How does self driven cars operate?

A self-driving car is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input. To accomplish this task, each vehicle is usually outfitted with a GPS unit, an inertial navigation system, and a range of sensors including laser rangefinders, radar, and video. The vehicle uses positional information from the GPS and inertial navigation system to localize itself and sensor data to refine its position estimate as well as to build a three-dimensional image of its environment.

Data from each sensor is filtered to remove noise and often fused with other data sources to augment the original image. How the vehicle subsequently uses this data to make navigation decisions is determined by its control system.

The majority of self-driving vehicle control systems implement a deliberative architecture, meaning that they are capable of making intelligent decisions by:
1) maintaining an internal map of their world and
2) using that map to find an optimal path to their destination that avoids obstacles (e.g. road structures, pedestrians and other vehicles) from a set of possible paths. Once the vehicle determines the best path to take, the decision is dissected into commands, which are fed to the vehicle’s actuators. These actuators control the vehicle’s steering, braking and throttle.

This process of localization, mapping, obstacle avoidance and path planning is repeated multiple times each second on powerful on-board processors until the vehicle reaches its destination.

Breaking Down the Technicals
Mapping and Localization

Prior to making any navigation decisions, the vehicle must first build a map of its environment and precisely localize itself within that map. The most frequently used sensors for map building are laser rangefinders and cameras. A laser rangefinder scans the environment using swaths of laser beams and calculates the distance to nearby objects by measuring the time it takes for each laser beam to travel to the object and back. Where video from camera is ideal for extracting scene color, an advantage of laser rangefinders is that depth information is readily available to the vehicle for building a three-dimensional map. Because laser beams diverge as they travel through space, it is difficult to obtain accurate distance readings greater than 100m away using most state-of-the-art laser rangefinders, which limits the amount of reliable data that can be captured in the map. The vehicle filters and discretizes data collected from each sensor and often aggregates the information to create a comprehensive map, which can then be used for path planning.


Now to my question, can this kind of car drive safely in Lagos from point A to B considering the driving mentality of other drivers on the road mostly the danfo drivers and the okada pilots? What do y'all gurus in the house think?

It's not likely the car will be able to cope in chaotic places such as oshodi but it will work in other areas that are well organized.