​Google’s self-driving car turns out to be a very smart ride

Google’s team of self-driving car engineers have succeeded in a large fashion where many have had issues.

Continuing to work on their ability to have an autonomous car, the group is looking to replace you as the driver – and believes that no one really wants to drive – do you?

 

Don’t mock Google’s robo-cars. A ride in one shows that you, the driver, may soon be obsolete.

If the car was being driven by a human, that would be no big deal — except to share-the-road advocates. But this is Google’s self-driving car we’re talking about, and that seemingly unremarkable maneuver turns out to be one of the highlights of a day spent with members of Google [X]‘s Self-Driving Car Project team.

“People hate driving,” Self-Driving Project director Chris Urmson said at a press event held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., near Google’s headquarters. Once you get to work in the morning, “it takes 30 minutes to decompress from that jackass who cut you off.”

Google’s self-driving car is an ambitious project that hopes to end human error behind the wheel with a very Googley solution: software. The tech titan’srobo-cars have logged more than 700,000 hours since it began working on the vehicles in 2009. Google expects to have them ready for public use between 2017 and 2020.

The goal, as Urmson describes it, is to imagine a world where cars are safe. Not only are more than 33,000 people killed annually (PDF) in the US in car crashes, but such accidents are the leading cause of death (PDF) for people under the age of 45.

“Google is uniquely positioned to solve this problem,” said DmitriDolgov, the software lead on the project. “There’s a whole researchfield in taking a map and comparing it to your position.”

That is essentially what Google’s self-driving cars do — on a vastly more complex scale — because here “you” are a multi-ton vehicle hurtling through the real-world “map” at velocities fast enough to pulverize, if not kill, on impact.

At the heart of the technology, what separates it from other sensor-driven autonomous vehicle projects, is a Google-made topographical map that gives the car a sense of what it should expect. The map, different from Google Maps, includes the height of the traffic signals above the street, the placement of stop signs and crosswalks, the depth of the sidewalk curb, the width of the lanes, and can differentiate lane markings from white and dashed to double-yellow.

See full story on cnet.com

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