Keeping emissions in check

The researchers discovered that each autonomous vehicle requires less than 1.2 kilowatts of computing power to keep emissions under control.Computing hardware must double in efficiency approximately every 1.1 years in order to achieve that level of efficiency.

Using more specialized hardware that is designed to run specific driving algorithms could be one way to improve that efficiency.According to Sudhakar, it may be simpler to design specialized hardware for the navigation and perception tasks required for autonomous driving because researchers are aware of these tasks.

However, vehicles typically have a lifespan of 10 to 20 years, so developing specialized hardware that can run new algorithms would be difficult.