Search Giant Google Testing Autonomous Cars
These days search giant Google is in a different kind of mode; the company is testing new kind of prototypes which are away from the software realm
. Google Inc. is road testing cars these days that Start, Stop and Steer without the need of a human driver, as per the reports published by the company. The project leader Sebastian Thrun wrote in Googles Corporate Blog that the primary goal of the project is to prevent the ever increasing percentage of traffic accidents, free up the time of drivers and to reduce the carbon emissions. Project leader used the terminologies like through ride sharing and the new highway trains of future.The cars according to Thrun are never unmanned, he further added that a backup driver is all the time behind the wheel to keep a check on the software running, and reports or monitors a malfunction in the system.
Well, this is not the first time that Google is planning to change the way people commute or go from one place to another. At a conference held by TechCrunch named as disrupt, the CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said to the audience that cars should drive themselves and this fact makes sense.
According to Corporate Blog of Google, these cars have toured roughly a total of 140,000 miles on most of the California roads without any much involvement from the drivers. Mountain View which is a California based technology giant has sent several cars for test drive racking up a total of 1,000 miles without any kind of control as well. New York Post also published a report in which they stated and mentioned about these Robotic Cars.
Thrun Blog post also stated that cars have pre-programmed software that told them the speed limits, road maps and traffic patterns. Cars are equipped with laser sensors, video cameras and radars that enable them to detect other cars in the close proximity.
In a report published in New York Times about these cars, engineers have tagged these robotic cars as more secure and safer because they react more quickly and promptly as compare to the humans themselves. Google has still not decided that how are they going to profit from these cars and how are they going to make them a useful research. According to an Analyst at Enderle Group in San Jose, the company is brimming and flushing with cash and thats why they have launched multitude of businesses that are not related at all to their core internet business.
The word focus according to the analyst is what Google dont have in their dictionary, the company at present is funding electricity projects and artificial intelligence based projects as well.
The blog post says that these self-directed cars are made by scientists and engineers who have also been taking part in the unmanned cars races planned by DARPA, a government defense project.
by: exsmith