If you’ve ever been broken down in the desert late at night without the luxury of supplemental lighting, you know that it doesn’t get any darker. You could even say night time in the desert is something that nightmares are made of. But, if you’re a self-driving Fusion Hybrid with autonomous capabilities, that darkness doesn’t matter.
See, instead of relying on cameras to detect the car’s position, Ford’s Fusion Hybrid autonomous research vehicles use the combination of high-resolution 3D maps, LiDAR, and radar to determine exactly where it is at. The beauty of this system is that it doesn’t need light to accurately pinpoint exactly where the vehicle is at, and that has now been proven as one of Ford’s Fusion Hybrid research vehicles has successfully navigated desert roads under the cover of complete darkness.
Jim McBride, Ford’s technical leader for autonomous vehicles, said, “Thanks to LiDAR, the test cars aren’t reliant on the sun shining, nor cameras detecting painted white lines on the asphalt. In fact, LiDAR allows autonomous cars to drive just as well in the dark as they do in the light of day.” For those of you who don’t know, the LiDAR system actually pulses a laser grid 2.8 million times per second, just to scan the surrounding environment. When the information is combined with information from the radar system and the high-resolution maps, the on-board computer knows the car’s precise location.
This most recent nighttime testing session took place at the Ford Arizona Proving Ground with Ford engineers strapped in for the ride. With night-vision goggles, the engineers monitored the self-driving Fusion, but did not have to intervene during the testing procedure. Wayne Williams, a research scientist and engineer for Ford, said, “Inside the car, I could feel it moving, but when I looked out the window, I only saw darkness. As I rode in the back seat, I was following the car’s progression in real time using computer monitoring. Sure enough, it stayed precisely on track along those winding roads.”
So, as it turns out, autonomous cars like Ford’s Fusion Hybrid research vehicles don’t need the light to see where they are going. This experiment does demonstrate how far autonomous technology has advanced, but I doubt we’ll be seeing any light-less cars, autonomous or not, anytime in the future.
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