Arizona was once a hot spot for learning how to drive an autonomous car, where the warm climate, sparsely populated rains, and wide roads make it an ideal starting point for this still-toddler experimental technology where the vehicle-mounted complex sensors are located Can also look more clearly.
Arizona is very similar to California in terms of climate and traffic conditions, but does not have a strong DMV and regulations that bother automakers.
Governor Doug Ducey signed an executive order last year, requiring all state agencies to try their best to facilitate autonomous Arizona car testing without requiring any approval or reporting, close to zero regulation. "Arizona, This will not stop the innovation of automatic driving technology.
But for self-driving cars, it's time to look for change and meet the challenge. Waymo, an independent driving company owned by Alphabet's parent company Alphabet, has announced that it will conduct autonomous vehicle testing in the Detroit Metropolitan Area of Michigan.
The cold winter and snowy weather in 'Wolverhampton' (Michigan) will create many difficulties for autonomous vehicles, something that Waymo values. If autonomous vehicles want to be able to travel anywhere, Environmental acceptance test.
Waymo began cold weather testing in places such as Lake Tahoe (located at the junction of Nevada and California) as early as 2012, but this time in the ice and snow in the metropolitan area of Detroit, testing activities will face even more serious challenges .
Michigan is the sixth state where Waymo is testing, with the other five states including California, Texas, Arizona, Washington, and Nevada in more than 20 cities.
Michigan December 2016 Enacted law allowing the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads, including fully autonomous vehicles without human pilots.
Another advantage of Waymo in Michigan is that in May 2016 Waymo set up a 53,000-square-foot development center in Novi, a suburb of Detroit, where it partnered with Fiat-Kleist , Equipped with Chrysler Pacifica Waymo autopilot technology.
In addition, Michigan is at the heart of the automotive industry where Waymo is still there and will continue to expand with other partners.
To understand why autonomous vehicles are struggling in inclement weather, they first need to know their sensors, and most automakers now use radar, lidar and cameras in combination.
Radar can operate well in bad weather such as fog and snow, but the lack of detailed environmental data collected, enough to allow autonomous vehicles to complete the complex environment.
LIDAR provides a very clear field of view, emitting millions of infrared lasers to the surroundings every second, measuring the time it takes to bounce back from nearby objects to create a 3D image of the surrounding space, The process has a serious impact.
Raj Rajkumar, a self-driving car researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, said bad weather can affect the ability of the sensor to discriminate, for example, if the laser beam hits a water drop outside the scanning device and the lidar may mistakenly think it's an object just in front of the vehicle, Researchers have to teach vehicles how to perform special driving tasks in certain adverse weather, such as icy roads or determining the speed of a vehicle when slipping, in the same way that driving skills are taught to humans.
In addition to the weather level, autonomous vehicles also need to be trained in different environments, as roads in different parts of the world may differ widely in appearance and mode of operation.
For example, there is a Pittsburgh left turn in Pittsburgh (when the green light came on, the Pittsburgh tradition held that left-turn vehicles should pass even if the straight-ahead vehicle had priority access.) 'This is a local cultural feature,' said Rajkumar, 'Bostonians love to park side by side, which is also a local driving culture, and all this needs to be taught to autonomous vehicles.'
Some companies believe that conquering the most challenging environment will dominate.
GM Cruise last month decided to double the size of the test it took in San Francisco, citing CEO Kyle Vogt, who cites test data in Phoenix, Arizona and in San Francisco, California, to prove that autonomous cars drive more in densely populated cities than in suburbs There may be thorny situations such as construction area, lane change, turn left and emergency rescue vehicles.
"If we could test in the hardest places first, we could scale up the deployment faster than with simple tests," Kyle Vogt said. "It may not be intuitive, but actually When tested in densely populated areas, our software is more likely to encounter special circumstances, which means it will be completed sooner.
GM Cruise will likely be testing autonomous driving cars in New York in 2018, one of the most densely populated parts of the world.