Overview of self-driving vehicles
Several major motor vehicle manufacturers and technology companies are actively pursuing the development and sale of fully self-driving, or autonomous, motor vehicles. The utopian vision of safe, entirely self-driving vehicles beckons us to a future in which commuters are free to relax, read, or even sleep while in transit and the likelihood of being involved in a serious traffic accident is drastically reduced from the hazardous situation of today.
While this is the dream, the current state of self-driving vehicles remains far from this goal. Experts in the field predict it will take decades to fully develop and deploy the technology to support the widespread use of fully autonomous transportation.
To understand the requirements of autonomous driving systems, we begin with the inputs a human driver provides to control the operation of a current-generation motor vehicle. These are:
