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Rohit, Week 5: Automated Vehicle Symposium

From June 9th to 12th I had the opportunity to attend the international automated vehicle symposium in San Francisco. The symposium was three days long and consisted of a morning session and afternoon small group discussions, in the mornings various professionals in the field of autonomous driving presented their research and goals going forward for autonomous driving research and development. For example the VP of self-driving vehicles, Nadeem Sheikh, gave a talk about the companies goal to eventually transition to becoming fully autonomous. An interesting point he brought up was that even if lyft becomes fully autonomous there are other problems that would arise, for example currently lyft drivers maintain their own vehicles and store them overnight. Another issue that was discussed involved city planning, because if a city only has fully autonomous vehicles there would be no need for parking as the vehicle could roam around while their owner shopped and then pick them up again. This would radically change city design and planning especially in cities where parking is a premium. Another interesting presentation was from the the program manager, Dr. Ismail Zohdy from Dubai's self-driving transport program. Like many other countries Dubai is offering to help companies that want to create and test autonomous vehicles on Dubai's roads both with financial aid and permits to test vehicles publicly. The following picture is the main hall where the morning sessions would be held.
 The next image is from a smaller breakout session where there was a debate as to which standard of communication should be adoped between two autonomous vehicles.
Lastly another interesting aspect of self driving vehicles were the different levels of autonomy. Level 1 consists of basic cruise control, Level 2 consists of adaptive cruise control often found in most modern vehicle where the car can automatically adjust the following distance but cannot steer. Level 3 can both steer and adjust following distance, but always requires a human to be aware of vehicles motions, this is similar to Tesla's autopilot system. Level 4 is basically fully driver less but is restricted to areas that have been thoroughly; mapped out and driven before, this is similar to Google's self driving program: Waymo's vehicles. Lastly level 5 is full autonomy and there is no human input or location restriction at all. One of the representatives from Waymo highlighted a key issue they had to overcome in regards to what level they were going to develop initially they worked there way up to level three over the course of a decade but soon found themselves stuck because the human driver would become too reliant on the system and not pay attention. Therefore they decided to develop a level 4 vehicles to remove the potential human factor out of the equation. This has so far been successful as there has not been a single crash caused by a Waymo vehicle. Overall the symposium was helped me learn about the recent developments in the field of autonomous vehicles. The only off putting aspect was that the other high school intern and I were the only high school students that attended the symposium. 

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