KING (ROBOT) OF THE ROAD: The Google fleet consists of conventional vehicles--six Priuses and one Audi--that have been outfitted with off-the-shelf components consisting of two forward-facing video cameras, a 360-degree laser range finder, four radar sensors and advanced GPS units.
Image: COURTESY OF GOOGLE
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Long a staple of science fiction, self-driving vehicles that act as robot chauffeurs have been a cultural dream for decades. For most of that time, however, the dream seemed a part of some unattainable future.
But now, led in large part by Google's sudden and unexpected charge, autonomous robot cars come tantalizingly close to reality. As various mapping, sensing and location-based technologies have converged recently, Google has begun to position itself as the leader of our robo-chauffeur future. Yet for all of the technology's promise, it still has some major—and perhaps insurmountable—hurdles to overcome.
Google estimates that one million lives could be saved around the globe by driverless cars each year. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in the U.S. alone there were 5.8 million crashes in 2008. Of those, about 34,000 resulted in fatalities, 1.6 million resulted in injuries and 4.2 million entailed some sort of property damage. The NHTSA says these numbers have come down over time—attesting at least partly to the ever-increasing safety of all vehicles—but they clearly still account for a large amount of deaths, injuries and property damage that driverless cars could drastically reduce.
Gigantic leaps with off-the-shelf components
Forty years ago the first self-driving cars were little more than crude, slow-moving contraptions following lines painted on the road. The past several years, however, have seen accelerated success in the quest for autonomous road vehicles, starting with a series of self-driving challenges the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held between 2004 and 2007 to help develop robots that could replace some U.S. military personnel on the battlefield.
Last year, a group of engineers from Stanford University Dynamic Design Laboratory, the Electronics Research Laboratory for the Volkswagen Group and software-maker Oracle Corp. shifted driverless cars into a higher gear by successfully running their 265-horsepower Autonomous Audi TTS Pikes Peak research car up the 20-kilometer course of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb race in Colorado without stopping. The sporty hatchback—Volkswagen owns Audi—carried two computers in its trunk, both using Oracle's Java Real-Time System to run algorithms that kept the car on the road and at the limits of its handling ability on the varying surfaces and conditions.
Google's self-driving car project exited stealth mode last year and now the company is lobbying Nevada to be the first state to allow self-driving cars to be legally operated on public roads. To this point, Google's robot fleet has traveled more than 240,000 kilometers with minimal human intervention and only one incident in which a test car was rear-ended by another (human-driven) vehicle. Unlike the futuristic sci-fi images splashed on movie screens, the Google fleet consists of conventional vehicles—six Priuses and one Audi—that have been outfitted with off-the-shelf components consisting of two forward-facing video cameras, a 360-degree laser range finder, four radar sensors and advanced GPS units.
The Google project is very much an offshoot of the DARPA challenges. In fact, many of the members of the Google team are alumni of those competitions and brought the lessons learned during that time with them.
"Certainly there have been a lot of advances in sensor technology that are allowing us to do this today versus 15 years ago," says Chris Urmson, technical lead for the Google project and a lead on the Carnegie Mellon team that won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. "But we see the real power as being in the software that's taking that data and figuring out what to do with it."
It is a vehicle's ability to interpret what is going on in its surroundings and then react appropriately that represents perhaps the biggest technical challenge for the future of self-driving cars.
An issue of common sense
An aspect of Google's project often lost on the casual observer is that its cars are not completely autonomous, even when no human is helping drive them. In order for the vehicles to function the route needs to be driven by a human ahead of time in one of the test cars and mapped using its array of sensors. This rich set of mapping data is then stored on a Google data center and a portion of it is loaded into the car's hard drive. The location of stoplights, school zones and anything else that is reasonably static is marked so the car will acknowledge them without having to interpret them in real-time.
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16 Comments
Add Comment"Suppose 10 human-generated fatalities are replaced with five robot-generated fatalities, is that an ethical trade that society wants to make?" that is a very interesting comment. Ethically, it is a reasonable trade-off but people will see it differently. People will see those deaths as additional as though the number of people killed has increased. It is similar with medicines. A medicine may help a large number of people but if a small number of people have bad reactions to the drug, the general public sees those problems as additional issues and not part of the checks and balances. It is as though the drug has only caused the bad reactions and not helped anyone. The anti-vaccine and naturopath crowds are famous for this kind of reasoning and I suspect driverless planes, trains and automobiles will experience the same thing. The general public has no idea of the number of people killed by automobile accidents. But the first time someone is killed in an autonomous car everyone will know and autonomous cars will be credited with one kill not one million lives saved. The real challenge as always is not in making smart cars, but making smart people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not just the perception relative safety, but the perception of loss of control. Many people will not want to surrender control of the vehicle to an unseen and uncommunicative force.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLooking at the tendency of an even slightly overloaded roadway to develop jams and voids in traffic, it is understandable that drivers will be frustrated that a robotic vehicle would occasionally travel under the speed limit with space in front of it, following an algorithm that prevents a jam miles down the road.
Observing that most of the drivers in certain regions speed, it is understandable if drivers would be frustrated with a car that never exceeds the speed limit.
If you are reading the newspaper or something, do you really care if your self-driven car never exceeds the speed limit? It's possible to come up with a fairly accurate time of arrival - would most people really care what the intermediate speeds are?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Many people will not want to surrender control of the vehicle to an unseen and uncommunicative force." people do it all the time in public transit and airplanes. I'm not sure about the speeding though. Not too many people on buses or trains complain that they are driving the speed limit. When taken together with you comment about control I think it is more likely that people will feel more secure if the vehicle demonstrates that it follows traffic laws to the letter. Remember, people think that when they are driving crazy, they are driving correctly for the conditions, when the other guy does it, it is because he is a maniac. I think most people would panic if the vehicle started driving the way they drive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany people like driving and won't want to hand over control of their cars to a computer. That's unless there's traffic conjestion, they have to drive the same old boring road with a 50km/h limit and speed cams, they are tired after work, they want to go out for a few drinks with their friends, or are already elderly and not as comfortable driving any more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, you care that your car is doing the 55 mph speed limit, all the human-driven cars are doing a much more reasonable 75 mph, and you are eventually going to get hit in the rear and killed because you are a mobile road block.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Suppose 10 human-generated fatalities are replaced with five robot-generated fatalities, is that an ethical trade that society wants to make?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo.
The 5 that are saved are going to be the worst drivers among us, while the computers in the cars are going to kill people at random, including the very best of drivers that have no accidents at all, ever. If you are such a driver, why would you ever get into a car that kills occupants from time to time?
I would want much much more than a 50% reduction in traffic injuries and deaths from my computer controlled car. There's no reason that a driver than never falls asleep, never gets bored, never gets distracted, never feels the need to race another vehicle, never feels slighted when another car cuts it off, should not be able to drop the fatality and injury rate by a factor of 10 or 20. All accidents should be the fault of the other vehicle, and the robot driver should be excellent at avoiding even those accidents.
I think that by the time robotic driving is real and commonplace, the reduction in death rate will be more like 999:1, than 2:1
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@rally2xs : less coffee
@everyone else : I hope so.
A necessary step to autonomous cars is the integration of these technologies into standard automobiles as collision avoidance systems. If these technologies could successfully avoid accidents in real world situations by either alerting the driver to potential dangers or by taking limited action (such as braking) if the driver fails to respond to the system’s warning, the value of these technologies would be proven.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet these technologies save a driver from a potentially devastating accident and the psychological barriers to autonomous control of vehicles will disappear.
I'm concerned with how it will deal with those tire eating potholes that appear without warning, construction, and the line painting orange cones. Not to mention accidents and detours.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'll assume it can deal with the Driver's Ed scenario where a ball comes bouncing into the street, followed by the kid chasing it.
An automated driver might have a better shot at avoiding potholes than human drivers since they could have radar as a sensor, as well as possibly being networked with other cars ahead that have already identified the pothole. In fact, the car might have already downloaded the location of all potholes on the intended route as the car is leaving the driveway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think much could be done that is not possible now via computer communications. The challenges will likely be the dynamic things - a tumbleweed is blown into the path of the car - avoiding it could cause a skid and crash, while hitting it might mess up some paint, depending... what to do? That's a tougher decision for a computer, I think.
We surrender the accelerator to speed control.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome drivers now let the car park itself; or to tell them if something is too close and institutes autobraking.
This is just one step further.
At my age I can see great value in a car that can call 911 and drive straight to the hospital emergency room. Or one that can detect the Alcohol on your breath and refuse to go into a bar's parking lot if you are about to reach the legal limit. I would feel a lot safer if I knew, when the bars let out, the patron's car would be the designated driver. Even so, I know several people who would try to drive over a cliff, just to prove it could be done. You also have to realize that in an age when hackers have broken into the Pentagon's computers, the system in the self driving car would have to be totally fool proof.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTechnology help everyone on the world.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<a href="http://tapchipcworld.blogspot.com/2011/08/steve-jobs-resigns-as-ceo-of-apple.html">Google Plus SEO</a>
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe you have just answered their pre-mapping problem. It is very rare that you are the first person to drive along a particular stretch of road.
As data comes in, it could be transmitted to subsequent vehicles traveling along the same path, thus creating the map on a continuous basis. Of course, transient data, such as the kid chasing the ball, could be accounted for as a heads up to subsequent vehicles to use extra caution in that area. A crash could also transmit data to vehicles farther away to reroute around it.
In the event of uncertainty, the autopilot would alert the person in the driver's seat and disengage if needed, bringing the vehicle to a safe stop along the side of the road. For example, if map data were unavailable or outdated(data expires after a set number of hours), you could not engage the autopilot, but it would continue to map out the road you are on for subsequent drivers or possibly for your return trip.
Static road signs could be made machine-readable through RFID and signals could be enhanced with transmitters in the long term to help alleviate the need for pre-mapping.
The marvelous use of vehicle activated radar:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe vehicle activated radar is device used to calculate the speed of the vehicles which is running beyond the speed of the law permitted. The people who used break rules often on road. This very best device is developed for to indentify the culprits and show them to the law and get punished.