之前寫過AutoX這家公司喇潘，主要原因是公司創(chuàng)始人肖健雄是一位華人体斩。最近在EmTech數(shù)字會(huì)議上，肖講到他們希望用低成本的攝像頭實(shí)現(xiàn)汽車自動(dòng)駕駛颖低，讓每一個(gè)普通人都能享受自由的出行服務(wù)絮吵。
他們的解決方案就是利用7個(gè)攝像頭，成本大約為50美元忱屑，可360°覆蓋汽車周圍的環(huán)境并感知蹬敲。這些低成本的傳感器和他們的算法組成一個(gè)無人駕駛汽車大腦暇昂，可適用于任何汽車上。按照這個(gè)思路伴嗡，以后的普通汽車也可以通過后裝一個(gè)AutoX駕駛大腦變成無人駕駛汽車急波。
While companies like Uber and Google build self-driving cars replete with pricey sensors, Jianxiong Xiao is doing the same thing with some $50 webcams.
Previously an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton, Xiao is the founder and CEO of AutoX, a startup working to make autonomous transportation accessible to everyone. Speaking at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco this week, Xiao credited his past with inspiring the startup’s goal: as a child growing up poor in a small town in China, he wasn’t able to visit the ocean until he was 18, despite the fact that it was just 20 miles away.
Now, Xiao said, he imagines a future where kids don’t have to depend on their parents to drive them around, for instance, and can instead summon a self-driving ride.
“Autonomous driving should not be a luxury,” he said.
To make this happen in a way that’s economical, AutoX is eschewing the standard self-driving car sensors like inertial measurement units, lidar, and differential GPS, which can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead, over the past six months the company built software—the brains of a self-driving car, essentially—that harnesses seven Logitech webcams that are mounted on the front of a car, arranged to get a 360-degree view.
At EmTech, Xiao showed off some videos of the technology at work, letting a car navigate city streets on its own during the day, in light rain on a winding road, on a cloudy night, and at night on the highway. Another video showed how it can drive in varying lighting conditions, too—such as when going under a freeway overpass in San Jose. These kinds of conditions are still tricky even for self-driving cars bristling with state-of-the-art sensors.
Xiao says AutoX hopes to work with carmakers as well as companies, like Lyft and Uber, that are already helping people get rides.
