How do self-driving cars see the road?
Cars That Read Streets
How do self-driving cars see the road?
You're cruising down the street in a car with no driver. The steering wheel turns itself. The car slows for a red light, speeds up on green, and somehow knows that kid on the skateboard is about to zoom across the crosswalk. How does it see all that?
Self-driving cars don't have eyeballs, but they're covered in sensors — gadgets that gather information about the world. Cameras snap pictures of everything around the car, just like your phone's camera. Radar sends out radio waves that bounce off objects and come back, measuring how far away things are. And lidar (a laser scanner) shoots out millions of tiny laser pulses per second, creating a 3D map of the street in real time.
