Unmanned Ford drove around the track in pitch darkness
Recently, under cover of the night in almost complete darkness, the experimental Ford Fusion Hybrid autonomous driving car did what it was almost impossible for an inexperienced driver to do. With the headlights turned off, he confidently drove around the difficult road at the Ford Arizona Proving Ground test site. Like a person does not see anything in such darkness, so the car camcorders were powerless. The machine relied only on lidar and firmware.
According to statistics, in the dark, the probability of an accident with a fatal outcome is about three times higher than in the daytime. For autonomous cars, such statistics do not apply. Thanks to the lidar, the car is almost as effective in the dark as it is during the day, says Jim McBride, technical project manager. In other words, in the dark, an unmanned vehicle is probably safer than a machine with human control.
This is what a lidar looks like on a Ford car.
Of course, there is no magic. The car is not driving blindly, but according to a pre-compiled high-resolution 3D map of the terrain, which includes all the important information about the road, road signs, geography, topography and objects like buildings and trees. Lidar pulses (2.8 million laser pulses per second) pave the way, as if feeling the way with the orientation on the 3D map.
During tests in Arizona, an engineer was in the car, who observed the lidar and navigation system, wearing night vision goggles. Other engineers watched the car outside.
Another engineer sat in the back seat without glasses and tracked the movement of Ford Fusion on a computer screen. “Inside the car, I could feel how it was moving, but when I looked out the window, I saw only darkness,” says project participant Wayne Williams. - In the backseat, I saw the trajectory of the car. Without a doubt, he was driving exactly on the highway on these winding roads. ”
The company "Ford" conducts research in the field of unmanned vehicles for more than ten years and seeks to achieve absolutely complete autonomy in all situations. In other words, a person may not participate at all in control, in accordance with the specifications of SAE International Level 4.
This year, the company has tripled the number of test cars, now around thirty Fusion Hybrid run in on the roads of Arizona, California and Michigan, where it is allowed to travel to UAVs.