Three IITs are working together to build self-driving cars

There seems to be a global race of sorts to build self-driving cars, with biggies like Tesla, Uber and Google leading the race. And now, India has also decided to jump in, with three top colleges of the country joining hands to do the same.

Kharagpur, Kanpur and Bombay branches of Indian Institutes of Technology have deployed their teams to work on driverless cars and as expected, Indian automotive companies are showing interest in the project.

Even though the names of the companies were not disclosed, sources said that all major auto companies are involved with the three institutes.

"We are developing technology for driverless cars keeping the Indian market in mind, in contrast to the global tech majors who are building and testing technologies in the Western market," IIT Kharagpur's Debashish Chakravarty, head of the autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) project, told ET.

While students at IIT Kharagpur are testing autonomous vehicles that they have built from scratch in their campus, those at IIT Kanpur are also planning to build its own autonomous vehicle.

Similarly, IIT Bombay students are also running the pilot testing of the autonomous vehicle in their campus.

Also read: IIT-Bombay students have made India’s fastest sports car ORCA

All three institutes are also individually designing a prototype vehicle using outsourced 3D laser sensor lidar, so that they can have advanced road detection, a feature crucial for autonomous vehicles. Other than these sensors, everything is being built in the campuses itself.

(Image source: IndianCarsBikes)