How Does a Self-Driving Car See?

To drive better than humans, autonomous vehicles must first see better than humans. Building reliable vision capabilities for self-driving cars has been a major development hurdle. By combining a variety of sensors, however, developers have been able to create a detection system that can “see” a vehicle’s environment even better than human eyesight. The keys to this system are diversity — different types of sensors — and redundancy — overlapping sensors that can verify that what a car is detecting is accurate.