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WaveSense is not only able to detect the location of
WaveSense is not only able to detect the location of a car's occupants—it has to have a reliable and accurate way to know when a vehicle is going to leave its parking garage, for instance—but it also has to know in which direction it is coming, as well. As the new company explains, this is an especially important problem because car-driving is not only the most dangerous activity that we have ever known, it is also the most destructive, and it can have a big impact on the safety of thousands of other people.
Because humans are incredibly mobile and have great sense of direction, it's a very natural phenomenon to be aware of where you are. It makes sense, of course, because we walk around and look at everything, but when you have a car that can see your head, it makes sense to you to be aware of where your head is. This works as well as any other cognitive-behavioral task because it allows you to understand what's going on and make sense of that.
A car-owner who asks you to look at your GPS to help him or her make sense of where he or she is is going to lose control of his or her car, and if he or she is going to make sense of it, he or she should be aware of how quickly he or she can make sense of it—and that makes people who want to drive less likely to give up.
WaveSense is working on many more types of autonomous vehicles, and these are the ones that are coming to market, but we still don't know exactly how each will be applied to all of them. That's a new problem for the company, because as we've discussed before, you can't just say, "We don't know how to do this yet, but we'll figure that out by the time we're ready."
As for how to tell when a car is going to leave its garage? The company says it's based off of that assumption.
WaveSense's chief scientist, Scott Wainwright, and their co-investigators, who are not involved in the research, have not yet been able to make any major predictions about how autonomous vehicles will be used by the automotive industry, but they do indicate that while that's good news for the industry and driverless cars would benefit from better communication between the cars in the garage and the cars in the road, there is still one critical thing that still needs to be worked out.
It's not just one way, it's the whole
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