Modeling emissions

The researchers developed a framework to investigate the operational emissions from computers in a global fleet of fully autonomous electric vehicles that do not require a second human driver.

The model is determined by the carbon intensity of the electricity that powers each computer, the number of hours each vehicle is driven, and the number of vehicles in the global fleet.That appears to be a deceptively straightforward equation on its own.

However, because we are considering an emerging application that is not yet available, each of those variables contains a significant amount of uncertainty,” Sudhakar states.