Ford tests night-driving autonomous vehicle

A prototype self-driving Fusion sedan has been tested at Ford's Arizona facilities in complete darkness to test the capabilities of its Lidar sensors.

Visibility or the lack of it, probably accounted for most of the accidents and deaths on the road. This included natural interference from rain, snow, fog or night or artificial vision impairment from alcohol, the inability to see the road and hazards around the car frequently led to trouble. The key benefit of technology such as sensors, being increasingly integrated into vehicles, is the enhancement of the driver's view around the car.

According to a 2007 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study of accident data from 2005, 49 per cent of all traffic fatalities occurred at night. This comes against the fact that the vast majority of all vehicle trips happened during the day when people traveled to work, school or other locations.

Conducting the night testing at the Arizona track allowed Ford to have an environment with minimal ambient light pollution from the surroundings. The interior lights from the instruments and controls were also covered up to create the darkest possible environment near the rooftop Lidar sensors. The testing was monitored using night vision goggles and real-time telemetry broadcast from the car.

Ford engineers succeeded in making the autonomous vehicle drive in complete darkness over the track using laser radar, or Lidar, as its guide.

According to commentators, as autonomous vehicles made their way into our automotive future, the biggest hurdle for automakers would not be scientific but rather psychological.

"We take any opportunity we can to teach our future (self-driving car) customers about the technology so they can learn to trust it," says Jim McBride, Ford's technical lead for autonomous vehicle development.

During its recent night drive, the autonomous Ford Fusion drove with no headlights, rather it used onboard cameras to plot its course against pre-loaded  3D maps. It shot beams of laser light into the desert and on-board computers instantly concluded the car position of the vehicle in relation to the landscape data provided by those laser scans.