3 ms·

> It is so much easier to make electric vehicles self-driving compared to the ICE vehicles. Why?

• IndrekR 9y ago
  Faster response time in motor control, high torque in low revs. Makes math simpler.
  • NLips 9y ago
    What maths? I don't see what I'm missing: Normal acceleration and maintaining speed is trivial to handle with simple control loops. This isn't like e.g. phase detect autofocus where you want to supply a single input at the start to get to the correct end position; accelerating a massive vehicle takes a significant amount of time, such that a control loop has to: - gradually increase the accerator input from the start point - decrease accelerator input as the desired speed is approached - maintain a constant speed This is trivial for a control engineer. In some ways ICEs are easier than electric motors - you get free damping on your accelerator input! Outside of normal driving, you also have emergencies, where surely the alternatives are basically braking, steering, and hard acceleration, which respectively require engine inputs of 0 (i.e. no gas), no change (or again 0), and max. And hard acceleration is almost never the answer to emergencies anyway. When does a self driving car need to know "provide exactly X power to the engine", where X is none of [0, a little less than currently, no change, a little more than currently, max]? Source for control loops: On a general engineering course bachelors, our 1 days labs included one of which a part was writing speed control software for ICEs and one of which a part was writing position control software for an electric helicopter.
  • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Automatic gearbox cars are easy enough to control, for both electric and fuel cars the input is a throttle.