The principle of autonomous driving depends on the ability to know the surroundings of the vehicle, including other vehicles, pedestrians, traffic lights, and speed control, despite the simplicity of the concept, turning it into reality was not a simple matter.
The process of developing a self-driving vehicle began in the sixteenth century by the famous scientist Leonardo da Vinci, who was able to develop a vehicle that propels itself forward and backward.
The starting point:
After that, there were many attempts until the beginning of the current century, when DARPA, it is an agency that supports emerging projects, affiliated with the Pentagon, the agency launched a challenge in 2004, and this challenge was the first and the largest of its kind, and allocated a prize worth one million US dollars to the vehicle that succeeded in traveling a distance exceeding 240 km, but all the experiments failed and no project was able to succeed at that time, the best vehicle was able to travel a distance only 11 km.
The year of transition:
The surprise came the following year, in 2005, when DARPA reorganized a new challenge with the participation of 23 teams to cover a distance exceeding 212 km. 22 participating teams were able to exceed a distance of 11 km, which is the maximum distance achieved the previous year, in addition to five teams that were able to exceed a distance of 212 km, i.e. Completing the race until its end, and here the two phases of self-driving cars have entered a new phase in which they determine the future.
There is a huge development in the world of self-driving cars in just one year.
After that, private sector companies began investing in the field of autonomous driving.
The real start:
The peak was in 2015 when Tesla launched the Autopilot system on its cars. The beginning was with Tesla, followed by many car manufacturing companies such as Mercedes, and the emergence of other companies specialized in the field of developing self-driving such as Autox, Waymo, which is affiliated with Google, and so on.
The companies have focused on two principles: the first is developing precise sensors that can determine the vehicle's location with high accuracy, and the second is collecting and processing self-driving car data.
In terms of software, some companies focused on applications, while others focused on maps and location services.
The volume of investment in self-driving cars reached about 60 billion US dollars in 2020, with expectations that it will reach 500 billion dollars within five years.
Challenges and difficulties:
- The process of dealing with collecting the huge amount of data needed to process it requires, at present, a large number of developers and processors to deal with it.
- Obtaining the necessary equipment for manufacturing, such as processors and other things, is not an easy matter until now.
- There are no facilities provided by countries yet for fear of potential risks resulting from a sudden event that a self-driving car cannot handle, such as the sudden appearance of an animal on the road, such as a deer or something else, according to the region.
- The high cost of equipment that requires high accuracy, such as sensors.
Despite all the difficulties, self-driving cars have finally become a reality in a way that does not pose a danger to others through, for example, the existence of a fully self-driving taxi service without any driver, but within a specific area, as well as for special uses such as delivering orders and the field of agriculture.
Self-driving driverless taxis have entered the service phase in a number of cities, but their widest spread in the United Arab Emirates is in the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where one of them can take you to move within specific areas in a very safe manner.