Well, that's a relief—Google has announced in a blog post that, after nearly 700,000 miles of real-world testing, its self-driving cars have gotten the hang of the urban jungle.
While it's reassuring that Google's autonomous cars are capable of digesting the often complex and chaotic scenes typical of a city street, we're a tiny bit curious over what things were like when the cars first hit the mean streets. Anyway, Google nonetheless claims it has had a trouble-free run of tens of thousands of test miles in and around its headquarters' Mountain View, California, environs.
As Google aptly points out, "a mile of city driving is more complex than a mile of freeway driving." While humans can take in a ton of information while behind the wheel and respond as if by second nature, autonomous vehicles must scan their environments and make (safe) decisions or predictions based on the information and data at hand, and that takes a ton of testing and programming.
So it's a big deal that Google's cars have been essentially "taught" to identify and navigate real-world obstacles such as bicyclists signaling, crossing guards holding stop signs, railroad crossings, parked cars, construction zones, and more is a big deal. (Bicyclists, children crossing streets, and construction workers in Mountain View previously unaware that they were part of a potentially disastrous experiment involving a technology undergoing active development, you may now breathe a sigh of relief.) Curiously, in spite of the cars' work-in-progress status, Google claims its cars are poised to be the safest vehicles on the road.
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As the company puts it, "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." We are of the mind that a monkey or a six-year-old without a smartphone in hand is a safer driver than distracted or fatigued drivers, but we're also not so sure Google's cars are the zero-sum answer to distracted driving. There will always be some kind of scenario that falls just outside an autonomous car's programming, not to mention the nebulous concept of "judgment" that we're not sure a circuit board can ever learn. We'll still drive ourselves, thank you, although that isn't to say Google's tech isn't impressive. You can see how the cars take in and understand data in this neat video:
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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