I had no idea the technology was this advanced. Last I heard was the DARPA challenge where they were still struggling to navigate traffic-free dirtroads. Google blows mind once again.
Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
21–30 of 216 posts
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#22can anyone see this completely eliminating human taxi drivers within the next 10-15 years?
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#23Yes, they are coming: http://jalopnik.com/5572978/driverless-audi-tts-gets-new-col... Seems like quite a few people are working on projects such as these. I heard some hairdo on TV the other day musing that they will reach general availability "as early as 2022". How do they even come up with those numbers?
>Rather than cameras and lasers providing situational awareness and plotting course, the TTS uses high-resolution comparative GPS to follow a pre-plotted course at an accuracy up to 1 cm of deviation.
Don't think I like the sound of that...
>The only trouble with this set up is the car will be incapable of reacting to unexpected obstacles, say a boulder rolling onto the road or a spectator jumping out to get a picture. Careful spectators.
Seems they agree.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#24can anyone see this completely eliminating human taxi drivers within the next 10-15 years?
only if they throw in a chat bot :)
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#25The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the autonomous driving market?
I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some states, and in any event isn't an ideal place to be clicking on ads). There is a safety issue here as well. Although using a smartphone while driving is illegal in some states, people are driving while using their smartphones with increasing frequency. We need our Internet "fix."
I am sure this driving technology also taps into several of Google's key capabilities: e.g., programming expertise, its voice recognition technologies, search, and its mapping software (Google Maps and Navigation).
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#26The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the autonomous driving market? I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some sta…
If Google paid me to sit at home, I'd have a lot more free time than if my car drove itself.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#27And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software? The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the driver/owner like today.
> The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the driver/owner like today.
duh, of course! The question is - at what premium? Because you know, actually it's customer in the end who pays the price.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#28Nova did an excellent (and surprisingly technical) episode [1] on the 2005 race mentioned in this piece, including Thrun's Stanford team. It was especially impressive as a triumph of Thurn's software-based approach over several of the other veteran teams that relied heavily on complex hardware (e.g., those teams used camera gimbals while Thrun's team just compensated for camera bumps using code).
For those of you on Netflix, it's available as a streaming video [2], and I highly recommend it.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/ [2] http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Great-Robot-Race-Nova/700...
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#29Finally! A giant step towards 'packet-switched' personal transport, using dynamically-routed, market-dispatched autonomous cars on standard roads.
Cancel the bullet train, and instead plow all that money into rapidly deploying this.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#30I wonder if this is legal. I mean, if one of these cars went haywire and mowed down a bunch of pedestrians before the "driver" was able to take control, I reckon Google would have some splainin to do. With autonomous vehicles coming closer and closer to a reality, it's somewhat alarming that there appears to be no legal body attempting to define some guidelines on this subject. At the rate our government works, we'll have fully functioning, marketable autonomous vehicles long before it's legal to use them.