Look out: Super-sensor sees around corners, promises zero avoidable deaths.

NPS wrote a paper theorizing that perceiving the environment far enough, clear enough, and early enough to eliminate roadway deaths (that is, those from avoidable crashes) requires a data acquisition and processing rate of 100 terabits per second-that's 10 million times the sensory data rate flowing from your eyes to your brain when you're not drunk or distracted.

- Frank Markusa

I've just learned it's not entirely our fault, as Homo sapiens, that we cause 95 percent of car wrecks. That's because we haven't evolved the physiological ability to both see far enough ahead and process visual data sufficiently to eliminate "accidents." I learned this when a California company called Neural Propulsion Systems (NPS) unveiled its AtomicSense Platform sensor fusion product, which it says can sense and interpret enough data to prevent crashes.

NPS wrote a paper theorizing that perceiving the environment far enough, clear enough, and early enough to eliminate roadway deaths (that is, those from avoidable crashes) requires a data acquisition and processing rate of 100 terabits per second-that's 10 million times the sensory data rate flowing from your eyes to your brain when you're not drunk or distracted.

So NPS devised a fully solid-state, system-on-chip (make that chips-lots of 'em) sensor suite to do just that, leveraging Department of Defense research. The AtomicSense system includes many cameras fused with three tech breakthroughs: digital multi-band radar, multiple input/multiple outputs (MIMO) lidar, and atomic-norm computing.