India joins self driving race with Tata Nano

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India joins self driving race with Tata Nano
The driver-less Tata Nano plying on a roadduring its test run in Kerala. - YouTube grab

New Delhi - A team of Indian techies has developed a self-driving Tata Nano.

By Staff Report

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Published: Thu 3 Mar 2016, 11:00 PM

Last updated: Fri 4 Mar 2016, 7:24 AM

Move over Google, Ford, Tesla, Apple and the likes. The ingenious culture that is India refuses to be left behind in the race for autonomous cars. A team of Indian techies has developed a self-driving Tata Nano.

Dr Roshy John, who heads Robotics and Cognitive Systems at Tata Consultancy Services in Kerala, was inspired to build his autonomous Nano five years ago when he booked a taxi at the airport to go home but found the cabbie too exhausted to drive, media reports said. After seeing the taxi driver falling asleep, Dr John took over the wheels midway the journey which ultimately inspired him to think of the autonomous vehicle project.
By that time, he was already developing robots for multiple industries.In a video on the project, Dr John, who hails from Trivandrum, said he and his team chose Tata Nano for the project as it is one of the very few cars in India that has a rear-engine layout, which allowed him to fit numerous sensors on the vehicle's front-end with no space constraints, the reports said.
Dr John started the project to-wards the end of 2010, and by 2012 he had a Nano which ran driverless for the first time. It took four years of streamlining and tweaking to create an advanced model by 2016.Dr John and his team first created a complete simulation of the vehicle to check out if the project was feasible.
After the virtual testing was completed, they mounted cameras on real vehicles and drove around the city to fine-tune the algorithms for real time performance.After running multiple simulations, eventually the car was ready to be tested on the roads. A brand new Nano was stripped down to its essentials and equipment like cam-eras, sensors and actuators were added to make the car autonomous.However, their project bumped into a roadblock as their simulation model was configured to have an automatic transmission, but the Tata Nano used manual transmission.
The team finally overcame the difficulty by creating an improvised automatic gear shift equipment. The reports said that while building the autonomous Nano, Dr John and his team also created a more modular version of this system that can be fitted into just about any car in less than an hour.
They checked the vehicle extensively, and concluded that it is "much more accurate than any human driver". India, which has a reputation for creating ultra-cheap technologies, succeeded at the first attempt, where others failed, by reaching Mars with $74m satellite, a budget much cheaper than of a Hollywood film. At a time when numerous tech giants around the globe are spending millions on self-driven car technology, it is a great accomplishment for his team to build an automated car, the Deccan Chronicle said.
"I am proud to say that this is Made in India," Dr John was quoted as saying.Dr John did his studies in Trivandrum and graduated from University College Palayam. Later he did his Ph.D in Robotics from NIT, Trichy. "I took up this project because I thought I had to do something to prevent fatalities in road accidents in Indian roads.
To me this is a social commitment I had to make. We already have self-driving cars abroad, none of which is designed for Indian roads," said Dr John.There are a few challenges if one wants to drive in a driverless car in India, he explained. Driving in India is chaotic and unlike in Western countries, people often change lanes without warning. They often ignore traffic rules and jaywalking pedestrians are a common sight. Such problems need to solved be-fore an autonomous car can be safely driven on Indian roads, he was quoted as saying.
reporters@khaleejtimes.comin


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