MIT Researchers Taught Autonomous Cars to See Around Corners

Researchers at MIT are helping autonomous cars deliver on the promise of safer roads with a new trick that lets driverless vehicles see around corners to pre-emptively spot other vehicles or moving hazards that human drivers would never see coming. There have been several attempts to make cameras that are able to see around corners, including other MIT researchers who revealed a system that can shine light into a room from the outside, capture the light that's bounced back, and then process the results to calculate a 3D model of objects inside that are otherwise hidden from human observers. It required a special camera, however, including lasers and other hardware that would inevitably increase the cost of an autonomous vehicle, which would, in turn, hurt sales. You didn't think all these carmakers are developing driverless cars for fun, did you? The new approach to spotting oncoming hazards around corners is being presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Macau, China, next week, and it builds and improves on an earlier system called ShadowCam that was developed a few years prior.