nsane.forums Posted October 9, 2010 Share Posted October 9, 2010 Self-driving cars have logged 140,000 hours on US roads Google has revealed major successes in the field of vehicle driving automation. The company said that cars based on its automatic driving software have now logged over 140,000 lines of travel on normal roads, with one recently driving from Google’s Mountain View campus to the Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. “We’ve always been optimistic about technology’s ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today,†said Sebastian Thrun, distinguished software engineer at Google in a blog posting. “While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting.†The cars use built-in video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to identify road markings and navigate traffic without incident. In addition it appears that the actual road has to be driven beforehand by a human driver to identify road waypoints before the car can navigate itself. Thrun stresses that the cars had a trained safety driver behind the wheel at all times and local police have always been notified when vehicles have been on the road. Google hired a highly respected development team to build the automated vehicle’s systems, including Chris Urmson leader of the winning 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge team and Mike Montemerlo, the software head of the team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Also included is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle as well as a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside. Long term the team want to build software that allows cars to use roads much more efficiently, reducing the effects of traffic congestion and cutting wasted commuting times, as well as saving lives in road accidents. Much of the current progress in vehicle automation has been driven by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It held a series of public competitions to develop automatic cars, with millions of dollars in prizes. All the vehicles in the first Grand Challenge in 2004 failed to finish (or in some cases even start) the course but a team from Stanford scooped the $2m prize in 2005, and DARPA is now funding similar challenges in urban environments with actual traffic. DARPA, which is funded by the US Department of Defense, is funding the challenges to investigate automating military vehicles, particularly for mundane resupply work. The organisation has said it would like a quarter of all military vehicles to be automated by 2030, and the first prototypes have already been built. Meanwhile General Motors has said that it expects fully automatic cars to be on the road within the next eight years, or possibly sooner. View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.