Will self-driving technologies ever make it to developing/poor nations
Various self-driving technologies have been developed by Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Google and Audi among the companies with systems ready to deploy. The most famous self-driving cars in existence today are those made by Tesla and Google. They take different approaches: Google is using lidar (a radar-like technology that uses light instead of radio waves) sensor technology and going straight to cars without steering wheels or foot pedals. Tesla has rolled out a software system called Autopilot, which employs high-tech camera sensors as a car’s “eyes,” to some of its cars already on the market.
There are three technologies that makes self-driving cars possible and they include; sensors, connectivity, and software/control algorithms.
Sensor: There are many types of sensors that make self-driving cars a reality, we have sensors for blind-spot monitoring, forward collision warning, radar, camera, LIDAR, and ultrasonic all these sensors work together to provide the input necessary to navigate the car safely.
Connectivity: Self-driving cars use cloud computing to act upon traffic data, weather, maps, adjacent cars, and surface conditions among others. This data is used to monitor a car’s surrounding operating environment to anticipate braking or avoid hazardous conditions. Self-driving cars must be connected to the internet even if edge computing hardware can solve small computing tasks locally.
Software/Control Algorithms: The Information gathered by the sensors and connectivity features are interpreted by this software. Software/control algorithms are needed to reliably capture the data from sensors and connectivity and make decisions on steering, braking, speed, and route guidance, it analyses all the data the car collects to determine the best course of action. This is the most complex part of the self-driving car since it has to make decisions flawlessly. The decision-making of the algorithms, must be able to handle a multitude of simple and complex driving situations.
Factors that can affect self driving cars in Developing nation
Most of these self-driving cars are design to work in developed nations where the laws are conducive, and measure had been put in place to help them work over there, what happens if you take a self-driving car design for US and put in a third world nation, it will fail because it wasn’t designed for that locality. According to Ram Vasudevan, co-director of the University of Michigan’s Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles, he said “Many of the things that we’re doing in self-driving at the moment probably wouldn’t work if we were trying to do it in a third-world country,” Let look at the factors that can affect self driving cars in developing/poor nations;
Bad/Mad Drivers: Self Driving cars are designed for roads where order prevails. In Nigeria, where I live, it’s common to see cars driving the wrong way, running red lights, and zigzagging across wide roads without the slightest regard to lane markings, Humans can deal quite well with that, even if they get frustrated and honk at each other, but For Self Driving cars, the chaos would be an enormous challenge.
Mapping: self-driving cars need the help of mapping data that doesn’t yet exist in most parts of the world. Most of the roads are not properly mapped, do not get me wrong, I am not talking in terms of network accessibility but the accuracy of the routes the map takes you through for example the map doesn’t indicate a ‘one way traffic’ road. Self driving cars requires highly detailed street maps that contain everything from the height of street curbs, to the location of temporary construction detours, to the exact position of street signs and traffic lights in 3-D space. And this map needs to be constantly updated using data that Self driving cars capture as they drive around.
Bad Roads: The roads are terrible and I don’t know if they can be able to program the car to avoid the type of port holes and bad roads in developing nations. e.g
Connectivity: Many experts have agreed that large-scale adoption of 5G wireless technology is required for a self driving car. And network connection is very poor in developing nation, and Self-driving cars must be connected to the internet. Most developing nations are still struggling to perfect their 4G wireless, and the current 4G network is not fast enough to provide the capability to give self driving cars human-like reflexes.
Traffic Light Problem: Self driving cars comes with in-built sensors such as GPS, light detection, and computer vision. These allows the car to access data, to interpret the information, and make a decision. Any sudden changes may affect the way the car is designed to function. In Nigeria where I come from, we are prone to irregular functioning traffic lights in certain areas. Sometimes, even when the traffic lights are functioning, traffic police choose to manage the traffic, often going against the direction of the traffic lights and this may be difficult for self driving cars to find a place on the roads.
Will self-driving cars ever make it to developing nations?
Deploying self driving cars in developing nations might be difficult to function in the nearest future because of the challenges listed above, but if these challenges are addressed, there is hope for self driving cars to be deployed in developing countries. If developing nations cannot address these issues then companies like Tesla and Google will have to make massive changes to their systems or a new company may have to build a system from scratch that takes into consideration the issues in developing nations and model the car to suit their environment like teaching the car to learn about the locality and exposing it to real road conditions.
