MIT's self-driving car can navigate unmapped country roads

There's a good reason why companies often test self-driving cars in big cities: they'd be lost most anywhere else. They typically need well-labeled 3D maps to identify curbs, lanes and signs, which isn't much use on a backwoods road where those features might not even exist. MIT CSAIL may have a solution, though. Its researchers (with some help from Toyota) have developed a new framework, MapLite, that can find its way without any 3D maps. The system gets a basic sense of the vehicle's location using GPS, and uses that for both the final destination and a "local" objective within view of the car.