Google is testing robot cars. They’re envisioning “highway trains” to cut the number of road fatalities in half. Cars that can react to real conditions but also access pre-made road maps for the path they’re on. And these are the exact conditions in which the automatic cars have been tested – with police approval, a human passenger ready to override the computer and take control if necessary, and a human driven car having pre-mapped the route ahead.
The altered Toyota Priuses and Audi TTs managed the drive between San Francisco to Los Angeles, covering as much as 140,000 miles, much more than any previous robot car system. Accomplishing this was a sensor array of video cameras, laser sensors and radar, giving the cars a live image of the road and other vehicles. Google’s vision of cars driving better and more reliably than humans, with always-on attention, while passengers use the commute time for other purposes, is an enormous project. The obvious next step is making the cars aware of each other, further reducing the possibility of accidents happening.
