Indian multinational corporation Wipro has collaborated with IISc Bangalore develop an electric autonomous/driverless car for Indian roads. According to a report, IISc and Wipro are not going to use any existing vehicle; rather they are going to create their own electric vehicle and then put all the systems inside. And talking about the rollout, it is planned for March 2020.

“It is a greenfield design. Everything has been designed from scratch. We are not taking a Toyota or a Honda and retrofitting,” said Dr Ramachandra Budihal, Wipro’s head for AI, autonomous systems and robotics

Considering the traffic conditions, human behaviour and even stray cattle, it is not a great scene to imagine a car without a driver running on Indian roads. However, Wipro and IISc seem to be brave enough to bring this hard-to-imagine-thought to reality.

Furthermore, this project is an extension of Wipro’s effort on using data for roads in Europe and the US. Talking about the data that is going to help the team in this project, over the past few months, a car equipped with special sensors have been collecting data on the roads in Bengaluru and have gathered about 100 hours of data. And this data will be used by the IISc to work on algorithms, data processing etc.

“In Europe or the US, there is lane discipline. Here, nobody bothers. If we have an autonomous vehicle in these conditions, it has to take care of a lot of factors, plus the zero infrastructure, the potholes and the fact that everything is random,” said Prof A G Ramakrishnan from the department of electrical engineering at IISc.