This is really
good news. The problem has gone from intractable
to solvable. As I have posted in the
past this will be a utter revolution in personal transportation.
Expect to step
out of your home, touch a button on your cell phone and have a car pull up in minutes
or if need be, to pull out of your garage to pick you up. You then inform the car of your destination
and sit back. Upon arrival at destination
you let the car know on any planned needs to be confirmed later and then
proceed. The car then enters the standby
pool to provide transport as needed to anyone else.
This
capability will empty the garages and parking lots and sharply reduce the
number of vehicles needed to provide continuous service. Let us say it another way. If you are reading this, your car is likely
sitting idle. If you do 10,000 miles per
year, then you average around one and one half hours per day and your car is
unused the rest of the time. Finding a
way to double that usage on average will halve the number of cars on the road.
As well it
will become almost impossible to have an accident as this system matures. That is a huge cost saving both in material
and ongoing medical care much of which is actually charged off to society.
Google:
Driverless cars are mastering city streets
Apr 28, 8:10 AM (ET)
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Google says it has turned
a corner in its pursuit of a car that can drive itself.
The tech giant's self-driving cars
already can navigate freeways comfortably, albeit with a driver ready to take
control. But city driving - with its obstacle course of jaywalkers, bicyclists
and blind corners - has been a far greater challenge for the cars' computers.
In a blog entry posted Monday, the project's
leader said test cars now can handle thousands of urban situations that would
have stumped them a year or two ago.
"We're growing more optimistic that
we're heading toward an achievable goal - a vehicle that operates fully without
human intervention," project director Chris Urmson wrote.
Urmson's post was the company's first
official update since 2012 on progress toward a driverless car, a project
within the company's secretive Google X lab.
The company has said its goal is to get the
technology to the public by 2017. In initial iterations, human drivers would be
expected to take control if the computer fails. The promise is that,
eventually, there would be no need for a driver. Passengers could read,
daydream, even sleep - or work - while the car drives.
Google maintains that computers will one day
drive far more safely than humans, and part of the company's pitch is that
robot cars can substantially reduce traffic fatalities.
The basics already are in place. The task
for Google - and traditional carmakers, which also are testing driverless cars
- is perfecting technology strapped onto its fleet of about two dozen Lexus
RX450H SUVs.
Sensors including radar and lasers create 3D
maps of a self-driving car's surroundings in real time, while Google's software
sorts objects into four categories: moving vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and
static things such as signs, curbs and parked cars.
Initially, those plots were fairly crude. A
gaggle of pedestrians on a street corner registered as a single person. Now,
the technology can distinguish individuals, according to Google spokeswoman
Courtney Hohne, as well as solve other riddles such as construction zones and
the likely movements of people riding bicycles.
To deal with cyclists, engineers initially
programmed the software to look for hand gestures that indicate an upcoming
turn. Then they realized that most cyclists don't use standard gestures - and
still others weave down a road the wrong way.
So engineers have taught the software to
predict the behavior of cyclists based on thousands of encounters during the
approximately 10,000 miles the cars have driven autonomously on city streets,
Hohne said. The software projects a cyclist's likely movements and plots the
car's path accordingly - then reacts if something unexpected happens.
"A mile of city driving is much more
complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects
moving according to different rules of the road in a small area," Urmson
wrote.
Before recent breakthroughs, Google had
contemplated mapping all the world's stop signs. Now the technology can read
stop signs, including those held in the hands of school crossing guards, Hohne
said.
While the car knows to stop, just when to
start again is still a challenge, partly because the cars are programmed to
drive defensively. At a four-way stop, Google's cars have been known to wait in
place as people driving in other directions edge out into the intersection - or
roll through.
The cars still need work on other
predictably common tasks. Among them, understanding the gestures that drivers
give one another to signal it's OK to merge or change lanes, turning right on
red and driving in rain or fog (which requires more sophisticated sensors).
And when will these and other problems be
solved?
"You can count on one hand the number
of years until people, ordinary people, can experience this," company
co-founder Sergey Brin said in September 2012. He made the remarks at a
ceremony where California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation legalizing the
cars on public roads in the state.
To date, Google's cars have gone about
700,000 miles in self-driving mode, the vast majority on freeways, the company
said.
California's Department of Motor Vehicles is
in the process of writing regulations to implement that law. Nevada, Florida,
Michigan and Washington, D.C., also have written driverless car laws.
Google has not said how it plans to market
the technology. Options include collaborating with major carmakers or giving
away the software, as the company did with its Android operating system. While
Google has the balance sheet to invest in making cars, that likelihood is
remote.
Traditional automakers also are developing
driverless cars. Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said he hopes to deliver a
model to the public by 2020.
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