Autonomous car: Indian techie builds self-driving Tata Nano

Autonomous car: Indian techie builds self-driving Tata Nano

An Indian techie from Kerala along with his team of engineers have managed to build an indigenous self-driving car in a period of just five years.

Dr Roshy John, Robotics and Cognitive Systems head, Tata Consultancy Services, has built an automated Tata Nano, which is also tuned to cope with the unique road predicaments in the country.

Interestingly, John got the idea of building a self-driving car after a taxi ride from the airport. While sitting in the cab, he saw the taxi driver falling asleep midway, which forced him to takeover the wheels. This inspired him to start off the autonomous vehicle project, as he was already developing robots for multiple industries.

He pointed out that the traffic and roads in India still continue to lag behind other developed countries in the world. Apart from that, the never-ending constructions and road development projects also proved to be major snags.

After inspecting a slew of cars, John chose Tata Nano for the project, as it is one of the very few cars in India that has a rear-engine layout, and allowed him to fit numerous sensors on the vehicle’s front-end with no space constraints.  

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