In these days most of the roads are cluttered with vehicles, and it is very disturbing to drive vehicle through this cluttered roads. If you have a driver, you can give control to him and you can relax and enjoy the trip. If you don’t have enough money or provision to appoint a driver, then also nothing to worry. Here is a new news from Google- it is the time for Self-driven Vehicles ! Google’s self-driven cars will soon be appearing on Nevada roads as the Google gets the first autonomous vehicle license.
Wondering how Google’s Self-driven car drives ? Read on.
Google’s self-driven cars rely on video cameras, radar sensors, lasers, and a database of information collected from manually driven cars to help navigate. The car uses video cameras mounted on the roof, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic.
Through the use of computers, sensors and other systems, an autonomous vehicle is capable of analyzing the driving environment more quickly and operating the vehicle more safely. The system combines information gathered from Google Street View with artificial intelligence software that combines input from video cameras inside the car, a LIDAR sensor on top of the vehicle, radar sensors on the front of the vehicle and a position sensor attached to one of the rear wheels that helps locate the car’s position on the map. Urmson, who is the tech lead for the project, said that the “heart of the system” is a laser range finder mounted on the roof of the car. The device, a Velodyne 64-beam laser, generates a detailed 3D map of the environment. The car then combines the laser measurements with high-resolution maps of the world, producing different types of data models that allow it to drive itself while avoiding obstacles and respecting traffic laws. The tech leads for the project, Thrun and Urmson explained how the car works and showed videos of the road tests, including footage of what the on-board computer “sees” and how it detects other vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic lights, which is shown in the below picture .
The vehicle carries other sensors, which include: four radars, mounted on the front and rear bumpers, that allow the car to “see” far enough to be able to deal with fast traffic on freeways; a camera, positioned near the rear-view mirror, that detects traffic lights; and a GPS, inertial measurement unit, and wheel encoder, that determine the vehicle’s location and keep track of its movements.
The DMV licensed a Toyota Prius that Google modified with its experimental driver-less technology, developed by Stanford professor and Google Vice President Sebastian Thrun. Engineers at Google have previously tested the self-driven car on the streets of California, including crossing San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge. For those tests, the car remained manned at all times by a trained driver ready to take control if the software failed. According to software engineer Sebastian Thrun, the car has covered 140, 000 miles with no accidents, other than a bump at traffic lights from a car behind. Google’s car has been issued with a red license plate to make it recognizable. The plate features an infinity sign next to the number 001.
Google engineers has spent years working on a tough engineering problem—how to create a hardware and software system capable of gathering and interpreting massive amounts of real-time data and acting on that knowledge swiftly and surely enough to navigate innumerable varieties of crowded thoroughfares without ever once (among other human frailties) exploding in a fit of road rage at the guy who just cut hard left across your lane without even bothering to flash his blinker.
At the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach, Google gave rare demos of its auto-driving car. The video demo shown below was taken from inside of the car. The car is making extreme turns unlike it would on regular roads on a closed-course and it demonstrating its capabilities in the video.
More Information
- Check Google self-driven car in Google plus
- Watch Google Racing.
- Google Self-driven car in Wikipedia.
- How Google cars Works from spectrum IEEE.
What you think about the future of driver less vehicles or self-driven vehicles? Is it will be a boon or bane? In your opinion, the driver assist vehicle or the complete self-driven vehicle, which one is the better option?
