MIT’s self-driving car can navigate unmapped country roads

There?s a good reason why companies often test self-driving cars in big cities: they?d be lost most anywhere else. They typically need well-labeled 3D maps to identify curbs, lanes and signs, which isn?t much use on a backwoods road where those features might not even exist. MIT CSAIL may have a solution, though. Its researchers (with some help from Toyota) have developed a new framework, MapLite, that can find its way without any 3D maps.

The system gets a basic sense of the vehicle?s location using GPS, and uses that for both the final destination and a ?local? objective within view of the car. The machine then uses its onboard sensors to generate a path to those local points, using LiDAR to estimate the edges of the road (which tends to be much flatter than the surrounding landscape). Generic, parameter-based models give the car a sense of what to do…