This article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In 2011, Ionut Budisteanu read about Google's self-driving car project and decided to build one himself. So the 18-year-old, from Râmnicu Vâlcea (also known as Hackerville) in Romania, started writing algorithms that could recognise images of traffic signs, lanes and other objects from the camera feeds.
His biggest obstacle: the cost of 3D LiDAR, the remote-sensing technology that measures distance. "I realised that [Google's] LiDAR system costs about $75,000 [£47,000]," says Budisteanu, now 21. "So I decided to make my own. My LiDAR only had 18,000 pixels but it cost about $200." His system, which he built around his father's Fiat, can recognise buildings from 100m, and humans from 20m.
Budisteanu, a WIRED Innovation Fellow, started programming when he was 11. After playing computer games for years, he started making his own. He designed his first antivirus software in year six and his own programming language in secondary school.
Inspired by his blind uncle, he also designed a device that enables a visually impaired person to identify objects with their tongue. "I undertake these projects to learn and to challenge myself," he says.
Budisteanu is now focused on a new project: a pick-and-place robotic machine, called VisionBot. "I want to create an infrastructure to help makers and engineers turn their prototypes into industrial products," he says.