Once a driver activates the autonomous mode, the vehicle's drive-by-wire system transfers control of the brake, gas, and steering to an onboard computer. The vehicle's roof-mounted lidar (or light detection and ranging) unit probes 360 degrees with 64 laser beams, taking more than a million measurements per second. This data forms a high-resolution map (accurate to about 11 cm) of the car's surroundings.
Prebuilt navigation maps indicate static infrastructure, such as telephone poles, crosswalks, and traffic lights, which enables software to quickly identify moving objects, like pedestrians and cyclists. These targets are clustered together and tracked so that algorithms can process the traffic situation and plot a path safely through
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