To improve the safety of autonomous systems, MIT CSAIL scientists have developed a system that can sense tiny changes in shadows on the ground to determine if there’s a moving object coming around the corner.
If you’ve ever seen a self-driving car in the wild, you might wonder about that spinning cylinder on top of it.
It’s a “lidar sensor,” and it’s what allows the car to navigate the world. By sending out pulses of infrared light and measuring the time it takes for them to bounce off objects, the sensor creates a “point cloud” that builds a 3D snapshot of the car’s surroundings.
“For me, to be really fulfilled in my work as a scientist, I want to have some tangible impact,” she says.
Carpenter explains that artificial intelligence, which can help compute the combinations of compounds that would be better for a particular drug, can reduce trial-and-error time and ideally quicken the process of designing new medicines.
