The "Complete Guide to Autonomous Vehicles for Kids and Everyone Else" explains everything you may have heard about autonomous vehicles and lots more. 

It's a fully illustrated guide, available in book and e-book formats. For older kids and adults alike! 

What's the Deal with Autonomous Vehicles?

Autonomous vehicles could transform our roads and cities, but they're not really here yet. 

Why? This guide takes you on an illustrated journey through their history, the motivations driving their development, and the key technical and societal issues.

By better understanding these key concepts, we'll (as a society) be better prepared to:

• See through the hype and understand the real opportunities and challenges
• Be empowered by a working intuition about the key components of the technologies involved operate (and can fail)
• Understand that these challenges span disciplinary divides - it's not just a technology race
• Excite and inspire new generations to get involved in developing and understanding this potentially transformative technology

What's in the Book?

The guide comes as a 100+ page softcover (8.5" x 11", 280 x 216 mm), full colour illustrated book (we also have an e-book version).

It's packed full of key STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and HASS (Humanities And Social Sciences) concepts encountered in in the Autonomous Vehicles field.

All up, there are over 50 key concepts covered in the book: 

History and Beginnings: origins, early days, competitions, companies and startups involved

How They Work: technical overview, power, cameras, LIDAR, radar, GPS, compute, traffic sign recognition, vehicle recognition, lane keeping, localization, path planning, connectivity

Training and Testing: training, artificial intelligence, simulation and playback, test track training, public road testing

Types of Autonomous Vehicles: levels of autonomy, private autonomous vehicle usage profiles, centralized ride-sharing fleets, truck platooning, autonomous shuttles, autonomous delivery vehicles

Challenges: vulnerable road users, human (and kangaroo!) movement prediction, the trolley dilemma, dealing with road works, autonomy in extreme weather

Potential Impact: traffic jams, the road toll, autonomous delivery during pandemics, health impacts of less walking, amount of money on offer, public transport impact, government revenue raising, equity of access, urban versus rural concerns, last mile transport, cybersecurity and hacking, city layout changes, where people will live, what happens to garages, impact on transport jobs, impact on automotive industry

Off-the-Road Autonomous Vehicles: autonomous racing, autonomous trains, autonomous scooters, autonomous flying cars, autonomous mining trucks, autonomous farm vehicles, autonomous logistics vehicles, autonomous planetary rovers, autonomous military vehicles

Predicting the future and Getting Involved: future predictions, how to learn and train to get involved, types of training.

Caution: who is this book for?

Your guidance and judgement as a parent, guardian, carer or educator is needed as to the suitability of this book for children. A rough guide is that it is aimed at older kids (aged 10 and up) and adults. Younger kids could also benefit from the book - but there are some concepts that can be confronting, like the fact that cars (both autonomous and human-operated) can kill and injure people, and that the defence industry is looking at autonomous vehicles too. There are also complex, potentially challenging topics - like issues of equitability.