As one of AI’s most popular applications, not considering over $100 billion invested already, autonomous vehicles (AV) are becoming mainstream!

As one of AI’s most popular applications, not considering over $100 billion invested already, autonomous vehicles (AV) or driverless cars are gradually becoming mainstream. With Alphabet’s Waymo, GM’s Cruise, and Alibaba’s AutoX already on the streets in select cities, it shouldn’t be long before autonomous cars become common sight and common use globally.

Increasing AVs on streets is also reflected in the belief, and therefore, huge investments by big tech and electric-battery companies in the future promise of autonomous vehicles.

While the aspired fully autonomous ‘level-5’ vehicle (the last of 5 levels of vehicle autonomy) is still under development, the current R&D focus is more on machine learning / deep learning with the intention of these machines self-learning and adapting with progressive experiential data inputs. Needless to mention of the complexity of integrating a host of sensory technologies of radar, lidar, sonar, GPS, and odometry with AI computing and control systems.

In the automobile industry, we are currently amidst a radical transformation from its traditionally electro-mechanical evolution over the last century to an AI-led one in the last decade. And the coming of age of AVs will trigger a significant cascading impact on closely associated realms of socio-economics (jobs), transport planning, and urban planning. All that’s another story ...

(Source: www.tesla.ai; www.waymo.com)