How many of you would love to own a self-driving car? Well, some of us might put up our hands, while others could very well figure out that a self-driving car is not something they would look forward to, sitting in one as a passenger, since they would pretty much prefer to have things in their own hands. Thing is, this enterprising 19-year-old high-school student from Romania has managed to work on an artificial intelligence system for self-driving cars which could cut down on the cost of such technology, and he even went away with the top gong of a scholarship amounting to $75,000 scholarship last Friday at an international science and engineering fair.
Ionut Budisteanu did explain the situation surrounding his system, “The most expensive thing from the Google self-driving car is the high resolution 3-D radar, so I was thinking how I could remove it.” His solution? By relying on processing webcam imagery using artificial intelligence technology in order to select curbs, lane markers, and even soccer balls which happen to roll across the road. When this is merged with data from a low-resolution 3-D radar that is capable of recognizing “big” objects such as other cars, houses, and trees, you’ve got a winner here. Compare his $4,000 system to Google’s $75,000 system and you can see where he intends to go with this.
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