Google has improved the software so that it can detect hundreds of separate objects at the same time - pedestrians, buses, stop signs held by traffic cops, or a bicyclist reaching out to signal in front of her. Volvo plans to provide customers with 100 autonomous cars for driving on selected roads
Pedestrians cross, cars suddenly emerge from hidden roads, delivery trucks double park and block the travel lane and line of sight. During the busy hours of the day, typical city streets can drive even the calmest driver crazy.
We all want a world where city centers are freed from the wandering cars and whose drivers drive in circles looking for parking. This is why over the past year Google has shifted its focus from the self-driving car project to controlling urban driving.
For the past year, Google's driverless cars have been driving through the streets of the city where its headquarters are located, Mountain View, California. A kilometer of city driving is much more complicated to drive than a kilometer on a highway, where hundreds of different objects move according to different rules on the road in a small area.
Google has improved the software so that it can detect hundreds of separate objects at the same time - pedestrians, buses, stop signs held by traffic cops, or the width of a bicycle extending its hand as a signal in front of her. A driverless car can pay attention to all these things in a way that humans are physically incapable of - and it will never get tired or distracted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEsvQOHreg4
In the video, Google showed its vehicle navigating some common driving scenarios near the Googleplex.
Google engineers prove in these tests that what appears chaotic and random on city streets to the human eye are things that are relatively easy for a computer to predict. So far, the experimenters have met in thousands of different situations, and built software models that allow the car to know what to expect, from the expected (a car stops at a red light) to the unexpected (crashing into it). Many problems will have to be solved, including teaching the car to drive on more streets in Mountain View before it will be allowed to travel in other cities, but also thousands of new situations that we will encounter on city streets that will require another two years for the cars to operate in autonomous mode.
Google's driverless cars have so far accumulated more than a million kilometers, and with each additional kilometer the company's leaders become more optimistic that the experiment is heading towards the goal - a car that operates without the need for the driver's intervention.
On the same topic on the science website:
The future according to IBM - a car without a driver and a computer that locates terrorists
And meanwhile in Spain - robotic cars move on the roads
Volvo is also conducting an experiment
The Volvo Group, operator of the "Drive Me" project in which it is building a hundred driverless cars, this week presented a test drive of several cars under routine road conditions (which include normal cars and disturbances on the road) on the streets of the second largest Swedish city - Gothenburg. The company concludes the experiment as a success.
"The test cars are able to take care of maintaining a lane, adjusting the speed to the road conditions and the speed allowed according to the law and integrating into the traffic, on their own. This is an important step towards the final goal of the 'Drive Me' project to be able to drive the entire test track in fully automatic mode.
The technology, which will be called autopilot, will allow the driver to release his hands and leave the driving to the car that will take care of all the driving tasks" said Eric Kolling, a technical expert at the Volvo Group.
What makes the 'Drive Me' project unique is the involvement of all responsible bodies, legislators, traffic authorities, a large city municipality, a car manufacturer and real customers. Customers will travel in 100 cars under normal driving conditions on approximately 50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg. These roads are the normal roads used by drivers on their way to work, including freeways and traffic jams.
Google, the Swedish Transport Authority, the Swedish Ministry of Transport, the Lindholm Science Park and the Municipality of Gothenburg are partners in the Drive Me project. The Swedish government supports the project.
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In my opinion, the next step is to create relatively small vehicles for a passenger or years, and for a large company to build a huge taxi fleet of autonomous vehicles.
Instead of taking the car to work, it will be much faster and more economical to order a small and efficient taxi to take you to work.
Over time, even the big cities will decide to prohibit the entry of manned vehicles into their territory, when these taxis will replace the metro in some cities or at least be a complement to the metro...
Movement in the air is a problem because as soon as you rise 2-3 meters from the ground you are already in danger, while on the ground the danger only starts from a speed of 30-40 km/h. But also on the ground, the vision is that there will be communication between cars and a coordinated route calculation with the other vehicles to avoid traffic jams. By the way, the communication between autonomous vehicles will also reduce in advance the possible accidents that cause a large part of the traffic jams.
1, computer simulation Any 10-year-old child can create on a computer today, let's first see this beautiful aircraft flying in the field outside of a computer simulation.
Secondly, the main problem with this vision is synchronization between hundreds and thousands of flying vehicles that fly densely at the same time over the cities and cross each other's path, preventing collisions, preventing a situation where such a flying vehicle with an engine failure, for example, will fall like a rock on the head of The passers-by below, etc.
If it was that simple they would have already implemented it.
This is not the future, the future is in the automatic movement of cars in the air.
That's where all the future is, and the money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2TWNpTA7s
Wow.
"bicycle width"
This is the future.