An overview of sensors in Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous driving is a rapidly developing technology that is also a source of debate. People believe that autonomous vehicles will provide a better future by increasing road safety, lowering infrastructure expenses, and improving mobility for children, the old, and the disabled. On the other hand, many individuals are concerned about incidences of automotive hacking, the likelihood of fatal crashes, and the loss of driving-related professions. Autonomous driving is, without a question, a complex and problematic technology for many people. To better comprehend how safe self-driving cars are, it’s necessary to first understand how they function, as well as what kind of sensors autonomous vehicles use to determine where they should travel and recognize things on the road in order to avoid automobile accidents. Data collected by the sensors exhibit heterogeneous and multimodal characteristics, which are further fused to frame effective decision rules. Thus sensors play a major role in decision making activity of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). In order to acquire more information related to the sensors, this paper analyses and summarizes different types of AV sensors based on their mandatory attributes. This analysis helps the readers to understand the contribution of the sensors towards decision-making in AVs and also summarizes the data types collected by different sensors. The summarized inferences will be an eye-opener to most of the budding researchers and students in the field of AVs to select the appropriate sensor based on their needs for their research. The study also gives brief information regarding the specifications of different categories of sensors manufactured by leading vendors in the market.