Concept of driverless cars in India:
A few years ago, Bengaluru-based techie Roshy John was one his way home from the airport in a taxi when the sleepy driver almost ran into another vehicle. John took the wheel and drove the driver and then himself home — but the near-death experience got him thinking. Five years later, he and his friends have developed India's first driverless car — Tata Nano Autonomous.
John, who is practice head, robotics and cognitive systems at TCS, and his 29-member team worked on the software and algorithms in their free time and created a 3D model to test it. The car is yet to be tested on the road, and John is hoping to get permission from the traffic police soon.
In 2011, John purchased a Nano to test the software. "The Tata Nano is considered an engineering marvel. What better car to test Indian technology than on a car made in India?" says John. Across the world, Daimler, Nissan, General Motors, BMW, Google and Tesla are investing big bucks indeveloping driverless cars.
John used onboard diagnostics, a regular feature in most cars today, and a scanner to monitor the engine. "I had to get data from the car to make it accelerate or slow down based on the RPM," explains John. Creating an algorithm using a custom cluster (multiple computers), John and his team were able to read all parameters of the engine.
Several other devices were used to extract vitals of the car and its surroundings — wheel encoders to measure the speed of the wheel, multiple lidars (a surveying technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser light) to identify obstacles around the car, HDR cameras and GPS. The data was processed by the software to make the car 'drive' like a human.
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