Society advances and with it its technology. Large companies have to know how to cover a large number of fields of work in order to reach the maximum number of possible users. In this way, they ensure that they have cutting-edge technology for all sectors. In the case of Apple, it could be said that it works in artificial intelligence, in all kinds of devices, and experimentally in driving autonomous vehicles.
The US Department of Motor Vehicles has released the reports that Apple has to issue about testing with their autonomous vehicles and the data of "loss of control" of driving are quite encouraging for the development of the project.
DMV forces Apple to release data on Project Titan
El Titan Project o Project Titan is one of the fields where Apple is working in recent years. It's about a autonomous vehicle driving model. Although it is in the testing phase, the Big Apple has not given any information. All the information collected comes from official agencies and institutions of the United States. On the one hand, we know that there are more than 60 vehicles that are running to test Apple models.
Thanks to this, the media have been able to get some information about the work that those in Cupertino are carrying out. One of the important data that is measured in this type of project is the number of times the vehicle loses control from the situation and "disconnects", leaving control of the vehicle to the driver. To this number is also added the number of times that the driver has to modify the situation of the vehicle to avoid an obstacle or cause major accidents.
According to official Apple sources, there is a high number of disconnections by the philosophy that is being carried out from the project, that is, "top priority" and "conservative movements." That is, they prefer to be cautious in the tests to progress little by little. It is normal when you design such a system. To get an idea, these are some of the situations for which a disconnection:
- Appearance of emergency vehicles: fire brigade, ambulance, police, etc.
- Construction zones
- Objects that appear in the portfolio immediately
Apple's vehicles under Project Titan are not yet designed to get around these kinds of difficulties. The data published by the DMV assures that these vehicles traveled about 40.000 kilometers throughout the United States between April 2017 and June 2018. Of all these kilometers, there were 36.359 software disconnections, y 40198 manual acquisitions, in which the driver has had to intervene. But Apple assures that they have only happened two major incidents among all these additional incidents.