UPS recently tested a self driving truck. How do self driving trucks work?
In: Engineering
Self driving vehicles are categorized in 5 different modes under the term “autonomous driving”. See Wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car.
Self driving means normally mode 5, which does not need human interference during the drive. The vehicle doesn’t even need a steering wheel or windows then.
Such vehicles are using lots of technical instruments to be aware of their surroundings like GPS, radar, sonar, cameras etc.
GPS tells the vehicle where it is, while the other technical stuff tells the vehicle what’s going on around it. I.e. other cars on different lanes, traffic signs, pedestrians etc..
All that stuff is processed in the vehicles onboard computer, which decides what the car is actually doing (braking, steering, shifting etc.).
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