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Drive.ai Develops New Autonomous Cars

Drive.ai is a Silicon Valley start-up founded by people who met at Stanford University’s renowned Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and who are creating artificial intelligence deep learning software for self-driving or autonomous vehicles. At Avalon Collision Center - Rancho, we love the concept of autonomous cars and that's why we're looking at a future when we can fix them here in Rancho Cucamonga, CA for our customers in say 2025, for example.

Drive.ai is developing cars that not only recognize people and items in their environment, they can also “signal their intentions to humans through lights, sounds and movement,” according to a recent article in Fortune.com.

The company recently announced for sale, a kit that can retrofit delivery trucks, car services and other fleet vehicles to make them self-driving. The kit includes a computer, a sensor array and an LED sign to communicate with other drivers and pedestrians.

Self-driving car technology is being developed by most major automakers and others with the hope of eliminating the 95 percent of fatal car crashes annually that are caused by human error.

Drive.ai’s PhDs are focusing on machine learning, a relatively new computer science area, with which computers can be equipped to extrapolate from prior experiences, rather than only responding to specific instructions.

“Using deep learning programming, a car's computer can accurately identify what its sensors perceive, then decide how to react to each situation” the Fortune article says.

However, pedestrians in an urban environment can be unpredictable in their movements. So, to help self-driving cars deal with humans, they’ll have a say to show others on the road that they’re in self-drive mode, and will be able to use sound or movement to indicate their intended next move.

For instance, the car could rock back, like a sprinter, to indicate it’s about to go forward, in the hope that pedestrians will recognize the meaning of the movement and not walk into its way, the article says.

Drive.ai is licensed to test self-driving cars in California and is already doing so, and will offer a camera-based and LIDAR sensor-reliant retrofit kit to fleets for delivery companies and ride-sharing services. Confined to urban areas with set routes, the autonomous cars’ computers will continue learning ways of coping with the environment and share the data with the firm, to improve the system.

Depending on the success of Drive.ai's pilot programs, the day that human drivers can be eliminated entirely, may come much sooner than anyone expects.

Sources: Drive.ai, Fortune.com and Huffington Post