As excitedly as we talk about it, you’d think the promise of fully autonomous vehicles is right around the bend, just another few miles and we’ll pull into our destination. In truth, we’re not there yet, and a few sceptics even suggest we’ll never get there — too many bumps in the road ahead.
As engineers, we know that we’ll get to the holy grail of autonomous driving. The key questions are how long will it take, what’s the best route and how much will it cost?
Let’s pull out a map and see how we can get there from here in automotive electronics. We know it will require serious engineering feats to integrate all of the different components and deliver seamless safe performance. The good news is we’re perched on a stepping stone right now: advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which are seen today in features such as emergency braking assist, drive- and steer-by-wire and collision avoidance. If we want to see this type of advanced technology in every mass-market vehicle, these systems need to be robust, low cost and low power. But this is what the collaborative design chain ecosystem does well and relentlessly optimizes. These core engineering tenets are a compass that will help us navigate the map toward the holy grail of autonomous vehicles.