REVEALED: Apple’s progress in self-driving car technology

Apple is finally, revealing information about the progress it is making in the field of self-driving car technology. During the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in California, Apple’s AI research director Ruslan Salakhutdinov shared several projects related to automated driving - technology that identifies and classifies objects including pedestrians and other vehicles, from 3D point cloud information.

According to a report by Wired, Salakdinov, who joined Apple in 2016, addressed roughly 200 AI experts who were present during the session. These included researchers from big tech firms, including Google and Facebook. He showed off a project previously disclosed in a paper posted online by Apple last month. It states that this project trained a system to recognize pedestrians and other vehicles from 3-D point cloud information.

Another project was revealed which offered a method for classifying different objects on the road using cameras placed on top of a vehicle, and a method of using camera footage to track its position very precisely. This technique, known as visual SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping) could be used for autonomous driving but also augmented and virtual reality.

After Salakhutdinov, Apple’s director of machine learning Carlos Guestrin spoke about the company’s effort on machine learning and also, the tech that has gone behind developing the Face ID for iPhone X.

Apple hasn’t shared a lot of information to the public about its plans on automated driving. However, a recent leak implies that the company has applied for a permit to test automated vehicles in California.