Google Continues To Advance Self-Driving Cars

 Self Driving Cars  

Google's self driving cars have now logged nearly 700,000 autonomous miles, and with every passing mile their research team is growing more optimistic that the goal of a vehicle that operates fully without human intervention is possible.

Jaywalking pedestrians. Cars lurching out of hidden driveways. Double-parked delivery trucks blocking your lane and your view. All of these occurrences and more are faced by human drivers everyday, and now they are the challenges of teams around the world developing self driving cars.

"We’ve shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving."

Google has posted an update on their blog showing some of the progress their team has been making over the last year with its self-driving car initiative. The driverless cars have been tackling the challenge of navigating city streets of Google’s home town, Mountain View, California.

Freeway driving has already been largely tackled by the self driving car team, so now they are ready for the next challenge.

Google's vehicles have now logged nearly 700,000 autonomous miles, and with every passing mile they are growing more optimistic that the goal of a vehicle that operates fully without human intervention is possible.

  "We’ve shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving," claims the post.

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Since our last update, we’ve logged thousands of miles on the streets of our hometown of Mountain View, Calif. 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. We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously—pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t—and it never gets tired or distracted.

The video above details how Google's vehicles navigate some urban driving scenarios in and around Mountain View.

According to Google, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. "As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it)," they write.

There are still a multitude of problems to figure out before Google can really start making and selling self driving cars, "But thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously."


SOURCE  Official Google Blog

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