Google Wants Nevada to OK Driverless Cars

It says they have been testing this in california, but where? I have not read or heard anything of this testing, and would like to know how it is going.

also, first.

Would be interesting to hear about these cars 20 years from now and getting hacked and accelerated to max speed and crash head on while full of passengers. That oughtta teach humans a lesson

Yeah, right. General Protection Fault and it runs into oncoming traffic.

Human error is the cause of most airplane crashes.... Would u ever get inside an airplane with no pilot?

Can a computer identify a distracted child that might run into the road? Can a computer anticipate other driver's behaviour?

I'm trying to suggest they come to Arkansas instead cause it would be nice to have google here.. and why do they bother with places like Nevada when they could come to a small state to test stuff and not have to worry as much..

I think it's a great idea and very feasible with today's technology. If an entire city's traffic was driven by computers there would be no traffic jams and very few accidents. But I can see problems arising when you mix smart computers with stupid humans.

The docklands light rail has been open since 1987, and has always been driverless(since you are mentioning monorails) but that is a bit different from cars driving on open roads now, isn't it.

A guess:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex

Once this technology is fully tested the government should pass a law requiring all new cars to be able to be controlled by a computer network, then have cities designate certain highways as driver-less zones, once a vehicle enters a driver-less zone the city's network would then take over the driving.

As cool as this sounds, I easily see how this technology could become troublesome. I would hate for my car to be hacked :|

No thanks Google, i don't want to be killed by a fault in your computer systems. They say its better for the environment and safer due to no human error, but what they really mean is that it's cheaper for them

They test it in Nevada because Nevada is mostly empty desert, same reason they want to dump nuclear waste there. There's less of a chance of a serious accident outside of the cities.

Exactly, HUMAN error. If everyone is on the autopilot system, there's no need to anticipate other drivers. People drive more aggressively than an automated car would. Auto systems won't think they can get past the yellow light, or speed, or talk on a phone while driving. It is possible for cars to have an autodetect system built in front to prevent collisions. It wouldn't be perfect, but it might not be worse than human nature. Still, it would be more likely that this system would be in more rural areas and highways, leaving the city areas to put up light rail services.

911: Hello 911

Citizen: SOMEONE JUST STOLE MY CAR!

911: What is your ID and Plate number

Citizen: XXXXXXXX and XXXXXX

911: Hold please. Types in code

Stolen car speakers: This is the police, you are driving a stolen car, please set back and enjoy this set of classic Justin Bieber songs at max volume while the car is being redirected to the nearest police station. Feel free to slit your own wrists if you feel you can not last the entire ten minutes it will take for the car to reach its new destination. Have a nice day.

I thought torture was illegal in this country!

it's not going to happen....nothing beats the human brain...there are situations in wich a robot can not make the correct decisions

Nevada is a small state. Less people than Arkansas and the density is about half of Arkansas.

Google's work on driverless cars has not been highly publicized, but I can tell you that the kind of things they're currently able to do with the technology the have is quite amazing.

Google gave a presentation at my University a few months back where they explained a lot of the hardware and software systems that run their driverless cars. Before seeing that presentation, I had the same reservations as many of you that have already commented do. Afterwards, however, I honestly feel pretty confident that this technology is at a place where it's nearly ready for public use.

One thing that comes to mind is their obstacle recognition, which, when demonstrated, certainly seemed more apt at detecting and avoiding obstacles than any human I've ever seen. We're talking about sensors and software that can look hundreds of feet in front of you, identify an obstacle, identify what TYPE of obstacle it is (car, person, rodent, curb, wall) and take appropriate action automatically.

If i remember correctly, they said that they they've been testing on public roads in California and some surrounding states (with safety drivers behind the wheel and ready to take over at any time) and that the only accidents they've ever gotten into have been ones where another (human) driver crashes into them.

The point is, don't automatically discount this technology just because you think it's not plausible for a system like this to work effectively. It's completely plausible, and has a lot of potential.

A few, and I imagine a great number of people, believe that a computer wouldn't be capable of reacting in a way appropriate to certain situations while controlling an automobile. When you drive, in order for you to look at the road behind you and to the sides of the car, you must take your eyes off of the road in front of you. A computer running on a sophisticated program would not only never ever take it's focus off of any section or direction of the car, but it's reaction time would be wildly faster than that of a humans.

40,000 people die a year in car crashes, how many more are seriously injured or create insane amounts of property damage. It is my opinion that, for the most part, computers should drive cars on the highway. I have been at a near stand still on the highway countless times for 15, 30, even 60 minutes or more simply because there was a car pulled over by a cop and everyone wanted to slow down and stare. I think that many humans lack the focus, intelligence and reaction time to safely drive on the highway. Computers can look 360 degrees around a car at all times, humans absolutely cannot. For a while, I dreamed of developing this system, but google beat me to the punch by a long shot. At 70 mph, one car creeps into the lane of another car, you have absolutely zero idea, but the computer does and takes instant action to the event and avoids a catastrophic accident. Imagine that.

I think that in the worst case scenario a computers reaction time to most, if not all events while driving would be around 50 ms(millisecond) (I imagine more swift than that). There are 1000 ms to 1 second. It is suggested that the average human reaction time is probably around 200 ms. That isn't terribly different. However, I think that a mathematical formula needs to be taken into account. What is a humans field of vision? Lets say their field of view is 120 degrees, that is 1/3rd of 360 degrees. So, lets just say we multiply 200 ms by 3 which is possibly how long it would take a human to make a full observation of the surroundings of their vehicle. Of course, there are the infinite number of variables in human reaction time. How many times have you seen or you yourself driven while using a cell phone? Hows about simply messing with the radio? What about just being sleepy? To average all this out, I could say that the average human reaction time while driving might be around 800 ms, and I feel that could be very generous in many situations (think old people or a driver texting with a cell phone).

Computers have no variables relating to reaction time, they always see and do what they are programmed to do, 100% of the time. They aren't going to be rubbing the sand out of their eyes, checking their hair, texting something to someone or whatever humans do while driving that put their lives and the lives of others at risk. 50 ms versus 800 ms is a pretty substantial difference when you are in control of something that weighs 3500 lbs.

I love freedom, I need freedom. But I would love to see a road where many of the drivers are computers. I never would be happy if taking control of the vehicle you were in wasn't always 100% of the time an option that could be had without pause, hesitation or reason.

Excellent, two more domains for my server's black list :-)

Bluscreen would suck if you were in one of these

This will be awesome! once it works...just think...no traffic b/c all the cars will drive correctly w/o breaking...get there faster....I can read a book while i am sitting in my car...sleep. ha...even eventually having a drink will be acceptable (probably a LONG ways from now)...but seriously no doubt about it...it will be awesome once it works....btw the drive to vegas is horrendous and anyone who does that drive would definitely welcome a someone else to drive it...thats why they choose nevada...and all the open straight roads .

This isn't quite the case with driving. Driving can be broke down to mathematics and thus probabilities. If there is a emergency situation the car could calculate many different actions before being forced to take one before a human could. Leading up to a more likely desirable outcome. It won't be perfect but I would say its safe to believe it can surpass humans.




Obviously the car will work on external sensors that would detect things that are more than the width of the road likely more than any human can as I would assume it would be made to look in every direction all at once. So it would see the said child in your scenario, likely notice the child before the human inside even takes notice and monitors it (and every other moving object perhaps even seeing if they are a heat source). So if the child, pet, Godzilla, or any other object gets too close to the road it likely would slow down to the point of breaking becoming easy. As for other drivers behavior... yes it can assuming they also have a self driving car.

yes I would get into a plane with no pilot for the first point you made. planes have been able to fly them selves for quite a long time. the pilot is more of a fail safe than anything
and to your second point a computer may not be able to anticipate another drivers behaviour but neither can people so I'm not sure what your point is here?
the only problem i have with this is i have to much fun driving my car

Google's Driverless Car: A TED Talk by Sebastian Thrun

Of course it can, what do you think Google has been testing? You're also making the assumption that human drivers are well adapted to do these things; if you truly believe this you must not do a lot of driving!

I used to drive trucks for a living so I know a thing or two about dangerous driving and the last thing I'd be worried about is a well tested computer aided autonomous car driving next to me. A computer isn't going to speed up when I put on my turn signal or drive on my ass if I'm in their way.

People suck at driving, it's about time we let computers do it!

never heard of drunk computer driving

Very often, humans can't do all these things either. And much much more.
Simple: humans do mistakes all the time. A computer CANNOT do a mistake, even theoretically. Every PC problem ever occured has been caused by humans. The less humans are involved, the safer things will become.

You say you use to drive lorries for a living, they all could be out of work with this system.

Its a good idea, But I like driving (A bit of a petrolhead). I do worry if it comes standard practise, Human driven cars might end being banned (due to health and safety etc), that will be a very sad day in my book.

ok, where is the logic? i know for a fact that robots can not and will not have logic the way a human's brain does....all it does it's what it was programed to do....now, let's say that for some reason unknow the cpu blows up while you are cruising at 70mph....what then?

The hard part is going to be integrating the computerized cars in with human controlled cars. If they were all computerized, they could communicate with eachother in a vast network and you would never ever see a car accident ever.

Just sayin - this is a good idea to a point.

It sounds like a good idea in theory, computer controlled cars will always obey the rules. The only thing is if the system has an error and your sleeping away in the back seat your pretty much screwed. If one car has a certain error the other computer controlled cars can all avoid it, depending on what the error was. If the car had an error where the car would run completely off the road at 100km/h then there would be no way to recover from it then your also screwed.