Self-driving technology drops off a cliff

[Bruff]

19-year-old Romanian high school student Ionut Budisteanu has designed an autonomous vehicle system that would cost just US$4,000. 

Budisteanu says his goal was to remove the expensive, high-resolution 3D radar that is at the heart of Google’s self-driving car technology to bring costs down. To that end, he used a much cheaper, low-resolution 3D radar to recognize larger objects, such as other cars, buildings and trees, while webcams mounted on the vehicle are used to detect lane markings and curbs and monitor the real-time position of the car.

http://www.gizmag.com/intel-award-self-driving-car/27571/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=473d99750c-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-473d99750c-76689669

[Eric Johnson]

It seems a slimmed down version of his setup could be used on PRT as the backup sensors to verify pods are at a safe headway distance from the pod in front of them. Thus even in a major system outage the pods would be smart enough to brake in time before hitting others.

Eric