For people who can’t drive…
Sure, you’ve seen the TV commercials about new cars, some “luxury models” (does this mean rich people can’t drive?), some not, that can parallel park themselves, that watch with video cameras and proximity sensors, that look out for approaching objects behind, and that generally do a lot of the driving for “maroons” who should not be on the road in the first place! 
Now, we learn that Google has been testing self-driving robotic cars on the roads of California, and so far they have avoided everything but a minor fender bender caused by a human driver – no doubt one of the aforementioned “California maroons.” If you think about it, avoiding everything but a single minor fender bender is a MINOR MIRACLE on the roads of California, where amateurs compete in demolition derbies every day – some with driver’s licenses, and some without!
Seven Google test cars have traveled 1,000 miles without the need for human intervention, according to the New York Times. Each car has a human driver, just in case, and a human technician to monitor the navigation system. The cars have traveled more than 140,000 miles with the humans stepping in only occasionally. One of the cars even made it safely down Lombard Street in San Francisco.
The Google robot cars are equipped with artificial intelligence (which is more intelligence than found in some of the human-driven cars in California)! There is a rotating sensor on the roof that scans more than 200 feet in all directions to create a 3D map of the world around it and a video camera behind the windshield that keeps an “eye” on pedestrians, bicyclists, and traffic lights. (I’m reasonably certain that it looks for motorcyclists, too, in contrast to most human drivers. ) There are three radar devices on the front bumper and one in the back and a sensor on one of the wheels that keeps track of the car’s position on the 3D map. The car has a motion sensor and a GPS system, and it can be programmed to drive cautiously or more aggressively!
A few things that the robotic car likely does NOT do are: text while driving, phone while driving, eat while driving, read on the steering column while driving, apply eye makeup and shave while driving, use a laptop on the passenger seat while driving, and illegally drive with BOTH earphones of an iPod plugged in to an otherwise EMPTY head!
The man behind the project is Sebastian Thrun, (Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and) Google engineer and co-inventor of Google’s street view mapping project. Thrun was also behind the $2-million-prize-winning autonomous auto in 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge to see if a driverless vehicle could navigate almost 150 miles through the California desert!
For more details, see the CNET or New York Times online articles linked above!
(Note added October 11, 2010: See this CNET article for more thoughts about Google’s robot cars. As for me, I was plagued by thoughts of all of the radar signals sent and received by THOUSANDS of these cars bouncing off buildings, canceling and reinforcing each other, and wondering whether the performance of thousands of cars under those conditions would be as good as the performance of a single vehicle.)
-Bill at
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