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Monday, October 11, 2010

Google Cars drives themselves

Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.


The car is a project of Google which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light. 

Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has. 

Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.
The Google research program using artificial intelligence to revolutionize the automobile is proof that the company’s ambitions reach beyond the search engine business. The program is also a departure from the mainstream of innovation in Silicon Valley, which has veered toward social networks and Hollywood-style digital media. 

During a half-hour drive beginning on Google’s campus 35 miles south of San Francisco last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a route programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance lane and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through Silicon Valley.
It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop the car produced a detailed map of the environment.
The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for lights and stop signs, as well as making announcements like “approaching a crosswalk” (to warn the human at the wheel) or “turn ahead” in a pleasant female voice. This same pleasant voice would, engineers said, alert the driver if a master control system detected anything amiss with the various sensors. 

The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first. 

Christopher Urmson, a Carnegie Mellon University robotics scientist, was behind the wheel but not using it. To gain control of the car he has to do one of three things: hit a red button near his right hand, touch the brake or turn the steering wheel. He did so twice, once when a bicyclist ran a red light and again when a car in front stopped and began to back into a parking space. But the car seemed likely to have prevented an accident itself.
When he returned to automated “cruise” mode, the car gave a little “whir” meant to evoke going into warp drive on “Star Trek,” and Dr. Urmson was able to rest his hands by his sides or gesticulate when talking to a passenger in the back seat. He said the cars did attract attention, but people seem to think they are just the next generation of the Street View cars that Google uses to take photographs and collect data for its maps.
The project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service. 

In 2005, he led a team of Stanford students and faculty members in designing the Stanley robot car, winning the second Grand Challenge of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, a $2 million Pentagon prize for driving autonomously over 132 miles in the California desert. 

Besides the team of 15 engineers working on the current project, Google hired more than a dozen people, each with a spotless driving record, to sit in the driver’s seat, paying $15 an hour or more. Google is using six Priuses and an Audi TT in the project. 

The Google researchers said the company did not yet have a clear plan to create a business from the experiments. Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter of the potential to use robotic vehicles to make highways safer and lower the nation’s energy costs. It is a commitment shared by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, according to several people familiar with the project.
The self-driving car initiative is an example of Google’s willingness to gamble on technology that may not pay off for years, Dr. Thrun said. Even the most optimistic predictions put the deployment of the technology more than eight years away. 

One way Google might be able to profit is to provide information and navigation services for makers of autonomous vehicles. Or, it might sell or give away the navigation technology itself, much as it offers its Android smart phone system to cellphone companies. 

But the advent of autonomous vehicles poses thorny legal issues, the Google researchers acknowledged. Under current law, a human must be in control of a car at all times, but what does that mean if the human is not really paying attention as the car crosses through, say, a school zone, figuring that the robot is driving more safely than he would? 

And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software? 

“The technology is ahead of the law in many areas,” said Bernard Lu, senior staff counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. “If you look at the vehicle code, there are dozens of laws pertaining to the driver of a vehicle, and they all presume to have a human being operating the vehicle.”
The Google researchers said they had carefully examined California’s motor vehicle regulations and determined that because a human driver can override any error, the experimental cars are legal. Mr. Lu agreed. 

Scientists and engineers have been designing autonomous vehicles since the mid-1960s, but crucial innovation happened in 2004 when the Pentagon’s research arm began its Grand Challenge.

The first contest ended in failure, but in 2005, Dr. Thrun’s Stanford team built the car dubbed Stanley that won a race with a rival vehicle built by a team from Carnegie Mellon University. Less than two years later, another event proved that autonomous vehicles could drive safely in urban settings.
Advances have been so encouraging that Dr. Thrun sounds like an evangelist when he speaks of robot cars. There is their potential to reduce fuel consumption by eliminating heavy-footed stop-and-go drivers and, given the reduced possibility of accidents, to ultimately build more lightweight vehicles. 

There is even the farther-off prospect of cars that do not need anyone behind the wheel. That would allow the cars to be summoned electronically, so that people could share them. Fewer cars would then be needed, reducing the need for parking spaces, which consume valuable land. 

And, of course, the cars could save humans from themselves. “Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt?” Dr. Thrun said in a recent talk. “Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.”

by John Markoff from the NY Times

63 comments:

  1. Amazing what google is trying to do... i haven't seen any of those cars cuz i'm not in the US :/

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  2. I fear one day losing my driving to legislation and robots :-(

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  3. Yesss so we can fap while car go!

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  4. I would totally own a self-driving car.

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  5. Great read! Looking forward to reading your next post.

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  6. haha thats cool they should just build teleportation devices already

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  7. Is it weird I take pride that I live in Google's place of origin / headquarter city?

    I also crashed Google's company party once, they were celebrating when they opened up on the stock market.

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  8. Good. Very good.
    No moar driving licenses I guess.
    My cat could drive too.

    Supp 'n' follow bra.

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  9. i hate this, not being in control...yuck

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  10. Fucking Christ i know right !!! reviewd it too 1

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  11. In the future it's going to take no effort to do anything lol

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  12. This is crazy, I can't believe they even put different driving personalities in it.

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  13. Wow. And I was blown away when I heard google was going to provide internet up to 100gbps. But that's incredible! Up next, MJOLNIR suit.

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  14. All I got out of that article was this: I WANT ONE!

    @Sage: Isn't that what we do now anyway?

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  15. Wow 100gb/s that's incredible...where do I sign up for that kind of speed?

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  16. this is cool, can't wait till we can actually have these things.

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  17. Amazing technology, makes you wonder what other ventures Google has invested in and keeping secret.

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  18. Oh gee, can't wait till I don't need to drive myself.

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  19. I heard of this new electric company that produces Micro chip CPU's that run at 250GHZ. But anyway, this investment seems like a waste for how much it might be worth.

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  20. I think this was talked about in a POpular mechanics a long time ago

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  21. super fucking cool. the future. i want one.

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  22. Can't wait to see how they can integrate the car with everything else they offer. There's just so much they can do.

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  23. Thats insane man. I dont know if I would trust a computer enough to drive me around "Aggressively" haha

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  24. I buy cars based on looks and performance. Why would you want to get a car you don't have to drive? Driving is too fun.

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  25. This seems to be the first step to Skynet.....

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  26. Awesome, funny there was one crash from someone bumping the google car lol.

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  27. wow, absolutely awesome!

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  28. Robots man. This has large implications for shipping, trucking, and farming.

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  29. im guessing will smith's movie is coming true

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  30. i saw an article about this before, i really can't wait for this to become standard :)

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  31. google is gonna own the world haha

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  32. I remember a few weeks ago we had a google rep come talk to the class and he mentioned that he got to play with a lot of the new "toys" they are planning. Said one of them involved transportation. Bet this is what that fucker was talking about.

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  33. i think this is pretty cool. sometimes i'm tired to drive home from work so when this becomes available i might get one. lol

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  34. Cars that drive themselves are my dream, but also my worst nightmare.

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  35. Give it some time and people wont even be allowed to drive on public roads new cars will come with no way to overide the machine

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  36. interesting, I didn't know that...

    GTL4life!

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  37. Googles gonna take over everything, so you better hide yo kids hide yo wife hide yo huaband cause they be climbin in yo windows next

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  38. very cool. great idea for the disabled.

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