Autonomous vehicle challenges span many fields

Many of the challenges faced by military and commercial design teams are similar.

Engineers from fields as diverse as military, agricultural, and mining who are racing to craft autonomous vehicles share many similar technical challenges. Distributed architectures, networking, and redundancy are universal challenges for design teams tasked with creating vehicles that drive themselves. Autonomous vehicles are leveraging radar, lidar, and camera systems used for safety and other functions. Data from these sensors is pulled together and analyzed to steer, slow, and stop the vehicle. Some vendors note that autonomous technology is now being used in various fields, proving that the systems work, though it is still sometimes necessary to convince potential customers that the vehicles can operate safely.

“It's moving away from the technology being a bottleneck and into the next stage of integrating this into the way organizations operate,” said Bryan Everett, Engineering Specialist, Design, at Caterpillar. “The pace of adopting and instituting autonomous machine operation is just part of the journey.”