At a media event in Detroit, Ford Motor Company gave the automotive world a glimpse of its newest research vehicle, a tricked out Fusion Hybrid designed to test out new autonomous driving technologies. The car looks like your typical 2014 Fusion until you glance at the roof. It’s equipped with four whirling cylinders, emitting constant beams of imperceptible laser light in all directions.
The system is called Lidar (a portmanteau of “light” and “radar”) and we’ve become accustomed to seeing much larger versions of these rigs on Google mapping vehicles tooling around our cities. Ford is using the Lidar system in combination with 360-degree cameras to help its Fusion “see,” creating a visual and topographical representation of the world around it.
That real-time construct is then compared against detailed virtual 3D maps, allowing the car to distinguish the permanent (lane dividers, exit ramps, park benches) from the temporal (frightened deer, pedestrians, oncoming traffic). The car then mashes all of that data together, and algorithms developed by the University of Michigan determine how the car reacts to its perceived surroundings.
The technology is very similar to what Google uses in it driverless car project, and Google is arguable much further ahead and unquestionably much more aggressive in developing autonomous car technologies. Ford maintains truly autonomous cars could be built today, but the public mindset simple isn’t ready for them. Google X’s engineers are already being chauffeured in self-driving cars to and from work .
At the media event, Ford group VP of product development Raj Nair stressed the research vehicle is not a driverless car. Instead, it will be used to test out new “advanced driver assistance systems” Ford is testing, such as its automated self-parking and obstacle avoidance technologies.
The system is called Lidar (a portmanteau of “light” and “radar”) and we’ve become accustomed to seeing much larger versions of these rigs on Google mapping vehicles tooling around our cities. Ford is using the Lidar system in combination with 360-degree cameras to help its Fusion “see,” creating a visual and topographical representation of the world around it.
That real-time construct is then compared against detailed virtual 3D maps, allowing the car to distinguish the permanent (lane dividers, exit ramps, park benches) from the temporal (frightened deer, pedestrians, oncoming traffic). The car then mashes all of that data together, and algorithms developed by the University of Michigan determine how the car reacts to its perceived surroundings.
The technology is very similar to what Google uses in it driverless car project, and Google is arguable much further ahead and unquestionably much more aggressive in developing autonomous car technologies. Ford maintains truly autonomous cars could be built today, but the public mindset simple isn’t ready for them. Google X’s engineers are already being chauffeured in self-driving cars to and from work .
At the media event, Ford group VP of product development Raj Nair stressed the research vehicle is not a driverless car. Instead, it will be used to test out new “advanced driver assistance systems” Ford is testing, such as its automated self-parking and obstacle avoidance technologies.
