India's Answer to Google with First Driverless Car
BENGALURU: Now India too has developed a driverless car like Goggle’s self driven car, but with much less capital. Roshy John, a Bengaluru based techie has built a driverless car with the help of his friends, reports indiatimes.com.
Roshy John, who is a Head at Robotics and Cognitive Systems at TCS, developed this driverless car with his 29-member team. Although the car is yet to be tested on the road, just the idea of the self driven car gives us a hope that we can indeed curb road mishaps and accidents effectively. In 2011, John purchased a Nano to test his software on the Tata Nano which is considered an engineering marvel.
Similar test are done across the world by some of the famous car manufacturers like, Daimler, Nissan, General Motors, BMW, Google and Tesla who are investing large amounts of money in the development of driverless cars. John has used onboard diagnostics which is a regular feature in most cars today and also has a scanner to monitor the engine. Creating an algorithm using a custom cluster of multiple computers, he and his team were able to read all parameters of the engine.
Many devices were used to extract vitals of the car and its surroundings, which included wheel encoders to measure the speed of the wheel, multiple lidars to measure distance by illuminating a target with a laser light to identify obstacles around the car, use of HDR cameras and GPS. The data is further processed by the software to make the car 'drive' like a human.
