- The electric autonomous vehicle will be developed from the ground-up and will not be based on any existing model.
- Wipro will invest Rs 9.6 crore in collaborative research in cutting edge technology areas
Scientists and researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and IT major Wipro Ltd have joined hands for a project that aims to create a driverless car for Indian conditions. The electric autonomous vehicle is expected to hit Indian roads by as early as March 2020.
The collaboration is an extension of the ongoing three-year project at Wipro that uses data from European and American roads for the development of an autonomous vehicle.
The efforts at Wipro have resulted in “a grounds-up autonomous vehicle” but the real challenge now is to build a car while taking into account the unpredictability of Indian roads, say the IISc scientists and Wipro researchers involved in the project.
“We are working on some cutting-edge algorithms for Indian conditions. Earlier whatever we worked on was user data from Europe and America, but we want to do something for India. We cannot use the systems that we built for the other data sets because the conditions here are unique,’’ Dr Ramachandra Budihal, Wipro’s head for AI, autonomous systems and robotics.
According to him, the autonomous vehicle is a greenfield design, and everything has been designed from scratch.
“We are not taking a Toyota or a Honda and retrofitting. We are designing our own electric vehicle and then putting all the systems inside. It is a concept autonomous vehicle,” he added.
Key challenge
According to the scientists, the key challenge in building a driverless car for Indian road conditions is the amount of processing power that will be needed for the car to process the enormous amount of data coming in from the road environment. The plan is to equip the autonomous car with about 28 sensors.
The car project is a part of the recently created Wipro IISc Research Innovation Network, under which Wipro will invest Rs 9.6 crore in collaborative research in cutting edge technology areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and human machine interaction, related to autonomous systems and robotics.
“This collaboration will enable accelerated development and adoption of autonomous systems and V2X for our customers,” said K R Sanjiv, CTO, Wipro.
Source: The Indian Express
