Autonomous vehicles

One AI application that's getting much media attention is autonomous vehicles, also known as self-driving cars. These vehicles are capable of perceiving the world around them, and drive with little or no human intervention.

These autonomous vehicles are the perfect fusion of sensors and AI technologies that have been combined to create the self-driving capability. To develop the self-driving capability, these vehicles have logged millions of miles on highways and local roads, and billions more in simulations. Gobs of data coming from arrays of sensors, including cameras, radar, lidar, sonar, GPS, and many more, are used to train numerous ML models to perform the various perception and actuation tasks that are required to move vehicles safely in real-world conditions. The resulting AI capabilities, such as computer vision, object detection, predictive modeling, and obstacle avoidance algorithms, can create complex models of the environment that onboard computers can understand in order to control, to plot paths, and to navigate.

Self-driving technology is less error-prone than human drivers, and can potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives from crashes and accidents. This technology can also be a mobility provider for individuals who are unable to drive themselves, such as the elderly or disabled. At the time of writing, there are no true fully autonomous vehicles in large deployment in the world. We can't even imagine how this technology will reshape and mold our world in the decades to come.