Page 30 - TTG-Taiwan Transportation Equipment Guide 2023-09 Edition

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Industry News

Development of Global velopment of Global
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Automobile Industry Is Moving utomobile Industry Is Moving

Towards Self-Driving Technologyowards Self-Driving Technology
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By Andrew Hsu

The era of self-driving vehicles has arrived! In Apart from Tesla, Waymo, the self-driving unit
recent years, almost every major car manufacturer owned by Alphabet Inc., has also made signifi cant
has been dedicated to R&D for such technology. strides in autonomous driving. Since launching its
With the aim to dominate the market, they are self-driving service for suburban areas in Phoenix,
striving to develop complete and mature solutions USA, in 2017, Waymo has steadily expanded its
as soon as possible. business scope. By 2022, Waymo had extended
its driving automation service to cover downtown
As of now, Tesla has already built Level 2 Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where
driving automation features like "traffic-aware heavy traffic flow, roads with strong backlighting,
cruise control" and "autosteer" into their vehicles. and narrow alleyways are challenging factors
Moreover, they off er a full self-driving (FSD) option, to service providers of this kind. Drawing on its
enabling automobiles to automatically decelerate or accumulated experience from suburban and
stop in response to traffi c signals. Notably, Tesla's downtown operations, Waymo ventured into
approach excludes the use of lidar or radar for providing paid shuttle services at Phoenix airport,
detection. Instead, the company aims to replicate making it the first self-driving company to offer
human-driven patterns by employing cameras as airport shuttle service.
substitutes for human eyes, with artificial neural
networks (ANN) serving as the equivalent of human Amidst the intense technology competition
brains. This strategy is being implemented in certain among numerous companies, Taiwan is firmly
Tesla car models equipped with "Tesla Vision," keeping pace. Thanks to subsidies from the
which utilizes an eight-camera system and ANN to Department of Industrial Technology and the
assist in judgment and achieve level-two driving Ministry of Economic Aff airs (MOEA), the Industrial
automation. Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and Taoyuan
International Airport Corporation have jointly