It's been a couple of years since this Delphi modified Audi drove itself across the country.
Opening minds and rasing eyebrows.
Now here we are about two years later and I'm in a Delphi Audi but this isn't a freeway This is pretty busy congested intersection [INAUDIBLE] Silicon Valley.
We're right here in the heart of the valley and the car is handling itself as well as it did on the big roads two years ago.
A big reason why?
Is what auto makers call sensor fusion.
The car has three different ways to see tucked behind its body work.
There's radar, high definition cameras And most importantly LIDAR.
Laser scanning the environment and then looking at their basically the reflection of that laser beam back to receiver to determine the distance and I just scanned the actual features that around the vehicle.
It gives the car a contour review of the world around it.
Combine that with the different view which comes from radar and from a camera And the vehicle has more confidence that what it thinks it sees, it sees.
It all adds up to 40 terabytes an hour of data that the car is harvesting.
And a lot of that has to go to the cloud.
Have decisions made on it and sent back to the car and like that.
Which is why car makers are rushing to adopt the next wireless technology called 5G.
The first time they would adopted a wireless technology for a mission critical application.
It brings almost ten extra level of bandwidth compared to
Current technologies.
Late this season, the small number of milliseconds latency would be how much time it takes for something to go from the car to the cloud and then back again.
So it's really a game changer.
In terms of what it brings to autonomous driving.
Because all the wisdom to drive itself may not have to be installed on the car itself.
Ford, Audi, VOLVO, General Motors and more have all promised self driving no later than 2021 They can write all the clever software they want.
But they know without the fusion of these new kinds of sensors and successfully helping 5G come to reality, we'll all still be driving ourselves.
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