Self-Driving Car

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By David Lawal

If like the defunct Bank PHB, you were imagining the days that cars would drive themselves all by simple commands, technology has just taking you there; thanks to Google. The project has been several years in the making but was first unveiled in 2010.The Google's fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses has travelled more than 190,000 miles, about 300,000 kilometers, driving in city traffic, busy highways, and mountainous roads with only occasional human intervention.

Two things seem particularly interesting about Google's approach. First, it relies on very detailed maps of the roads and terrain; something that Chris Urmson, Google engineer, said is essential to determine accurately where the car is. Using a Global Positioning System, GPS-based techniques alone, he said, the location could be off by several meters.

The second thing is that, before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers drove along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment. When it's the autonomous vehicle's turn to drive itself, it compares the data it is acquiring to the previously recorded data, an approach that is useful to differentiate pedestrians from stationary objects like poles and mailboxes.

Urmson, TechnicalDirector for the project, said that the "heart of our 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 vehicle also 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 Robot Car has no problem with Pedestrians as it yields to pedestrians, and also obey Zebra Crossing rule which applies to pedestrians.Google's autonomous vehicles are now out in the open, quite literally, with the company test-driving them on public roads and, on one occasion, even inviting people to ride inside one of the robot cars as it raced around a closed course. Steve Mahan, who is 95 per cent blind, test drove to buy a taco and pick up dry-cleaning - activities which may seem unexciting, but which are shut off to many blind people who do not have a companion or carrier to accompany them. At the end of the journey, he tells his passengers, “You guys get out, I have got places to go.”

Sometimes, the car has to be more aggressive. When going through a four-way intersection, for example, it yields to other vehicles based on road rules; but if other cars do not reciprocate, it advances a bit to show to the other drivers its intention. “Without programming that kind of behaviour, it would be impossible for the robot car to drive in the real world,” Urmson explained at a keynote speech at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer, IEEE, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in San Francisco recently.