Autonomous Vehicle Control

This application area focuses on end-to-end control and operation of self-driving vehicles in real-world environments. It spans sensing the surroundings, understanding road context, predicting other agents’ behavior, making driving decisions, and executing precise vehicle control. The use cases highlight both full-scale intelligent vehicle systems and small-scale test platforms that allow rapid, low-risk experimentation with algorithms before deployment on public roads. It matters because safe, reliable autonomous vehicle control can dramatically reduce accidents, improve traffic flow, and lower operating costs in logistics, ride-hailing, and public transport. AI models fuse data from cameras, lidar, radar, and maps to perceive the environment, plan routes and maneuvers, and control steering, acceleration, and braking. Supporting technologies such as HD mapping, simulation and testing frameworks, and vehicle-to-everything communication are critical to validate performance and close key safety and reliability gaps before large-scale deployment.

The Problem

Your vehicles can’t drive themselves safely and consistently across real-world edge cases

Organizations face these key challenges:

1

Driver cost, availability, and turnover constrain fleet growth (especially in logistics and ride-hailing)

2

Safety performance is inconsistent: incidents cluster around rare edge cases (construction, occlusions, aggressive merges)

3

Long validation cycles: proving a new software release is safe requires expensive road miles and manual review

4

Sensor and environment complexity (camera/lidar/radar + maps + V2X) creates brittle integrations and hard-to-debug failures

Impact When Solved

Safer operations via consistent perception/planning/controlFaster validation cycles using simulation + scenario replayLower cost-per-mile and scale without linear driver hiring

The Shift

Before AI~85% Manual

Human Does

  • Drive the vehicle end-to-end (perception, decision-making, control)
  • Handle complex scenarios (construction, unprotected turns, merges) via experience
  • Perform safety oversight and incident reporting
  • Manually review test drives/logs to decide if software changes are acceptable

Automation

  • Basic automation/assist features (ACC, AEB, lane keep) in limited conditions
  • Deterministic rule-based planning/control for constrained scenarios
  • Conventional testing tools for data logging, replay, and dashboards
With AI~75% Automated

Human Does

  • Define the Operational Design Domain (ODD), safety requirements, and release gates
  • Supervise rollouts (remote ops, safety drivers during early phases), handle exceptions and recovery procedures
  • Curate datasets, label edge cases, and prioritize scenario libraries for regression testing

AI Handles

  • Perceive the environment via sensor fusion (camera/lidar/radar), detect/track objects, and estimate free space
  • Understand context (lane topology, traffic rules, HD map alignment, right-of-way inference)
  • Predict other agents’ intents/trajectories and estimate risk under uncertainty
  • Plan safe, comfortable maneuvers (route, behavior planning, trajectory generation) and execute control (steer/throttle/brake) in real time

Solution Spectrum

Four implementation paths from quick automation wins to enterprise-grade platforms. Choose based on your timeline, budget, and team capacity.

1

Quick Win

Geofenced Low-Speed Autonomy Demo with MPC Safety Envelope

Typical Timeline:Days

Delivers a constrained, low-speed autonomous driving demo (e.g., private road/parking lot) using an off-the-shelf autonomy stack and classical Model Predictive Control (MPC) with conservative safety constraints. Pretrained perception is used primarily to support lane/obstacle awareness, while control focuses on stable, explainable closed-loop tracking and emergency stopping.

Architecture

Rendering architecture...

Key Challenges

  • Sensor time synchronization and calibration basics
  • Controller stability across varying friction and latency
  • Preventing ODD expansion that breaks the demo constraints

Vendors at This Level

Tier IV (Autoware)Duckietown

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Market Intelligence

Technologies

Technologies commonly used in Autonomous Vehicle Control implementations:

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Real-World Use Cases