Techipedia

You might have seen in some Hollywood movies, that a car is being driven on its own. May be in a Super Hero movies or in fact more, in horror movies! Now Google has conducted a horrifying experiment successfully and has indeed become a Super Hero!

Aligning with Google’s optimistic view about technology’s ability to advance society, Google has made a surprising move! Google developed the technology for automated cars and test drove the car from Google’s Mountain View campus to Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard and logged over 140,000 miles (225,308 kms)! This project uses artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver. The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps to navigate the road ahead.

The project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service. Google is using six Priuses and an Audi TT in the project.

While the test is conducted, the car was manned by a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. With this automation, Google expects to reduce traffic accidents.

“Your car should drive itself; it’s amazing to me that we let humans drive cars,” Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, said at a technology conference last month. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”

The car's already traveled 140,000 miles, depending on cameras and a scanning laser to do the driving so you don't have to. You just tell it your destination and it plots a route for you, taking into consideration speed limits and traffic patterns. A Google engineer describes it as "Super Cruise Control," a way to augment your experience rather than usurp it. Although part of me is pretty sure that if I had this function available to me, I'd never turn it off.

The bad news: Google's not anywhere close to even thinking about retail at this point, and even if they did the cost would be astronomical. Besides, I'm sure they're just using the extra time to figure out how to make this baby fly.

However, this is a tremendous experiment and we could see these cars on roads in the near future and see a great decrease in the number of accidents.