According to Business Insider, nineteen companies are racing to put self-driving automobiles on the road by 2021.
The success of their efforts will depend on research like that being conducted at the University of Arizona.
Airplanes use a variety of sensors and navigation systems to successfully utilize autopilot, for instance. One of those is the global positioning system (GPS).
Mathieu Joerger, a University of Arizona assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, has teamed with a colleague at the Illinois Institute of Technology to study more reliable methods than GPS due to land-based impediments aircraft do not encounter.
“You’re not going to be able to rely on GPS satellite navigation because you’re going to drive in tunnels, under bridges and so on," Joerger said. "So we have other sensors, and the most popular ones are cameras, LIDAR and RADAR.”
Joerger doesn’t believe automobiles will be entirely autonomous even in the next decade, let alone by 2021.
