The Future is here and Google is driving!

Video chat, commercial space flight, robotic surgery, self-driving cars….have you noticed that the future is here? It interesting that as a child it seemed everyone thought that once we had video chat we had really moved forward as a society. Now that’s here, turns out no one really cares. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, especially considering you should probably put on pants and act like you’re really listening.

Commercial space flight is awesome and all, but still not a lot of people can afford it. Robotic surgery has sent us leaps forward in terms of precision and keeping wounds clean reducing accounts of post surgery infection.

But how in the world are there self-driving cars? You know the one; Google’s street view car is completely self-propelled and navigated. The fleet of Priuses has logged nearly 200,000 miles. These miles include everything from inner cities to mountain trails.

The car’s computer is programmed with all the appropriate traffic laws. There is a “Velodyne 64-beam laser” mounted on the roof that creates a detailed 3D map of the cars surroundings allowing it to interpret it’s path and avoid obstacles. This is made even smooth with other sensors including: four radars, a camera that interprets traffic lights, a GPS, an internal measuring device, and wheel encoder. All these different sensors are essential as relying on GPS alone could result in several meters of error.

Here is a video overview of the Google car.

The car knows to yield when appropriate but has also been programmed to be aggressive when necessary. For instance at a four way stop if the other cars are not allowing the Google mobile to proceed, the car will begin to advance to show the other cars it’s intention. Without a more aggressive approach around human drivers the car would never make it in the real world.

This could lead to a convenient service of automated rides throughout cities and towns. Just tap on your smart phone app and a self-driving car would appear and take you where you needed to go while you caught up on your email or applied your makeup.