August 21, 2018—WaveSense, a Boston startup, launched formally yesterday, and has a goal to take technology developed at MIT for the military and use it to give self-driving cars an extra sense, reported Wired.
It says equipping vehicles with a radar looking down, penetrating the ground, will give them a new way to map exactly where they are in the world without relying on visual clues or GPS, according to the report.
“Our solution is to look below the ground, where you don’t have the same issues that optical sensors on the surface have,” says Tarik Bolat, CEO of WaveSense.
According to Wired, his company uses an extra radar sensor on cars, usually mounted just behind the front wheel, pointed down. Even a low-power signal can penetrate up to 10 feet into the road. Wavesense says it can pinpoint a location to within an inch, even at highway speeds, and that it is weather-independent.
The tech comes out of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, a defense R&D center, and was first deployed in 2013 to help troops navigate in Afghanistan, where staying on path and avoiding landmines is a matter of life and death, reported Wired.
