Happy Monday Saints. From google.com google.com is making a car that drives itself
Seemingly not content with merely driving our Internet searches – ongoing plans for world dominance aside – online titan Google has developed a revolutionary artificial intelligence that’s capable of driving our automobiles without human input.
According to Google, its automated cars have been successfully driven by trained operators from the company’s Mountain View campus through to its Santa Monica offices
on Hollywood Boulevard.
They’ve also been driven across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, along the Pacific Coast Highway, and even all the way around Lake Tahoe for a total of 140,000 miles in what it calls “a first for robotics research.”
“Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder to ‘see’ other traffic, as well as detailed maps which we collect using manually driven vehicles to navigate the road ahead,” Google explained in an official blog post.
“This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain,” it added.
Google has created its automated vehicle technology alongside engineering talent plucked from the prestigious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Challenges.
While the prospect of cars navigating busy streets without a physical driver might put the frighteners up some readers, Google has been quick to point out that each car always has someone behind the wheel while a software-monitoring operator sits in the passenger seat.
Testing of the technology platform, which Google claims will cut down on commuting time and reduce accident rates by 50 percent, presently includes a conventionally controlled journey along prospective routes during which time the on-board camera software maps recognisable features.
Google’s automated fleet of cars currently consists of six modified versions of Toyota’s iconic Prius and Audi’s sporty TT coupe. The experimental technology is not expected to be ready for mass production for several years.
