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?

After 244 years, the Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print, as the publishers announced it will stop publishing print edition for the first time in more than 200 years. Britannica will move focus to online editions. The top year for the printed edition was 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold.

The company mark the end of the print version by making the contents of its website for free for one week starting Tuesday . The editors of Britannica announced that the online edition of Britannica, available at Britannica.com, will be entirely free for a full week. Earlier in Britannica website you can read the first few paragraphs of any article for free but the full content is only available to subscribers. The company would continue to offer digital versions.

Explore the updated online encyclopedia from Encyclopedia Britannica with hundreds of thousands of articles, biographies, videos, images, and web sites from www.britannica.com. The finale hardcover encyclopedia set is available for sale at Britannica’s website for $1,395.

With the rapid advent of technology smartphones and tablets are becoming more common. We can check internet where ever we go. We can spend more time in remote areas without the need of charging the device. Here are some cool apps meant for smartphones and tablets, which helps you to read the global news and help you to get connected to the fast world even if you are in a remote area.

iPhone and iPad Apps

  Zite

Zite is a personalized magazine for your iPad that automatically learns what you like and gets smarter as you use it. Zite itself is known as a personalized ipad news app.It has a white paper like background and classy fonts.It will also provide the experience similar to flicking through a magazine.

Flud

Flud pulls information from various sources including feeds from URLs that you may specify. You can also sign in to Google reader through this app.

Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone

News360

News360 is a news personalization and aggregation service. The App is available for Windows Phone7, Android, iPhone, playbook,iPad and for web.It learns from your cloud and uses semantic analysis to inform you on major ongoing events and give you content that is relevant just for you.

BBC News App

BBC had news app for Android and IOS devices.The app’s video experience is accessible to both Flash and non-Flash enabled devices, over Wi-Fi and 3G connections. In-story video is supported on Android devices versions 1.6 and above, and live streaming of the BBC News channel is possible on versions 2.2 and above which run Flash.

NewsRob

NewsRob autosyncs with Google Reader in the background. Read articles offline. NewsRob is an RSS/Atom newsreader that auto syncs with Google Reader.

PressReader

PressReader brings over 1700 full content newspapers from 92 countries to the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, smartphones, eReaders, PCs and Macs. The app is not free.

Google reader

Follow all your favorite sites, blogs, and more, all in one place. See what your friends are sharing, and easily share any interesting articles you read. The Google Reader app syncs with the web version, so all your reading lists are always up to date.

Pulse News

A beautiful application that makes reading news fun and engaging.Pulse News is a beautiful app that takes your favorite websites and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Tap on an article to see a clean and elegant view of the news story. Save stories for reading later across all platforms or sync them with Instapaper, Read it Later and Evernote. Sharing a story via Facebook, Twitter and email is as easy as two taps.

Feedly

A personalized magazine.A news reader for creative minds. A fast and stylish way to read and share the content of your favorite websites.

In, addition to this, you can search and download apps for portable devices from famous newspapers, which you read regularly. Here we mentioned some apps which can aggregate news from different sources. What you think about this kind of app? Is it really useful or not?

WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and  information to the public. They provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to their journalists. They publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of their sources anonymous.

The wikileaks was back online on friday with a new swiss address-wikileaks.ch-six hours after its previous doamin, wikileaks.org was shutdown. “Wikileaks moves to switzerland” they declared in Twitter.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, answers readers’ questions in the Guardian.co.uk site on December 3,2010. In the questions one of the reader asks, “You started something that nobody can stop. The Beginning of a New World” , another reader asks “why do you think it was necessary to “give Wikileaks a face”? Don’t you think it would be better if the organization was anonymous?”. Assange replied, “I originally tried hard for the organisation to have no face, because I wanted egos to play no part in our activities. This followed the tradition of the French anonymous pure mathematians, who wrote under the collective allonym, “The Bourbaki”. However this quickly led to tremendous distracting curiosity about who and random individuals claiming to represent us. In the end, someone must be responsible to the public and only a leadership that is willing to be publicly courageous can genuinely suggest that sources take risks for the greater good. In that process, I have become the lightening rod”. One reader asks, “Is there a ‘second line’ of activists in place that would continue the campaign?”. For that question he ends up the conversation with the words “History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you.”

[Source –http://www.guardian.co.uk ]

You can read the full Q&A from,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/dec/03/julian-assange-wikileaks