Have you ever wondered what’s behind the magic of self-driving cars and delivery drones like Amazon’s latest venture? These vehicles are built with a complex brew of many amazing technologies, including spectacular cameras, but let’s talk about one biggie: sensors. Sensors map out the shape of the world around the vehicle. Without them, the vehicle would be frozen in place, unable to safely make any move.
But how do sensors, well, sense? Many autonomous vehicles use a combination of cameras, radar, and a technology called “lidar” to build up a visualisation of the world around them. Let’s take a closer look at lidar, a cousin to radar and sonar. Unlike those two classic technologies, which use radio waves and sound waves respectively, lidar uses lasers – basically, light. The sensor sends a laser pulse outward, and measures how quickly the light bounces back to it. Together, all these back-and-forth pulses, combined with the camera images and radar, contribute to a 3D visualisation of the world around the vehicle. It’s sometimes called “remote sensing.”
For all the sensor data to mean anything that can be acted on, though, it has to be sent from the receiver inside the sensor to a central processor that makes sense of it all and builds up that 3D visualisation from the many data points coming at it. And finally, precise location data from satellites and cellular networks get added in for a robust dataset that a vehicle can confidently act on. That’s a lot of back-and-forth data. Given that too much latency (slowness) in sending the data around can mean seriously outdated information in a fast-moving car, split-second data exchange is critical.
That’s where compression comes in. Lossless compression shrinks the data down to a size that can be transmitted quickly without any loss of crucial data. When the sensors receive the data, the compressor is triggered, shrinking the data and sending it onward in the blink of an eye. This is all possible because the size of the expected incoming data never changes, no matter how much action is unfolding outside the vehicle: it’s always going to be the same number of bits for each data event. Even hanging out at a stop sign in the middle of dense fog (basically, “there’s nothing to see here”) is still going to be sent as that steady, unchanging number of bits, or “width.”
CompressionX is already proving itself in the world of remote sensing, shrinking data packets at lightning-fast speeds – all while maintaining 100% data integrity. After all, when it comes to high-stakes functions like providing location data for vehicles in motion, there’s no room for sloppy results. Designed by theoretical and applied mathematicians, CompressionX is built on exceptionally sound algorithmic principles for a fast, reliable compression result. To chat with us about the possibility of a bespoke project that focuses on your remote sensing product needs, get in touch with us today.
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