Recently, Google has released a report saying that they have out robot cars to the test! Yes, that’s right. These cars are being completely operated by robots!
Google’s robots drive more than search engines these days. The company has launched robot cars on the highways that drive safer than the best human drivers who enjoy the lowest insurance rates. Google asserts its robot drivers can save lives, reduce traffic jams, and lighten the load, allowing for light weight cars that are more fuel efficient and easier on the environment.
Google’s robot cars have made road trips spanning over 140,000 miles, starting from Google’s Mountain View campus to its Santa Monica office right on down to Hollywood Boulevard to trade parking spaces with the stars. The cars have even managed to drive down San Francisco’s Lombard Street, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation that’s also a continual tourist traffic jam. Only one accident ever occurred, when a Google robot car was rear ended while stopped at a traffic light. Apparently, even robot cars can be the victims of tailgaters.
Driven by robots, the cars have human drivers who can take over with a touch of the button in case the robots decide to go haywire. The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser ranger finder to sense traffic. Google maps keep them on track.
“Safety has been our first priority in this project,” Sebastian Thrun, a Google software engineer, explained on Google’s blog. “ Our cars are never unmanned. We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. And we also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. …And we’ve briefed local police on our work.”
The technology was developed by a team of engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a line of robot vehicle races organized by the US government. Google’s automated vehicle designers include Chris Urmson, the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge; Mike Montemerlo, the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge; and Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside.
Google contends that robot domination is not its number one priority. Traffic safety is, however, and the company argues that computer driven cars can drastically reduce the more than 1.2 million lives lost every year in highway accidents, as cited by World Health Organization statistics.
“We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half,” Thrun alleged.
Traffic jams may also become a thing of the past, Thurn hinted.
“We’re also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new ‘highway trains of tomorrow,’” Thurn said. “These highway trains should cut energy consumption while also increasing the number of people that can be transported on our major roads. In terms of time efficiency, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that people spend on average 52 minutes each working day commuting. Imagine being able to spend that time more productively.”
As robots make the roadways safer, cars can also weigh less, reducing fuel consumption.
“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,” Thurn explained. “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.”
Don’t expect robots to take you to work tomorrow, however. Even the most optimistic predictions foretell the technology’s at least eight years away from hitting the mainstream. A lot more needs to be tested, including the legal system. If a robot does get in a crash, for instance, whose responsible, the driver not paying attention thanks to technology or the company that programmed the robot in the first place?
As for now, Google’s robot cars are street legal, thanks to the human at the wheel ready to take over at the literal push of a button. While Google hired drivers with perfect driving records, the same can’t be said for all of us. Computers don’t drink and drive, sleep, or speed, but they do occasionally crash with disastrous results. Considering we’re still using GPS technology that has sent drivers down abandoned roads to their very deaths, computers have a lot of maturing to do before they can man the road trips.
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Not only is it amazing that they have been driving around for a combined 140, 000 miles, Not one car caused a single accident! Infact, one google car was even rear ended. An example of another case of human error on the road! Could you imagine how safe our roads would be if all of our cars were operated in this way? With every car working together electronicly, getting places will very safe and efficient. This will save many lives and reduce injuries.
This would even reduce traffic jams! Also, think what we could do with the time we would have in our cars. We could watch movies or read a book, or just enjoy the scenary.
Overall, this is a great idea. It will be very expensive and timely to implement, but it will improve traffic, save lives and make our roads safer. However, the most interesting part of this is that if there is the technology to do this NOW, it will be very interesting to see what technology will be available in the near future.
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