‘City traffic too chaotic for driverless cars’

KOLKATA: Vishal Dugar who grew up in Kolkata’s chaotic traffic, and is now an integral member of a team working on autonomous cars in the US, hopes the streets here will one day become conducive for driverless cars to ply. Though it seems apipe dream now, Dugar says it is possible to streamline traffic and improve driver behaviour by adoption of technology.


“Autonomous driving is about predictability of behaviour. That can happen if the actions of others — vehicles and pedestrians — are reasonable. In Kolkata, there are too many variable factors at present with vehicles ranging from hand-pulled rickshaws and carts to cycles, bikes, cars and buses. In addition, there is lack of driving discipline. If a driverless car is put on the city road today, it will be so confused that it won’t budge an inch,” said Dugar, who studied at Don Bosco in Park Circus before doing his engineering from BITS Pilani.

After a three-year stint at a Bangalore-based defence startup Tonbo Imaging, that works on R&D applications, he went to the US for post graduate at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. While at the university, he and others developed a pilotless helicopter with a $95 million funding from for US Naval Research. The successful demonstration took place in December 2017.

Dugar now works with selfdriving company Aurora, founded by the industry’s biggest rockstars — Chris Urmson who had led Google’s selfdriving efforts, Drew Bagnell who had headed Uber’s self-driving initiative, and Sterling Anderson, formerly head of the Tesla Model X and Tesla Autopilot. At Aurora, Vishal works on researching and implementing artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning techniques that allow autonomous cars to drive like humans.

“Imagine sitting back while your self-driving car drives you to the office. The car has to understand its environment, predict what the other cars and pedestrians might do in the next 5 seconds, understand traffic lights and other traffic devices, and then drive with absolute safety without being overly cautious. The car must also execute complex manoeuvres such as lane changes, turning through traffic and high-speed merges, while attempting to mimic how humans drive. Building such systems is a very difficult task, and requires a highly specialized set of skills even when one considers the disciplined driving in most America cities. To do for the Kolkata of present, or for that matter any Indian city, is impossible. But it can happen by generating traffic related data, installing sensors then influencing driving behaviour by linking it to incentives and penalties,” he said.

While driverless driving will take years to arrive in Kolkata and other Indian cities, Dugar believes it will happen sooner in highways with transportation of goods in trucks.