Self-driving cars are an area in which Google has placed particular emphasis, and continues to do so, improving its software.
As the company announced, since its last update, it has recorded thousands of miles of routes on the roads of Mountain View, California (where its headquarters are located).
“A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of open road driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different road rules in a small area. We’ve improved our software so that it can detect hundreds of distinct objects at once – pedestrians, buses, traffic signals, or cyclists signaling turns. A self-driving car can pay attention to all of this in a way that a human can’t – and never get tired or distracted,” writes Chris Ermson, director of the company’s self-driving car program, on the company’s official blog.
As he points out, what to the human eye appears chaotic and random on city streets is predictable to computers. "As we faced thousands of different situations, we created software models of what to expect, from the probable (a car stopping at a red light) to the improbable (a car running a red light). We still have many problems to solve, including 'teaching' the vehicle to drive on more streets in Mountain View before going to another city, but thousands of situations on city streets that two years ago would have caused us problems can now be handled autonomously," he adds.
According to Ermson, the company's vehicles have now logged approximately 700,000 miles of autonomous driving.
At the same time, in a similar context, the “Drive Me” pilot program is being launched in Gothenburg, Sweden, with the support of the Swedish government, with 100 self-driving Volvos. The aim is to examine the economic, environmental and social advantages of using autonomous vehicles and to familiarize the public with the new technology. The first vehicles are expected to start circulating on the city’s streets in 2017.
Source: naftemporiki.gr
