Following the recent release of its self-driving technology paper, indirectly confirming its investment in autonomous vehicle research and development, Apple earlier demonstrated its VoxelNet technology, which uses LiDAR to identify road conditions in front of the vehicle, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Symposium in Long Beach, California, to illustrate the functions that its technology can achieve.
Ruslan Salakhutdinov, head of Apple's artificial intelligence research departmentContents displayed, which shows that even when the camera lens is largely obscured by rain, Apple's autonomous driving system can still correctly predict the road conditions ahead, and can even correctly judge the possible movements of pedestrians behind who are obscured by parked vehicles on the roadside.
Apple's technology not only verifies the vehicle's location and direction through internet connectivity and GPS, but also uses the vehicle's hardware to create a real-time 3D model of its surroundings. This allows it to identify situations that the human eye cannot accurately perceive, such as pedestrians suddenly approaching from behind parked cars in front or to the left, or other vehicles approaching from behind. If the system detects unusual movement based on the 3D model data, it immediately alerts the vehicle to prepare for braking and other maneuvers.
This situation also facilitates the use of image recognition, ultrasonic, lidar and other sensing elements to improve the accuracy of judging the road conditions ahead, thereby enabling autonomous vehicles to react faster to road conditions. The overall computing performance used for image visual recognition can also be used more specifically for more information judgment.
However, Apple has yet to reveal whether its autonomous vehicle technology will be incorporated into commercially available vehicles, or whether it will even launch its own autonomous vehicle. However, given Apple's current partnerships with various automakers through CarPlay, it's expected that Apple will collaborate with automakers in the form of smart in-car systems in the future, and likely will not launch its own autonomous vehicle to compete with automakers.
