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60 but a prototype platform is unlikely to be made public during 2016. Nissan has shown a concept electric vehicle, the Intelligent Driving System (IDS), with autonomous driving capabilities, as its vision of vehicles in 2020. It has also tested a modified Nissan Leaf electric car for autonomous urban operation using 12 cameras, five radar sensors and four laser rangefinders to navigate, and the IDS is the company’s view of how these technologies can be integrated into a consumer platform. Nissan will also be testing its Piloted Drive system during 2016, which takes control of a vehicle in situations such as when the car is driving in heavy traffic. This is one part of the IDS that will be updated in 2018 with lane changing and then fully autonomous operation for 2020. By contrast, Toyota is taking a conservative approach in some ways. Its Advanced Safety Research Vehicle is based on a Lexus LS, which is also used by Google, and uses forward-looking and side-facing millimetre-wave (50 GHz) radar sensors, as well as a 360 º laser rangefinder that collects 3D data on nearby objects. Toyota is also setting up a new applied research company to bring together the technologies for autonomous operation. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) in Palo Alto, California, started in January 2016 will invest $1bn over the next five years in research into artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics. “Our initial goals are to improve safety by continuously decreasing the likelihood that a car will be involved in an accident, make driving accessible to everyone, regardless of ability, and apply Toyota technology used for outdoor mobility to indoor environments,” says Dr Gill Pratt, Toyota’s executive technical adviser and chief executive officer of the TRI. In a bid to lead the development of driverless cars, Ford is to triple its fleet of fully autonomous Ford Fusion Hybrid test vehicles this year to 30 vehicles, which it claims will make it the largest in the industry, with testing across California, Arizona and Michigan. Ford was the first car maker to test a fully autonomous vehicle at Mcity, a 32-acre, full-scale simulated real-world urban environment at the University of Michigan, and it has been testing its third-generation autonomous systems in the snow in Michigan in early 2016 as part of its advanced engineering programme before the designs go into full production. Fully autonomous driving can’t rely on GPS, which is accurate to only 2 m, which is not enough to localise or identify the position of the vehicle. Lidar, on the other hand, is much more accurate than GPS and can identify the car’s lane location down to the centimetre level. Ford is using solid-state lasers from Velodyne as part of the acceleration of its autonomous vehicle development plans. In ideal weather, Lidar is the most efficient means of gathering important information about the surrounding environment, sensing nearby objects and using cues to determine the best driving path. But on snow-covered roads or in high-density traffic, Lidar and other sensors such as cameras can’t see the road. This is also the case when the sensor lens is covered by snow, grime or debris. Instead, the Ford autonomous vehicles use high-resolution 3D maps, complete with information about the road and what’s above it – including road markings, signs, geography, landmarks and topography – which highlights the importance of the recent map announcements from Toyota, Mobileye and Here (see Platform One). February/March 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology Our initial goals are to decrease the likelihood that a car will be involved in an accident, to make driving accessible to all, regardless of their ability Nissan’s concept electric vehicle, the Intelligent Driving System (IDS), has autonomous driving capabilities (Courtesy of Nissan)