Face to face with Ford's self-driving Fusion Hybrid research vehicles - Ars Technica
DETROIT, MI—The future, or a slice of it, can be found in one of the many labs inside Ford's Research and Innovation Center. The center is a three-story brick affair on Ford's vast campus, but it wouldn't look out of place at a well-funded research university. We navigated the warren-like maze of corridors on our way to a workshop to meet some of the company's self-driving research vehicles, led by Randy Visintainer, Ford's head of autonomous vehicles. Fume cupboards and lab benches share the space with three white Ford Fusion hybrids. These are Ford's autonomous driving research vehicles, and Visintainer—along with Jim McBride and Doug Rhode—is here to show off the technology that makes autonomous driving possible. A fifth lidar sensor is mounted upside down, which Ford has been using to scan the tops of buildings (since the lidar scanners have a limited vertical field of view). That last one apparently came about after Ford had some requests to create 3D scans of NASCAR race. Source: arstechnica.com
