Driverless Car

  

The Google Self-Driving Car is a project by Google that involves developing technology for autonomous cars, mainly electric cars. The software powering Google's cars is called Google Chauffeur.[2] Lettering on the side of each car identifies it as a "self-driving car". The project is currently being led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense.[3] The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges.

 Driver less cars will start appearing on British roads next year

The UK government has announced that driver less cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year. It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time.

In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines.
The Government wants to change the rules to allow companies to start running trials of cars that do not need a human driver on UK streets, industry sources said. It means the first computer-controlled vehicles will be seen on quiet British streets by January next year. Ministers will update the law to ensure that driver less cars can take to the streets – a move which will require a change in the Highway Code.

The new generation of vehicles work by using GPS technology to locate the vehicle’s position on an electronic map. Google earlier this year unveiled its first computerised self-driving car, which has no steering wheel or accelerator. The company will test prototypes in California this year and says the ultimate goal is for cars to “shoulder the entire burden of driving”. However, motoring campaigners have raised safety concerns about the possibility of driverless vehicles appearing on British roads. A government document released this month said: “These vehicles will have a driver present but are capable of driving fully independently, using knowledge of the environment in which they are driving.” It added: “Fully autonomous cars remain a further step, and for the time being drivers will have the option (and responsibility) of taking control of the vehicle themselves. Vehicle manufacturers and their systems suppliers continue to explore the opportunities for full autonomy.”

The label "driverless vehicle" actually covers a lot of different premises. Indeed, the cruise control, automatic braking, anti-lane drift and self-parking functions already built into many vehicles offer a certain degree of autonomy.

But the term is generally used to refer to vehicles that take charge of steering, accelerating, indicating and braking during most if not all of a journey between two points, much in the same way aeroplanes can be set to autopilot.

Unlike the skies, however, the roads are much more crowded, and a range of technologies are being developed to tackle the problem.

One of the leading innovations is Lidar (light detection and ranging), a system that measures how lasers bounce off reflective surfaces to capture capture information about millions of small points surrounding the vehicle every second. The technology is already used to create the online maps used by Google and Nokia.

Another complimentary technique is "computer vision" - the use of software to make sense of 360-degree images captured by cameras attached to the vehicle, which can warn of pedestrians, cyclists, roadworks and other objects that might be in the vehicle's path.