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Autonomous vehicles, also known as self-driving cars, have come a long way in the past few years – a decade ago you could see them only in science fiction movies, then they became reality and nowadays every major auto maker is working to come up with new self-driving models each year.

Autonomous cars combine computer vision that allows them to see what’s around them with the help of radars, lasers and cameras, deep learning technologies to allow the car to make decisions of its own to solve road situations, robotics to put the decisions into practice and advanced navigation with GPS coordinates to get to the destination. The process looks like this in real life:

• The car receives the directions of movement from the navigation system based on the destination.
• It looks around to create images of the obstacles and pathways.
• The central computer – the brain of the car – makes decisions about how fast and which way to move and the decisions are transmitted to the steering and braking systems of the car.

Not all self-driving cars offer the same level of autonomy. They are categorized from level 1 to 5 based on the amount of human assistance they need to be able to participate in the traffic in a safe and efficient way, level 5 being 100% autonomous and still in experimental phase.  Of course, for now, new drivers should still seek training and attend driving lessons Orange County instructors conduct.