Ford Motor Co. is just one of several companies hoping to bring automated vehicles onto the roadways. But the technology required to operate self-driving cars is evolving faster than public policy and opinion are.
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The phrase "self-driving car" is a bit of a misnomer. Despite what the name suggests, automated vehicles do have a driver -- just not the kind we're used to. Developing a computer that is robust enough to operate an automated vehicle, small enough to fit in the car and efficient enough not to drain its power source is a difficult and costly endeavor. But California-based computing company NVIDIA seems to have solved the riddle with its latest-generation processing platform, Pegasus. Roughly the size of a license plate and 13 times more powerful than previous iterations, the newly unveiled system will meet the requirements to run a fully automated vehicle and will be available starting in mid-2018. Pegasus is just one of the rapid-fire developments in computing power, data processing and artificial intelligence that will bring the automated vehicle industry closer to its goal of releasing the technology onto select markets...
