Autonomous vehicles hold the promise to reduce urban congestion, optimize transit efficiencies, and connect vehicles to external systems, as well as other vehicles. What is the “engine” that “drives” those potentially game changing benefits? Data. Data from and used by the autonomous vehicle itself, vehicle-to-vehicle data sharing, vehicle to traffic control systems, and the ever critical data used to determine pedestrians and other obstacles.
On April 6th, the Chicago City Data Users Group was fortunate to have as a speaker Matthew Walter. Matthew was a research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, and is an Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute, studying the analytics that come from autonomous vehicles. Matthew certainly has the right background for this. His team at MIT came in 4th place at the DARPA Grand Challenge around self-driving cars…in 2005! Way ahead of his time.
At the Chicago City Data Users Group, he discussed the on-board systems, the data they use, and the data they produce. Data comes from many sources including cameras on the car (with special considerations for snow, sand storms, etc), lasers, on-board engine analytics, and data coming from external systems. See more on this great event here: https://storify.com/
You can see the full session here:
