Google hastens the arrival of driverless car

Most of the IT world obsesses about the next big thing in social networking, but Google is also pouring loads of cash and intellectual firepower into what it hopes will be the next big thing on the road: the car that drives itself.

It appears, too, that US state legislators are getting with the program, with the company reporting the first registration of such a vehicle in the state of Nevada.

It was three years ago that Richard Marshall, Holden’s director of all things green, told motoring.com.au that if industry and governments are serious about reducing the impact of the automobile on planetary health, they’ll aim to remove control of it from the hands of human beings.

The rationale is simple: handing it over to a matrix of on-board spatial and speed sensors, cameras, GPS guidance and traffic management systems would remove the single most important source of risk on the roads: human error. The resulting reductions in the risk of a crash would allow us to carve what Marshall estimated to be two thirds of the weight off the average passenger car, shrivelling it from about 1500kg to maybe 600kg. Yes – that’s how much of a car’s weight is devoted to protecting us from ourselves.

At the time, it sounded far away. But subsequent footage out of Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California suggests it wasn’t. By mid-2010, drivers on Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles regularly found in their midst a Toyota Prius carrying a rack-mounted cylindrical thing on its roof. A closer look revealed it was revolving. An even closer look again revealed the person at the wheel wasn’t holding it. The car is one of a fleet of Priuses (and one Audi TT) Google has equipped to drive themselves.

Autonomous cars have hovered around the industry weirdosphere for the best part of fifty years. But the pointy-head status of such projects began to diminish in 2004, when the Pentagon launched the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, offering cash prizes and development opportunities for driverless vehicles. And it has inspired work currently being carried out on the other side of the Atlantic, along unrelated but similar lines.

The Google technology has a direct lineage back to the early days of the DARPA event. Its progenitor, Google engineer and artificial intelligence whiz Sebastian Thrun, led the Stanford University team that produced the event’s first winner.

Thrun and his colleagues have been steadily improving the technology ever since. In its current iteration – the contraption atop the Prius – it uses 64 lasers to monitor its relationship to the things around it. It feeds the data back to an artificial intelligence package that imposes a layer of spatial, GPS and optical character recognition data over the car’s existing systems.

Many an average repbox now comes with the technological basis to accommodate such a system. Namely, computerised drivetrain and chassis management (ECU, ESP, ABS etc), electrically assisted steering and (at least on the options list) satellite navigation, cameras and radar sensors of the kind used in adaptive cruise and self-parking systems.

Google’s machinery expands on this to produce a vehicle that knows where it is, where it wants to go and precisely how to get there. En route, it’s taking readings by the millisecond, the degree, the inch, the mph, updating its progress in real time. It merges into traffic and travels at appropriate speeds, dictated by proximity to surrounding objects and its GPS system’s knowledge of the speed limit of every street in the country.

It doesn’t lose its temper, or get distracted by short skirts or text messages. It remains oblivious to horseplay in the back seat. It doesn’t spill hot coffee while opening a Crunchie bar at the wheel. Or apply lipstick in the vanity mirror while talking on the phone. It’s not interested in donuts and burnouts, and it’s not interested in drink or dope.

It can, however, be programmed to drive in different ways, from politely cautious to aggressive and thrusting. Google was quick to claim the technology was not involved when one of its fleet rear-ended another car in Mountain View earlier this year. The company said it was human error – the auto-pilot was off at the time. Although one other car has been rear-ended, none of the autonomous cars has caused an accident in more than 250,000km of test driving to date.

Recently, the company has expanded its autonomous fleet to include a Lexus RX450h. Eagle-eyed spotters in southern California say the roof-mounted sensor device on the SUV is smaller and aerodynamically better than the Prius ones.

The company has released a video giving a typical Google take on the practical and social value of the technology. See it here. And recent TV documentary series, Stephen Hawking's Brave New World also covered it. A clip from that series has been uploaded to YouTube also ; it's worth watching just for the experience of hearing tyre squeal from a Prius... without a 'meat head' hauling on the wheel.

Picture courtesy of Steve Jurvetson, Wikimedia Commons

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