The straight goods on autonomous driving technology

Automakers seem to take advantage of every media opportunity to boast about their progress with autonomous driving and aggressive timelines.

To provide some answers to questions consumers keep asking, we spoke with Grant Courville of BlackBerry’s subsidiary QNX.

QNX is Canada’s leader in autonomous driving technology. Courville is a senior director at BlackBerry QNX’s Automotive and Embedded division and a professed car nut.

We put three basic questions to Courville: How well will autonomous systems work on Canadian roads? What kind of reliability can consumers expect? How will these vehicles interact with human-driven autos?

Drivers of vehicles with lane-keeping assist features experience problems when road lane markings are worn away or snow-covered, or their parking assist alarm goes off because of snow and ice covering the sensors.

Courville says higher levels of autonomy rely on multiple systems. Instead of just visual cameras, these vehicles use a combination of radar, lidar (light detection and ranging), high-precision GPS units, proximity detectors, high-definition mapping software, and cameras.

BlackBerry QNX has found good-quality radar units to be particularly capable in navigating through rain, snow and such.

When it comes to subtle things such as determining a vehicle’s appropriate placement on a snow-covered rural road, on-board software and artificial intelligence come into play. This is where, as Courville puts it, systems can use visual cues to determine the centre line of the road.

Reliability is a concern for drivers because components for these systems can be expensive to replace. (For example, a blind-spot radar detector on a Chrysler 300 lists for almost $1,000.)

Courville is seeing prices drop for specific units as demand increases.

A side-benefit to QNX autonomous driving research is the work being done toward replacing the multitude of separate computers in vehicles with a single high-performance unit. Not only would this reduce production costs, but there would be fewer things to go wrong in the future.

Cybersecurity vulnerability is a concern. A malicious hack can affect the safety of the car and cost significant time and money to resolve.

Governments around the globe are pushing for mandated on-board protection in autonomous vehicles of every level, and companies such as QNX and BlackBerry have great credibility in this field.

How autonomous autos interact with human operators should be of concern because we’ll have to share a crowded road with them.

Courville says AI will permit high-level autonomous controllers to learn from every interaction on the road, and adjust to predict less-predictable driving behaviours.

That technology is being tested in the nastiest winter weather.