Robot cars are getting closer thanks to a new technology that could make fully autonomous vehicles safer and cheaper.
Self-driving cars of the near future | Raquel Urtasun | TEDxUofT
Cisco and Verizon recently demonstrated that mobile edge compute (MEC) technology enables autonomous vehicles to extend radio signals without expensive physical roadside units. The idea behind MEC is that applications perform better when they run closer to the mobile customer. Cities can potentially create less dangerous roads using the system.
"With MEC, we can move the compute load to the edge of the network, which is closer to the end user and the vehicle and not in a remote data center, so that the total time it takes to send and receive data messages is much shorter," Dennis Ong, a senior manager of systems architecture at Verizon, told Lifewire in an email interview. "That enables autonomous driving functions in vehicles that can be executed in less than a tenth of a second — faster than humans can react in some cases, and fast enough to enable certain safety features."
Autonomous functions in connected vehicles typically rely on roadside radios to extend the signals that vehicles use for low-latency communication with each other and surrounding infrastructure. The recent test was designed to prove that cellular networks and dedicated routers can meet the latency, or delay, standards needed for autonomous driving applications.