Indian Man creates Self Driving Car - Google and Ford need to Pull Over
In just five years, a techie from India and his Kerala engineering team have build an indigenous car that drives itself.
At Tata Consultancy Services, the Head of Robotics and Cognitive Systems, Dr. Roshy John, has built the Tata Nano, an automated car. It is designed to deal with India's unique predicaments on the road.
It was after taking a taxi from the airport, that John got the idea to build a car that self-drives. He was forced to take over the wheel of the cab when the taxi driver fell asleep halfway through the ride. Since he was already developing robots for a variety of industries, he found the inspiration to begin the project for autonomous vehicles.
He explains that India's roads and traffic conditions significantly lag behind the world's other developed nations. Other major snags in the development process included the ongoing projects for road development and construction.
The Tata Nano was chosen for the project after John inspected many different cars. He selected it because he could place the many required sensors on the vehicle's front end, because the car has a layout that includes a rear engine, rare in Indian cars.
To see if the project was even feasible, John's team first created a complete vehicle simulation. Upon completion of the virtual testing, the algorithms were fine tuned for performance in real time by driving around the city with cameras mounted on real vehicles.
Finally, a brand new Tata Nano was purchased and completely modified in order to place the actuators, cameras, and sensors into the vehicle. This actual model was a complete replica of the virtual model in order to gather results in real time.
However, the manual transmission was a major problem faced by the team.
An automatic transmission was used in the simulation model of the Tata Nano. However, a manual transmission is actually used on the real cars. Improvised automatic gear shift equipment was created by the team in order to overcome this problem.
A more modular version of the system was created by John and his team while building the autonomous Nano, which could be placed into any car in under an hour. The vehicle was checked extensively. The team concluded that it performed more accurately than any human driver could perform.
When millions are being spent on the technology for self-driving cars by many of the world's tech giants with many hoping to create self driving taxi firms, his team has accomplished a great thing by building their own automated vehicle. John concluded by saying how proud he is that the car is Made In India.