Apple research gives a peek at its self-driving car plans

Apply, which has been famously tight-lipped on its self-driving vehicle research, has posted what looks like its first public research on the subject, notes Reuters. The paper is listed on the public site Arxiv, often used by researchers to get preliminary feedback before publishing in a final form. The report describes a new way to use LiDAR called VoxelNet. That would make it easier for autonomous cars to not just spot the location of objects, but determine critical information like whether they're pedestrians or cyclists. While the scientific part of the paper is interesting, the most surprising part about it is that it exists at all.