No Snow Days For Autonomous Vehicles
By: Sierra Heuvelman
One of the leading arguments against self-driving cars is that they will never be able to function in extreme weather situations, such as snow and rain. Bosch, a German engineering and electronics company, is planning on dismantling that claim. Over the summer, Bosch announced its plans to team up with a Finnish weather broadcasting company, Foreca, to release a service that allows autonomous vehicles to analyze road conditions before they are encountered. This predictive road condition service will make autonomous vehicle use in rainy or snowy conditions significantly safer.
The service, which is scheduled to be released in 2020, will utilize multiple hyperlocal weather forecasts to allow autonomous vehicles to decide whether they can proceed on their current route based on the road conditions. As of today’s technology, the sensors used in autonomous vehicles are negatively impacted by less-than-ideal road conditions. Bosch is giving self-driving cars the ability to circumvent this fact.
The initial service will only include data from Foreca, but as self-driving cars become more and more common, Bosch will continue to enhance this service by allowing the cars to upload real time road conditions to Bosch’s cloud, essentially letting cars warn each other about possible hazards, making them even safer. Although this service wouldn’t solve the problem of poor weather impairing sensor functionality, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
