Anselmo Rodrigues

Autonomous vehicles were designed with the purpose of minimizing accidents on urban roads and providing more safety and comfort, assisting or performing independently some tasks that are the driver’s responsibility. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has developed a classification of autonomous vehicles, creating six categories for autonomous driving. Level zero refers to conventional cars without any technology of this type, while at the other extreme, at level five, the driver becomes a passenger, needing only to activate the vehicle and indicate the destination. In such case, it is up to the vehicle control system to carry out in a fully autonomous way the driving of the vehicle throughout the route and to carry out any emergency decision-making. The intermediate levels of autonomous driving include systems already found on the market, such as parking assistance, emergency braking and lane change assistance, among others.