MIT CSAIL's radars map hidden features to help driverless cars navigate snowy terrain

That's because precipitation covers cameras critical to the cars' self-awareness and tricks sensors into perceiving obstacles that aren't there. Plus, bad weather has a tendency to obscure road signage and structures that normally serve as navigational landmarks. Fortunately, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Lincoln Laboratory are on the case. In a paper that will be published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters later this month and presented in May at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), they describe a system that uses ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to send very high frequency (VHF) electromagnetic pulses underground to measure an area's combination of pipes, roots, rocks, dirt, and other features. The GPR builds a basemap that an onboard computer correlates, contributing to a three-dimensional GPS-tagged subterranean database.