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Among all the obstacles facing self driving cars—from inclement weather to shaky public acceptance—there’s another few of us anticipated: Bugs.
Anyone who’s ever driven a stretch of road on a summer’s day (or night) has seen an insect come into view and…splat. The mess on the windshield is a minor annoyance, but when a bug obscures the LIDAR sensor on an autonomous vehicle, it’s a much more serious situation.
Ford recognized the problem in 2017 and joined with Pittsburgh-based artificial intelligence developer, Argo AI, to come up with a solution for insects that impact and obscure AV sensors including LIDAR.
Lidar (light detection and ranging) measures distance by illuminating a target with laser light and measuring the reflected light with a sensor. Similar to radar, differences in laser return times and wavelengths discern the range, shape, and speed of static and moving objects.
But the sensors measuring reflected laser light can be obscured by bugs splattered across their lenses, leading to critical loss of information and crashes.
“We realized we needed to come up with a [LIDAR] cleaning, cooling, and control system,” says Mark Bosca, Ford’s Chief Engineer. <SNIP>
I've also had issues where the safety systems go offline due to icing.
