|
Listen to this story
|
Self-driving vehicles, robot taxis, and flying cars are not just things you hear in science fiction anymore; they are happening. You might have heard this statement multiple times in the last few years as we rode the hype around these innovations.
Among these, it was anticipated that self-driving cars would be the first to arrive. However, despite spending over USD 100 billion, the progress made in this direction is not too satisfying. To be precise, the optimism surrounding autonomous vehicles has been fading for some time now.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Anthony Levandowski, often regarded as the godfather of autonomous vehicles, said: “You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that’s invested so many dollars in R&D, and that has delivered so little.”
Tough year for self-driving cars
Tesla, the autonomous car company, headed by Elon Musk, has managed to put semi-self-driving cars on the market; however, they too are plagued by numerous accidents—accounting for nearly 70% of reported crashes for self-driving cars.
Tesla’s lawyers even said that their technology might be a failure, but it’s not fraud. “Mere failure to realise a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud”, the lawyers said in reply to a class action lawsuit against Tesla and Elon Musk from Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology customers.
Recently, Bloomberg reported that the launch of Apple’s highly anticipated self-driving car had been postponed to 2026, and it will be autonomous as claimed earlier by the firm.
In October 2022, Argo AI, an autonomous driving technology company in which Ford invested USD 1 billion, also shut down after it failed to attract new investors.
When it comes to autonomous tech, Amazon also scrapped its autonomous robot project earlier in 2022. Called ‘Scout’, the autonomous delivery robot was born after Amazon acquired robotics firm ‘Dispatch’ in 2017.
Indian players remain optimistic
Despite the future of self-driving cars looking bleak, startups in India remain optimistic. In fact, Minus Zero, a Bengaluru-headquartered startup that is also developing self-driving cars, has said that they will launch a self-driving car in 2023.
“Last year, we became the first company to fully test a driverless vehicle on a public road in India,” Gagandeep Reehal, co-founder and CEO of Minus Zero, told Analytics India Magazine.
“In the first quarter of 2023, we are planning a full-scale commercial launch, becoming the first company in India to launch an L4 self-driving vehicle commercially,” Reehal added.
While he refrained from revealing much about the vehicle, Reehal did share that it does not have a steering wheel nor an accelerator or a brake pedal, components found in a typical car.
“Having said that, we are not compromising on safety in any manner,” he continued, “What we are solving is not the car problem or the robot taxi problem but the problem of mobility.”
Reehal not only promises an L4 self-driving vehicle but also a very pragmatic price point for it.
However, the next question that arises is cracking the code of tech. Reehal said that their approach towards self-driving cars is a holistic combination of camera-based vision and AI algorithms that can easily adapt to unprecedented traffic scenarios.
“We have eliminated Lidar, Radars, and ultrasonics from the equation. Our system runs completely on cameras, not studio, only monitor cameras. [In addition,] we don’t rely on high-fidelity maps; we do not rely on GPS RTK or centimetre-level accuracy and all this stuff,” he added.
Minus Zero’s vision is to accelerate the world’s transition to driverless mobility, bypassing the conventions of all these technologies that are being mistaken as the only way towards an autonomous vehicle reality.
Saurabh Chandra, CEO at Ati Motors—which makes autonomous robots for material movement, factories and warehouses—says L5 is almost nirvana. “The self-driving cars we see today are between L2.5 and L3”, he told Analytics India Magazine.
Autonomous vehicles on Indian roads
“If we can get self-driving cars to work on Silk Board Junction—infamous for long traffic jams—in Bengaluru, it will work in the US, it will work in Europe, and it will work in the backyard of Elon Musk as well,” Umakant Soni, CEO, AI & Robotics Technology Park (ARTPARK), said.
The prospect of self-driving cars in India is indeed more challenging compared to the west. However, it’s not a problem that can’t be solved, Chandra said.
“The problem is not the driving, but the social negotiation between multiple parties on the road, which is still an unsolved problem,” he said. “This social negotiations problem has to be worked on and solved, and down the line, someone will solve this problem.”
“If you remember, Drive.ai tried to solve this problem. They also shut down, but they tried to solve this problem but did not stay at it for long enough.”
Chandra believes once we have the technology to surpass this threshold, self-driving cars will happen in Indian road conditions; however, it’s a matter of when. On an optimistic note, he concludes that we are not there yet, but we will get there eventually.
