之前写过AutoX这家公司，主要原因是公司创始人肖健雄是一位华人。最近在EmTech数字会议上，肖讲到他们希望用低成本的摄像头实现汽车自动驾驶，让每一个普通人都能享受自由的出行服务。
他们的解决方案就是利用7个摄像头，成本大约为50美元，可360°覆盖汽车周围的环境并感知。这些低成本的传感器和他们的算法组成一个无人驾驶汽车大脑，可适用于任何汽车上。按照这个思路，以后的普通汽车也可以通过后装一个AutoX驾驶大脑变成无人驾驶汽车。
While companies like Uber and Google build self-driving cars replete with pricey sensors, Jianxiong Xiao is doing the same thing with some $50 webcams.
Previously an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton, Xiao is the founder and CEO of AutoX, a startup working to make autonomous transportation accessible to everyone. Speaking at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco this week, Xiao credited his past with inspiring the startup’s goal: as a child growing up poor in a small town in China, he wasn’t able to visit the ocean until he was 18, despite the fact that it was just 20 miles away.
Now, Xiao said, he imagines a future where kids don’t have to depend on their parents to drive them around, for instance, and can instead summon a self-driving ride.
“Autonomous driving should not be a luxury,” he said.
To make this happen in a way that’s economical, AutoX is eschewing the standard self-driving car sensors like inertial measurement units, lidar, and differential GPS, which can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead, over the past six months the company built software—the brains of a self-driving car, essentially—that harnesses seven Logitech webcams that are mounted on the front of a car, arranged to get a 360-degree view.
At EmTech, Xiao showed off some videos of the technology at work, letting a car navigate city streets on its own during the day, in light rain on a winding road, on a cloudy night, and at night on the highway. Another video showed how it can drive in varying lighting conditions, too—such as when going under a freeway overpass in San Jose. These kinds of conditions are still tricky even for self-driving cars bristling with state-of-the-art sensors.
Xiao says AutoX hopes to work with carmakers as well as companies, like Lyft and Uber, that are already helping people get rides.
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