Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Google quietly testing driverless cars on real streets

Paul Marks - With little fanfare on Saturday night, Google revealed that it has been furtively testing and refining driverless cars on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, clocking up an incredible 225,000 test-driving kilometres as they did so.

Google says it has quietly gotten into the automotive automation research business by hiring some of the robotics engineers who won (or at least, performed well) in the Pentagon's 2004, 2005 and 2007 self-driving car competitions - the so-called DARPA Grand Challenges. DARPA wants Humvees and trucks to drive themselves so supplies can be delivered without risking the lives of troops.

But where the DARPA competitions started in a desert and ended up in a simulated city, Google has taken to real streets with real people in them. While that raises all kinds of legal and insurance issues, Google told the New York Times that it has stuck to the letter of Californian law.

Google stresses that its currently experimental driverless cars "are never unmanned" - a human operator sitting behind the steering wheel could always interject (with the alacrity of someone switching out of cruise control). And a back seat driver keeps a constant eye on the state of the software steering the car with the aid of roof-mounted video, radar and laser range-finding (lidar) sensors.

This project may further explain why Google also acquired lidar imagery with its Street View camera cars: it could provide automatic cars foreknowledge of street architecture before it hits them. As the Financial Times notes: "Google has already mapped and photographed hundreds of thousands of miles of roads around the world for its Street View service, including road signs and other information which may be useful for its driverless cars." ...

via Short Sharp Science: What will you do in a driverless car?.

2 comments:

teknophilia said...

I'd love to have a self-driving car. This seems to go hand-in-hand with the DARPA challenge for self-driving cars.

Gail Kirkpatrick said...

If i didn't have to drive every morning I sure would have a lot less anxiety.