One of the biggest issues facing the development of fully autonomous vehicles comes from perhaps not the most obvious source — the quality of road markings. "Clear visibility of road markings is required by autonomous vehicle sensors to work," explained Harald Mosböck, executive committee member at the European Union Road Federation (ERF). Mosböck was speaking at the 2018 Southern African Transport Conference (SATC) in Pretoria at which he presented Horizontal Road Markings and Autonomous Driving — Back from the Future. "We have a lot of norms and standards on how lane markings in Europe should look like for the human eye, but nothing on how they should look like for vehicle sensors," Mosböck said. Currently, only two vehicle sensors understand road markings: cameras and Lidar systems. The latter is a detection system which works on the principle of radar, but uses light from a laser. In order for fully autonomous (level 5) vehicles to work, road markings will need to be widened and...

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