New-Tech Europe Digital Magazine | Feb 2016

person has to sense the environment and detect things. The challenge, he said, is to ensure that the machines are delivering better decisions from all the available information than a human can. Certain convolutional neural network algorithms, which are used in pattern and image recognition, have demonstrated a detection rate accuracy higher than that of humans. And, as Patwardhan pointed out, our senses don’t provide the precise estimates of distance and speed that radar sensors can offer. What might happen in the face of something unexpected remains unknown. “We know humans, based on their experiences, can handle certain situations. It remains to be seen how automobiles can handle these situations,” he said. We may see self-driving cars rolled out via a zoned approach where they’re allowed only in areas that are well mapped out to support them, said Patwardhan. Once these vehicles are out of the designated zones, he said, they may be required to turn off certain features and operate more like regular cars.

There’s also discussion in the industry about who owns the cloud-based elements of this system. Notes Thomas, “A car is a moving IoT application and if you have a lot of these cars with multiple types of sensors, the information from each car could be aggregated and shared to help all drivers and other end users. This would place different constraints on the full system and also raise questions around who owns, controls, and can benefit from the information. Who will differentiate their products with the aggregated information from the cars moving around and sensing and monitoring their close environment? The car manufacturers, the system company offering the sensors…?”

Indeed, we could even see a mix of the cloud vs. in-vehicle approaches that Patwardhan mentioned. One viable approach, he noted, would be a vehicle-to-infrastructure communication model providing broad access to the information needed. These are among some of the questions that will need to be ironed out as theautomotive ecosystem evolves.

So, Self-driving Car or Human Driver?

So, getting back to that question of who makes better decisions: self- driving cars or humans? As Thomas notes, with the integration of ICs into cars, manufacturers are putting in more processing capability than a

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