A man falls asleep while driving his car. His car automatically takes control and he is safe from any accident and, he is still headed towards his destination. His kids in backseat play online games using the car’s Wi-Fi capability. The car arrives at the man’s place of work and the car automatically uses its playlist of destinations to take the kids to school and proceed to drive back home and await its next command. In the next 20 years, fully autonomous vehicles could actually perform like this car. The convenience of an autonomous vehicle (AV) is easily demonstrated but I wanted to know whether such a car is actually feasible within this generation’s lifetime. During my research, I found that not only are AVs feasible, but they are also probable. In this essay, …show more content…
I’ve divided the design process into three categories; Hardware, Software, and Automobile. Current AVs take in information using sensors which then relay information to the computer software, which makes decisions based on the information. The computer’s decisions cause the parts of the car to react, resulting in fully autonomous travel. I’ll describe the design challenges that each section of the process presents. The hardware of an autonomous vehicle usually consists of long range sensors that detect objects far away from the car in the front and rear, short-range sensors that detect objects close to the car in the front and rear, blind spot sensors that detect objects beside the car, and a digital mapping system of some kind that can detect where a car is in relation to its destination to within a few centimeters (Pokhriyal). The current problem with the hardware is the aforementioned cost of the detection equipment which can easily exceed $150,000. This technology needs to be made affordable before it is