Seeing Through the 'Eyes' of an Autonomous Car

At its recent DevCon, Renesas Electronics provided a peek at autonomous car development, as seen through the eyes of the car itself.

To make it happen, the electronics manufacturer incorporated eight LIDAR and five radar sensors on one of its autonomous cars, along with two forward-looking cameras, two inertial measurement units, and one vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) communication system. Then it displayed the actual sensor data on front- and rear-seat screens inside the car. In the accompanying video, flashing bubbles on the screens represent radar feedback, while green and yellow lines come from LIDAR sensors in the vehicle's side mirrors.

"A development tool like this makes it very easy for an engineer to come into this car and start developing autonomous driving algorithms," John Buszek of Renesas' ADAS Solutions Group told Design News.

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To process the data, Renesas engineers employed the company's R-Car H2 system-on-chip modules designed for vehicle information systems. Using ARM Cortex A15 quad cores, the H2 units handle the fusion of data from the LIDAR, radar, and camera sensors.

"We have two (H2s) for redundancy," Buszek told us. "We always want to make sure we have redundancy, so that if something were to happen, the vehicle could pull over to the side of the road safely."

Watch the accompanying videos to see the front- and rear-seat data displays.

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Senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been writing about technology for 31 years. He joined Design News in 1987, and has covered electronics, automation, fluid power, and autos.