We’re inching ever-closer to a world where cars can drive themselves. The most advanced autonomous vehicles in testing by companies like Alphabet’s Waymo can drive in many situations as well as a human, but the hope is to make cars better than human drivers. Ideally, a self-driving car would be able to use all its processing might to avoid an accident, but to do that, they need data. Researchers from MIT have developed a system that could help cars prevent collisions by, essentially, looking around corners. They call it ShadowCam.
Several teams have developed systems that can give AI-powered vehicles hints about what’s around the next bend in the road. For example, Stanford scientists created a system using lasers that could detect objects around corners. The new MIT system is simpler because it just looks for subtle changes in light and shadow on the ground that indicate another vehicle is approaching.
This work comes from MIT’s famous Computer Science and Artificial...
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