{"id":3922,"date":"2023-06-29T09:23:32","date_gmt":"2023-06-29T09:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innovationisrael.org.il\/en\/?post_type=article&p=3922"},"modified":"2023-12-06T07:59:15","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T07:59:15","slug":"autonomous-vehicle","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/innovationisrael.org.il\/en\/article\/autonomous-vehicle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Autonomous Vehicle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
“Imagine that every day, once an hour, 24 times a day, a jumbo jet falls from the sky killing 350 people”, says Yaron Toren, VP of Marketing at Oryx Vision. “This is the analogy for the number of people killed every day in traffic accidents worldwide. The cost is twofold: the direct cost of 1.3 million human lives lost and its’ associated financial costs of billions of dollars. Obviously, the cause for these accidents varies from case to case, but 92 percent of all accidents occur due to human factors – a tired, drunk or simply careless driver.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Toren, this is the first and main reason that autonomous vehicles are the future, even if it takes time. Naturally, there are also other reasons for this development: the roads are becoming more crowded and people want to save the time they waste while driving. These three categories \u2013 saving human life and the utilization of space and of time \u2013 render the autonomous vehicle a major economic issue.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The pace at which the world will make the transition to using autonomous vehicles is a matter of dispute. The bulls of Silicon Valley would say that it will happen within two months, however, in contrast to other industries, the automotive industry advances slowly and is not designed for frenetic progress. After all, millions of lives are at stake and any disturbance at the commercial or technological level causes inconvenience. In this industry, it takes years of testing for every small detail. It’s no wonder then that when we look at what has happened to the motor vehicle since the 19th century, we see a very slow process.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The transition to autonomous vehicles will be gradual. They will be initially limited to fixed routes in certain lanes on the road. However, a world in which at least most of the cars are driven by robots will nevertheless materialize. In any case, even when only a single autonomous vehicle takes to the road, it needs to perform properly and therefore, from a commercial perspective, it is already of interest today. More than 1.5 billion dollars has already been invested in various autonomous technologies.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“In order for a completely autonomous vehicle to be able to drive, it needs three capabilities. The first capability is to physically move the vehicle. It has already been proven that robots perform this function better than humans, however the vehicle also requires a second capability: decision making. This task, performed easily by the human driver, is difficult for a robot. A reasonable team of software engineers can overcome this challenge relatively easily 99 percent of the time, but an autonomous vehicle cannot take to the road with solutions for only 99 percent of the possible scenarios. The result would be huge numbers of people killed every year. Therefore, when constructing an autonomous vehicle, decisions must be correct with almost absolute probability \u2013 and that requires very extensive artificial intelligence capabilities.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“One of the key prerequisites, apart from the algorithms, is that the vehicle must have a precise perception of what is happening around it. The third required capability of an autonomous vehicle is therefore vision \u2013 it must be aware of what is happening in its immediate proximity. The major problem is in identifying each of the objects around the vehicle when some are moving and others are human, and there is need to predict their intended actions. This is one of the biggest difficulties in the development of an autonomous vehicle. Currently, there is no system that enables full vision at every speed, and in every kind of weather and visibility.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This is one of the most bustling fields today and it’s attracting many competitors worldwide”, says Toren. “They are all proposing a range of methods that attempt to meet performance requirements.” Two of these players are the Israeli companies Oryx Vision and AdaSky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The founders of Oryx Vision<\/strong>, Dudi Ben-Bassat<\/strong> and Rani<\/strong> Wellingstein<\/strong>, established the company with the objective of developing a unique machine vision technology for autonomous cars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “There are different ways to give a vehicle eyes”, Toren explains. “There are companies that maintain that a camera is the solution. But their picture is two-dimensional and immense calculating power is needed in order to create a three-dimensional image. Furthermore, the camera can’t see at night and is confused by shadows. When radar is added to the camera, the precision of identification improves but still doesn’t attain the required level.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Most of the industry players assume that the vehicle needs an active vision system that sends a light beam, using the returning light to identify the objects in the surrounding area and their distance from the vehicle. These systems are called LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and they do with light what radar does with radio waves. However, while this technology is used successfully in other fields, difficult problems arise when it is implemented on an autonomous vehicle and these are the problems that Oryx is attempting to solve.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n