Earlier this year, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook revealed that the company has secretly been working on self-driving systems for cars in a task they call Project Titan. The effort seems to be on the right track, as fellow autonomous car technology pioneer MacCallister Higgins posted the most up-close look at Apple's secret self-driving car.
Higgins, the co-founder of autonomous car service Voyage, posted a short video on Twitter which featured a closer look at the array of sensors that Apple's self-driving car is equipped with.
"Going to need more than 140 characters to go over [Apple's] Project Titan. I call it 'The Thing,'" said Higgins. In the video, he showed the equipment mounted on the roof of a converted Lexus SUV.
He also noted that the roof array had three light ranging and detection radar units (LiDAR) on the front side and another three at the back. The LiDAR is a camera that has capabilities to see depth, and thus one of the most essential pieces needed in the autonomous driving technology.
In a subsequent post, he also noted a difference on the way Apple approached the design of the equipment compared to other autonomous cars. "The majority of the compute stack is likely located inside the roof unit," he said. This is in contrast with most other self-driving cars whose computing equipment are tucked away in the trunk.
Apple's decision to go for this kind of design is intriguing, because this does not only allow the company to easily swap test cars by removing the autonomous driving equipment and deploying it on another car, it may also be the philosophy that the company is targeting in its future attempt at releasing the technology to the mass market.
Designing an equipment that can easily be mounted to a car without much modifications is a very consumer-friendly way of popularizing the technology. This way, users will be able to simply mount the self-driving unit to an existing car.
