5G technology. Rather, Tesla decided to use onboard cameras, sensors, and radar to tell the car where it is in relation to other objects, which seems to work well. This form of technology versus the V2V communication is better in this case, because Tesla does not expect all car to be self-driving for a while, so the V2V communication is not a necessary component quite yet. There are also other companies that are making attempts at creating a fully autonomous car, and that is Google and Nissan. They have both but large efforts into making self-driving cars commonplace in society. Google has a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles that has traveled over 500,000 miles (Fletcher). All of these different companies that are pouring billions of dollars into self-driving cars want to see them become a commonplace