Autonomous Vehicles Need Thermal Cameras

The future of autonomous vehicles requires driving in harsh weather and lighting conditions. This is practically impossible without the use of thermal cameras. The QuadSight 2.0™ vision system is the most advanced technology combing both visible-light and thermal cameras, resulting in incomparable capabilities which will be the backbone of future autonomous driving. There is no doubt that cameras will be used in future self-driving cars. We live in a colorful world and all our road signs are in colors for easy detection and understanding. But what happens at night? In urban areas there is usually still some light coming from streetlamps or other light sources, but even then, our vision capabilities decrease and awareness to hazards on the road is compromised in low light. In the suburbs, or while driving on a dark road, the risk level increases dramatically and unfortunately that is when most of the fatal accidents occur. This was the case on March 18^th, 2018, just before 10 PM. An Uber employee was behind the wheel of a Volvo, cruising just under the speed limit down a four-lane road in Tempe, Arizona. She was not watching the road. Instead, she gazed at her cell phone, which was streaming a reality TV show. The driver wasn’t being completely negligent, after all, the car had eyes of its own: a lidar imager, seven optical cameras, and ten radars. It also had a powerful computer brain, programmed to prevent the car from hitting other vehicles, crashing into fixed objects, and running over pedestrians. On that last point, Uber’s Volvo failed spectacularly. It struck a pedestrian named Elaine Herzberg at a speed of 56 km/h. Herzberg was taken to the local hospital where she died of her injuries. The National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the crash reported that while the car’s sensors had indeed picked up on something up ahead, they couldn’t provide sufficient and coherent information to the computing system for it to conclusively figure out what that thing was leading the car to essentially “not make” a decision, ending with a fatal crash. Since the Tempe tragedy, many experts in the remote sensing community have pointed out that if Uber’s sensor array had included a thermal infrared camera, the car would have likely identified Hertzberg in time to hit the brakes.