Autonomous Audi A7

You have probably seen the Google self driving car. The autonomous vehicle has many good aspects, but in the looks and fun departments it is rather lacking. Fortunately Audi has been working on a much better looking option.

In January a self driving Audi A7 took a group of automotive journalists from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The car was able to pilot itself over 550 miles successfully.

Click past the jump (or scroll down if you came directly to the full article) to find out more about the Autonomous Audi A7.

Getting a car to drive itself is no easy task. To help accomplish it the German luxury car maker has partnered with companies like graphic card maker NVIDIA. For a car to be able to navigate successfully, it needs to take data from video images and use those pixels to decide what to do.

To accomplish this Audi and their partners are working on artificial intelligence (AI) that learns the same way that we do. Just as at first we only know basic shapes, but over time can tell a Porsche from a Ferrari, the computer model is able to evolve over time and learn such details. This allowing of it to get smarter helps the car to be able to react correctly in more an more situations without human interaction.

Below is how Audi describes how the system works:

This is how the nexus of our piloted driving technology – the zFAS central driver-assistance controller – works. Pixels are generated by camera images, similar to how the human eyeball transfers images to the brain. The Audi processor, about the size of a tablet PC and powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra processor, analyzes every frame of video that comes in, and it senses edges which it groups into shapes. It learns that the shapes are objects, then learns to differentiate those objects. This artificial intelligence enables the Audi processor to detect, for instance, features such as eyes, a nose and mouth, and it figures out that they all fit into a face. It also allows Audi vehicles to detect and identify other vehicles. All of this information goes into a database to foster future advances in such recognition. The system serves as one of the important bases of intelligence for piloted driving. With every mile, the car gets smarter. But it takes more than terabytes of such data to make for successful autonomous driving. The data also must be processed very quickly: 30 video frames a second. The information must be transmitted, recognized, processed, analyzed – and provide a reaction – almost instantaneously, in case an Audi driver is encountering tricky conditions. That’s why one of the most important objectives of deep learning is to ensure that every bit of object recognition is embedded in the processor in the Audi vehicle, not dependent on the internet cloud.

All of this sounds very interesting and is likely the future of the automobile. It also sounds a bit like something out of the movie iRobot, where the self driving cars (as well as other robots ) decide to try and destroy humanity.

We think that the concept is a good one, but to allow for fun and more control if something goes wrong, a manual override will need to be present. if it did work, long trips, late night drives or even intoxicated drivers could be assisted safely home.

What do you think? Would you let your car drive you?