Google shocked the world this weekend by announcing that not only was it developing robot car technology, but that its fleet of autonomous cars had already racked up 140,000 miles driving experience. As described in the New York Times, seven converted Toyota Prius’ use laser range finders, cameras, radar, inertial sensors, and high-detail maps to autonomously drive while humans sit behind the wheel and monitor software. While robotic cars have made leaps forward in the past decade, spurred on by DARPA’s Grand Challenge competition, Google’s accomplishment stands heads and shoulders above the rest. The search engine giant’s announcement has fueled enthusiasm across the blogosphere for the technology, and many are hoping for the first time that robot cars could be nearer than we think. They will be disappointed. Google’s venture into autonomous cars may be an epic win, but automotive regulation and government bureaucracy will raise a wall of fails in the future. Video of the Google car is available below. Celebrate the success while you can – the technology may be getting better, but society is not prepared to use it.
Google did many things very right in developing their autonomous car program. Foremost was the gathering of some of the most brilliant minds in robotic driving, as tested by DARPA’s Grand Challenge. Sebastian Thrun, head of the project, was one of the leads in the Stanford Racing Team when it won DARPA’s challenge. He also headed Google’s StreetView project. Before Chris Urmson was ‘on leave’ from Carnegie Mellon to work for Google, he developed the autonomous vehicles that brought the university victory at the Grand Challenge. Michael Montermerlo (who got his PhD in robotics from Carnegie) was the software lead for Stanford’s racing team. Anthony Levandowski made news a few years ago by developing PriBot, a Toyota Prius that drove itself through San Francisco. He also worked on autonomous motorcycles at UC Berkeley. Google’s current robot car seems like a next generation version of PriBot. All in all, Google had just 15 engineers in their robot car project, but they chose the best. That’s why a stealth project could be developed and quickly outperform so many other robotic car endeavors. Brilliant strategy, no doubt about it. You can see Urmson behind the wheel in the Google robotic Prius in the video from NY Times below.
The Google car looks great, and it’s performed well, but it’s likely many years from reaching the masses. From the NY Times:
