operate the autonomous vehicle the lidar device 50 is as is known a remote sensing unit that emits intense focused beams of light and measures the time it takes for the reflections to be detected by a sensor this information is used to compute ranges or distances to objects in this manner lidar is analogous to radar radio detecting and ranging except that it is based on discrete pulses of laser light a set of three dimensional coordinates e g a set of x y z coordinates or a latitude a longitude and an elevation of an object are computed from a time difference between the laser pulse being emitted and returned an angle at which the pulse was u201c fired u201d and the absolute location of the sensor the video image capture device 52 can be any type of camera to capture images electronically e g a front grill mounted camera or a windshield camera the video image capture device 52 can also be a stereoscopic camera system which permits the video image capture device 52 to achieve depth perception in addition the video image capture device 52 can be tuned for non visible radiation i e infrared for improved night vision and sensing the recurrent neural network 54 is a class of artificial neural networks where the network has feedback elements that enable signals from one layer to be fed back to a current layer an exemplary recurrent neural network 54 having four layers is shown in fig3 the network 54 has a series of.