Dozens of sensors on top of Apple's driverless test car

According to the British "Daily Mail" reported on August 28, Apple's driverless car recently appeared in the test center in Sunnyvale, California. It is reported that the test vehicle has undergone a major upgrade. The white Lexus SUV test car is loaded with dozens of sensors on the roof rack, which is very eye-catching.

Since April of this year, Apple has used several Lexus SUVs to conduct road tests for its unmanned software platform. Recently, an Apple Forum user living near Apple's office in Sunnyvale, Calif., announced the latest version of the test car. Dozens of sensors on top of the test car essentially use lidar (Lidar) to explore the surrounding environment. By lidar scanning, one or more lasers send short pulses that are reflected back when encountering obstacles such as clouds, leaves and stones. In driverless cars, these sensors continue to scan the surrounding environment and acquire road information in this way, thus playing the role of “eye of the car”. By combining the information captured by Lidar with GPS and other sensor information, Apple's software can create a panoramic view of the surrounding traffic and environment. It is said that the driverless car that Apple plans to launch will eventually be applied to Uber's shared car platform. Apple’s internal car project “Titan” has been put on hold for a long time, and now the project has rehired software experts. According to recent news, this project will also run on Uber. According to foreign media reports, in order to enter the network car service and car sharing market, Apple is creating its own independent system. Last year, Apple invested $1 billion in Uber's opponents to get a place on its board of directors. Recently, the American taxi software, Lyft, also successfully cooperated with Google's sister company Waymo. Inadequate negotiations at Apple's top level and "lack of a clearly defined vision" have led to a significant reduction in the company's efforts to develop a driverless car program. There have been rumors that Apple plans to build a driverless team as part of the Titan project. Today, this long-term plan seems to be abolished for the development of driverless technology for other types of vehicles.