Autonomous Cars: The Sleeping-Giant

Autonomous driving is a constantly evolving and changing field. This article focuses on elaborating the fundamental knowledge and skill sets required to design and develop a self-driving car. The article further reviews the main concepts and major advances made in the field over the last two decades, highlighting the most recent progress made by major players in terms of safety and performance metrics, where available. The self-driving car is the technology round the corner which can change everything; road safety, mobility for everyone, while dramatically reducing the costs of driving. This article provides an insight to the foundational knowledge and practical skills one need to build a new future with self-driving cars. Further the article gives an overview of what is needed to know to kick start a career in the autonomous driving industry and examine the state of the self-driving industry. The decomposition of software architecture with major modules and their responsibilities are discussed. These included: environment perception, environment mapping, motion planning, vehicle controller and, finally the system supervisor.