Apple has announced that they were working on self-driving devices for some time now, but what we didn’t know was that their “autonomous car” would be able to learn routes. While we still don’t know too much about Apple’s self-driving cars, they are steadily releasing more interesting details.
For one thing, this may not be a traditional autonomous car at all. Recent releases even suggest that this new system may even function as an add-on for your car! Carnegie Mellon, professor of AI Reslan Salakhutdinov, revealed many new news in his recent presentation. A public publication of an autonomous navigation system from Apple’s 2015 patent application has been released as well.
According to Apple’s patent, the navigation system will make a “characterization of a driving route.” According to the abstract, the system will recognize routes manually made by the driver. After a specific route is repeated several times over and over again, the specific route can meet a “confidence indicator.”
Once a confidence indicator has been met, the route will be saved into the system. Routes saved into the system can then be used by the autonomous navigation itself! This means that the Apple system will be able to make such a smart driving car that has the ability to learn new routes!
It will even be features that will allow you to take some outside information into consideration when optimizing their routes. Although this patent is a couple of years old and things could have changed between now and then, we still have a lot to look forward to with Apple’s self-driving car.