Self-Driving Car

A self-driving car, also called an autonomous or driverless vehicle, is a car built to operate with reduced or no human input, combining sensors, artificial intelligence and control software to find its way on roads with little or no help from a driver. Its perception system draws on lidar and cameras, working much like human eyes, along with GPS and neural networks, to build a model of the vehicle's surroundings, while a separate control system decides how to move the car based on that model and the rules of the road. The idea traces back to radio-control experiments in the 1920s and the driver-assistance systems developed after the Second World War, with Japan building a first semi-autonomous car in 1977 and Carnegie Mellon University starting its Navlab project in 1984; commercial deployment took a large step forward when Waymo launched a robotaxi service in Phoenix, Arizona in 2017, though as of 2025 no system yet drives fully on its own in every condition and environment.