The company says its self-driving cars have logged over 700,000 miles without the assistance of a human driver so far, but now it's refining its self-driving software to focus on really mastering the finer points of city driving, which Google notes can be "much more complex" than freeway driving.
While intuitively we humans might have a hard time trusting a computer to be responsible for navigating crowded and seemingly unpredictable city streets, Google actually thinks the opposite is true. Here's how a new Google blog post about the program put it:
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.
Below is a video from Google's self-driving car team that shows how the car's software views the world in a city driving scenario. As project director Chris Urmson explained in the blog post, "what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer." The software is able to detect construction zones, obstacles, cyclists and even hand signals and navigate accordingly.
Georgia;color:#000" href="http://www.forbes.com/ebooks/curbing-cars-americas-independence-from-the-auto-industry/?utm_source=articlelink&utm_medium=direct&utm_campaign=carsebook">Curbing Cars: America’s Independence From The Auto Industry investigates why a growing number of Americans are giving up their cars. This illuminating account of our changing automotive habits is available now for download.Still, the streets of suburban Mountain View are a cakewalk compared to the chaos and congestion of cities like New York or San Francisco, but Urmson admits this readily.
"We still have lots of problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we tackle another town, but thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously."
Have a look at the system in action and let me know in the comments if you could ever trust Google software to get you safely home.
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