/ News

Apple reveals progress on its self-driving car tech

Technology knows no limits.

Allysa Mae Zulueta on Dec 12, 2017

Last month, Apple released its Iphone X which has stirred the attention of the tech savvy people. While the scene was focused on the Iphone X, Apple revealed the brand’s progress in regards to its self-driving car project.

The director of Apple’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, together with 200 experts in the same field, discussed about various software capabilities needed for the advancement of self-driving cars at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference.

To give you a slight background, Salakhutdinov has been working with Apple since 2016. Apparently, he has already published researches with funding from Google, Microsoft, and Samsung.

Related: Apple hints working on self-driving cars

In the said conference, Salakhutdinov talked about how Apple uses machine learning in order to analyze large stockpiles of data. He also presented the recently revealed data that trains software to identify pedestrians and cyclists via 3D scanners dubbed as Lidars.

Not only that, Salakhutdinov discussed the projects which can spot cars and pedestrians on urban streets, navigate unfamiliar faces, and build detailed 3D city maps using data from cameras and sensors. Elaborating the discussion, he showed images demonstrating how the system executed well even when raindrops cover the lens. Salakhutdinov also showed how the technology can determine the position of pedestrians on the sidewalk when they were partly blocked by parked cars.

Another thing that was tackled in the meeting is the technique called SLAM, which stands for simultaneous localization and mapping. It is said that it could also be used for autonomous driving, as well as augmented reality.

However, according to a report from Wired, the possibility of any car project at Apple is still vague. Salakhutdinov and the spokesman of the company are tight-lipped on how the projects mentioned will suit into wider effort in self-driving. Guess we should just wait and see until further details are given.