Snow is a Huge Challenge for Autonomous Driving

It seems every automaker is racing to the finish line of having the first fully autonomous car on the road, but along the way there are many obstacles that come across the path that must be dealt with.  So far the biggest challenge is the foul weather than can come up in many parts of the country, causing the systems of the autonomous car to be blinded and unable to find the road markings for navigation.  This is an extremely important part of being able to offer autonomous vehicles in more than just a sunny location and one company might have the answer to this question.

Ford has a new solution and it seems to be one that makes perfect sense when using these systems which are made to use imaging.  The current system that see the road markers us a LIDAR system which is a laser radar system that allows the car to see the road lines and stay in the lane desired.  When roads don’t have these markers and the car can’t see the lanes it calls on the backup system to do the driving, which is you as a driver.

This is fine for most driving situations, but when the roads typically have the markers needed for autonomous driving and they are covered by snow or rain the system shuts down.  For some parts of the country this means most of the year the car won’t be able to drive itself at all.  In order to correct this problem, the system Ford has come up with uses a previous view of the landmarks and the road to gain the bearings needed to identify the road and continue to drive.  The previous view is delivered to the vehicle from a car that has the same system that drive on the road on a sunny day.

Currently Ford is testing this system and using these superimposed images for driving cars autonomously using these images to create the lanes and markers needed to keep driving beyond the limitations of the LIDAR system.  So far Ford has had a great deal of success with this system in order to make autonomous driving a possibility for more drivers than those who live in only sunny weather areas which makes it more of an attractive technology for more of us to enjoy and be able to have in our new vehicles, once fully autonomous driving is actually legal.

With this new technology Ford offers a lead in the autonomous driving.  Who will come up with the next new advancement in autonomous technology?  It’s hard to tell, Tesla already offers the ability to summon your car to the driveway with the new update of their software, but they haven’t even figured out the snow problem as of yet.  The race is on and the finish line is in sight, but there are still many hurdles to jump over before we see fully autonomous vehicles, but now Ford can offer their semi-autonomous models for more drivers in more climates.