A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car (AC), driverless car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input. Self-driving cars are responsible for perceiving the environment, monitoring important systems, and control, including navigation. Perception accepts visual and audio data from outside and inside the car and interpret the input to abstractly render the vehicle and its surroundings. The control system then takes actions to move the vehicle, considering the route, road conditions, traffic controls, and obstacles.
Ekaterini Panagiotou Sycara is a Greek computer scientist. She is an Edward Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University internationally known for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of negotiation, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. She also serves as academic advisor for PhD students at both Robotics Institute and Tepper School of Business.
A rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) is an algorithm designed to efficiently search nonconvex, high-dimensional spaces by randomly building a space-filling tree. The tree is constructed incrementally from samples drawn randomly from the search space and is inherently biased to grow towards large unsearched areas of the problem. RRTs were developed by Steven M. LaValle and James J. Kuffner Jr. They easily handle problems with obstacles and differential constraints and have been widely used in autonomous robotic motion planning.
Open Robotics Automation Virtual Environment (OpenRAVE) provides an environment for testing, developing, and deploying motion planning algorithms in real-world robotics applications. The main focus is on simulation and analysis of kinematic and geometric information related to motion planning. OpenRAVE's stand-alone nature allows it to be easily integrated into existing robotics systems. It provides many command-line tools to work with robots and planners, and the run-time core is small enough to be used inside controllers and bigger frameworks.
Steven M. LaValle is an American computer scientist, and a professor in the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Oulu. He was also an early founder and head scientist of Oculus VR until it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. He is best known for his work on rapidly exploring random trees (RRTs), the Oculus Rift, and his book, Planning Algorithms, one of the most highly cited texts in the field.
Daniela L. Rus is a roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dmitri Dolgov is a Russian-American engineer who is the co-chief executive officer of Waymo. Previously, he worked on self-driving cars at Toyota and at Stanford University for the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007). Dolgov then joined Waymo's predecessor, Google's Self-Driving Car Project, where he served as an engineer and head of software. He has also been Google X's lead scientist.
Stephen Edward Cross is the executive vice president for research (EVPR) at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a position to which he was appointed in 2010. As EVPR, Cross coordinates research efforts among Georgia Tech's colleges, research units and faculty; and provides central administration for all research, economic development and related support units at Georgia Tech. This includes direct oversight of Georgia Tech's interdisciplinary research institutes, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) and the Georgia Tech Research Corporation (GTRC).
Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke cloud technologies such as cloud computing, cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered on the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. When connected to the cloud, robots can benefit from the powerful computation, storage, and communication resources of modern data center in the cloud, which can process and share information from various robots or agent. Humans can also delegate tasks to robots remotely through networks. Cloud computing technologies enable robot systems to be endowed with powerful capability whilst reducing costs through cloud technologies. Thus, it is possible to build lightweight, low-cost, smarter robots with an intelligent "brain" in the cloud. The "brain" consists of data center, knowledge base, task planners, deep learning, information processing, environment models, communication support, etc.
Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.
Argo AI was an autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company was co-founded in 2016 by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, veterans of the Google and Uber automated driving programs. Argo AI was an independent company that built software, hardware, maps, and cloud-support infrastructure to power self-driving vehicles. Argo was mostly backed by Ford Motor Co. (2017) and the Volkswagen Group (2020).
Lina J. Karam is a Lebanese-American electrical and computer engineer and inventor. She is an IEEE Fellow. Her areas of work span digital signal processing, image/video processing, compression/coding and transmission, computer vision, machine learning/deep learning, perceptual-based visual processing, and automated mobility. She served as an expert delegate of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 Committee and participated in JPEG/MPEG standardization activities. She served as expert consultant in matters related to Intellectual Property (IP)/Patent Litigation, Image/Video Compression and Streaming, Image/Video Processing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Autonomous Driving.
Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He cofounded Aurora Innovation, a company developing self-driving technology, in 2017 and serves as its CEO. Urmson was instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.
Luminar Technologies Inc. is an American technology company that develops vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies, primarily for self-driving cars. The company's headquarters and main research and development facilities are in Orlando, Florida; a second major office is located in Palo Alto, California.
DeepMap, is a Palo Alto, California-based software company that develops high definition (HD) maps for self-driving vehicles.
Linear-quadratic regulator rapidly exploring random tree (LQR-RRT) is a sampling based algorithm for kinodynamic planning. A solver is producing random actions which are forming a funnel in the state space. The generated tree is the action sequence which fulfills the cost function. The restriction is, that a prediction model, based on differential equations, is available to simulate a physical system.
Aurora Innovation, Inc., doing business as Aurora, is a self-driving vehicle technology company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Aurora has developed the Aurora Driver, a computer system that can be integrated into cars for autonomous driving. Aurora was co-founded by Chris Urmson, the former chief technology officer of Google/Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving team, which became known as Waymo, as well as by Sterling Anderson, former head of Tesla Autopilot, and Drew Bagnell, former head of Uber's autonomy and perception team.
NVIDIA GTC is a global AI conference for developers that brings together developers, engineers, researchers, inventors, and IT professionals. Topics focus on artificial intelligence (AI), computer graphics, data science, machine learning and autonomous machines. Each conference begins with a keynote from Nvidia CEO and Founder Jensen Huang, followed by a variety of sessions and talks with experts from around the world.
Woven by Toyota, Inc. is the mobility technology subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, creating and managing the software for Toyota's vehicle operating system, automated driving, and safety. It has an investment fund, Woven Capital.
