Gadgetory

hi I'm Wayne Carini Messina and I'm standing here with John ABS Myer the director of the Delphi labs in Mountain View California and the car behind us is about to go on a very extraordinary journey John can you tell us a little bit about where it's going absolutely so this is the first and longest trip across the United States it's going coast-to-coast from San Francisco to New York we're gonna set off on March 22nd Sunday it's about 3,500 miles and our intention is to arrive in New York in time for the New York Auto Show that's that's a long route you know mainly be on freeways you're gonna have to stop in cities at some point you so we are gonna have to stop but the purpose of this Drive is to collect data about highways across the country so we're really taking this chance to test our automated highway pilot and collect a lot of information to improve the technology we've spent the last year or so testing here in California as well as in Nevada and so we have a ton of information about urban driving in fact you got a chance to see it I think at CES this year in January but this trip the purpose is really all about automated highway but you will be driving automated in the cities no we will not we can't and of course if we have high fidelity map information of those cities but in this case we're really focused on the highway okay so driver will take over when you get ready it's on man stop overnight on ramp to off-ramp highway pilot registered the sensors on the car you got radar you mentioned them lidar yeah so there's roughly 20 sensors on the car it has radar which are high-volume mass-production sensors those sensors are on all four corners plus front and rear there's also forward vision systems and the vision systems are used for things like traffic sign recognition pedestrian detection as well as a traffic light recognition and lane marking detection it also has light hours around the car which are a third sensor for redundancy but also for higher fidelity information like in urban driving and then it has high accuracy GPS as well as vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communications okay and the then it's got a brain that obviously processes all that information what we have is we call a multi domain controller and it's sort of like the the brain of the vehicle it's pulling all the information together fusing the data and then making complex decisions about how to make the car move down the road and as it's driving are you worried about getting traffic tickets or speeding tickets or anything like that we don't anticipate that this car is going to be hands-free 100% of the way across across America in fact we're hoping to learn what those corner cases are and what areas in the country there could be differences where we need to develop the system further do all the states are gonna go through permit autonomous driving an awesome question so actually five states regulated or actually five places right Washington DC California Nevada Florida and Michigan there's regulations in place that require documentation and training programs etc the rest of the of the u.s. does not have regulation and what that means is that self-driving or automated driving is not precluded but it doesn't necessarily mean it's legal we've reached out to all the states that we're going to be passing through we've notified them and in some cases gotten feedback just reminding us that we have to follow the laws what's the next step what's the drive after this yeah not really sure yet but but but we'll see hopefully then next step is is really being able to bring these to mass production bring these systems and software solutions into the mass market all right well thanks John appreciate it thanks Wayne right when cutting I'm gonna see that here with John ABS Meyer looking at the autonomous car that's going to go from San Francisco to New York you