Driverless cars not to be a reality anytime soon

BANGALORE, INDIA: You too think driverless cars might soon be in the vicinity? Well it may not turn out to be so.

"Autonomous cars are still two decades away. It is all the components including roads, infrastructure which will make an autonomous car a reality and so we cannot rely just on the development on the technology, said Sanjay Gupta, R&D director, Freescale.

What are the challenges?

• In driverless cars, the major challenge is the real time communication between car to car.
• The real time map, traffic data, distance between the cars and most importantly chaecking it on mobile while on the go will be surely difficult.
• High speed Internet, softwares to get the data and the entire ecosystem needs to be structured well so as to witness driverless cars in this country.

"Ethernet in cars which we have recently launched might turn out to be one of the solution to resolve these challenges in future. We still need to explore the best technology for autonomous vehicles and building basic sensors can be a reality soon," he added.

Freescale's Roadmap

Sanjay Gupta, says, "Automative segment remains the largest segment of Freescale. We are investing on building the required technology and its R&D and the ecosystem partners. We are focusing on infotainment, power engine, body which includes the viber controls, lighting system etc. and also the impactful feature segment which is the ADAS."

"One of the prime projects run by the India R&D team is Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). We are currently working on complete end-to-end solutions on two unique systems under ADAS, which will eventually fuse together to provide the end solutions.One key technology we are developing for automotive is radar-based ADAS technology in the next five years," he added.

"The parallel technology that we are developing is a vision-based ADAS technology. This technology features multiple cameras that will be integrated throughout the car, and will work real time. Data would be collected from, say, traffic signals and fed back to the car for the drivers to take appropriate decisions. These applications would be based on huge graphics data streams channeling throughout the car embedded electronics in real time and helping in some of the cutting edge innovation for autonomous driving and safety of passengers as well as pedestrians."

The company is also working globally, with Neusoft Corporation and Green Hills Software in developing a complete ecosystem of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for the creation of next-generation automotive vision applications.

This ADAS ecosystem will be designed to cut costs and time, with regards to hardware and software platform, for the development of these safety vision applications.