Taking the road less traveled is extremely difficult for self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles rely on highly visible lane markings, as well as detailed 3D maps in order to navigate their environment safely. Which is why most of the major companies have eschewed testing on unmapped rural roads in favor of suburbs and cities. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they've never been on before without 3D maps. Called MapLite, the system combines simple GPS data that you'd find on Google Maps with a series of sensors that observe the road conditions. This allowed the team to autonomously drive on multiple unpaved country roads in Devens, Massachusetts, and reliably detect the road more than 100 feet in advance.

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.