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Google has built a fleet of cars that drive themselves, and over the past several months, these robotic vehicles have driven over 140,000 miles on public roads, from the Pacific Coast Highway to the famous twists and turns of San Francisco's Lombard Street
As the company revealed on Saturday morning with a blog post, each car is equipped with video cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder that alerts the vehicle to other traffic, and they navigate using maps previously collected by cars that were driven by good old fashioned human beings
Google blog
.Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.
So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.
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Originally posted by Pinke
This is pretty awesome. The millennium is finally here I guess.
So much awesomeness.
Originally posted by hotbakedtater
Integrating robotic safety features into human driven vehicles is great too, drivers need all the help we can get with the cell phone craze ruining people's ability to drive safely.
Originally posted by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
[Don't get me wrong, I don't even like to go out, and so on. If you want to be treated like a little kid your entire life, or be dominated as a species by the next generation of robots and cyborgs, don't brings us all down with you.]edit on 10-10-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss because: (no reason given)