How the Autonomous Car Works: A Technology Overview

How does an autonomous vehicle work? How does it understand what it sees? How does it know where to go? Oh, that majestic metallic creature, how does it know? In this post, I hope to provide you with a foundational understanding of the main mechanics of how an autonomous car works. After noticing that the only decent overviews of autonomous car technology involved the tedium of technical articles written by academics, I decided to develop a more accessible overview for anyone who was interested in the topic from a business perspective but wanted a better grasp of the underlying technology.

Let’s return to the original question. How does the autonomous vehicle work? The best place to start is by understanding the functional architecture of the autonomous car. A functional architecture is an architectural model that identifies a system’s functions and its interactions and how they work together to achieve some mission goal. A functional architecture of an autonomous car is like an anatomy map of the human body. Whereas an anatomy map illustrates the different organs and the various ways in which they interact with the mission of keeping the body alive, the functional architecture of an autonomous car illustrates how the major components of the car work together to achieve the mission of self-driving without violating any legal or ethical codes.