A driver sits focusing on his phone, catching up on emails as his car travels along the highway. In the next lane, a father helps his kids finish homework while their vehicle swiftly changes lanes. Nearby, an empty car returns home after dropping off its owner. At the heart of all of all these scenarios is the possibility that people will be living in a world where vehicles will drive themselves; some ambitious estimates claim in as little as 5 years from now.
With Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk recently announced that their car manufacturer will produce self-driving cars within the next three years. Nissan has announced that it will have a self-driving car available by 2020, Google has said it will do so by 2018. Over the past decade, the conversation around self-driving cars has evolved from futuristic police chase sequences in Minority Report to figuring out which auto manufacturer will be first to launch a commercially viable self-driving vehicle. Mercedes Benz, recently announced that an S-class sedan had completed a 62-mile journey in the streets of Germany without a driver. So car manufacturers definitely see self-driving cars as a reality in the next decade.
A self-driving car is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input. To accomplish this task, each vehicle is usually outfitted with a GPS unit, an inertial navigation system, and a range of sensors including laser rangefinders, radar, and video. The vehicle uses positional information from the GPS and inertial navigation system to localize itself and sensor data to refine its position estimate as well as to build a three-dimensional image of its environment.
Advantages of this type of technology would imply that you would see less driving fatalities to start with; provided the technology was solid and worked. Also, cities would not have to waste space on parking. Right now, huge amounts of asphalt in cities are set aside to park vehicles that spend most of the day doing nothing. But when your car can drive itself, you’ll never have to circle around and around looking for a spot near your destination to park it — the car can drop you off, then give someone else a ride or make a delivery, or park itself back at your house. Autonomous cars could also change the way we view the auto industry. For instance, you may be able to call a pickup truck to take you to and from Ikea, or a minivan to take your kids to hockey practice and while you’re not using it, it could do other things for other people. This could free up huge part of the family budget, including the cost of the vehicle itself, insurance, maintenance and fuel.
If you think about it; an airplane is really only controlled by a human pilot upon take-off and landing where majority of the flight is controlled by computers. Make no mistake, car manufacturers have made significant advances in the past decade towards making self-driving cars a reality; however, there still remains a number of technological barriers that manufacturers must overcome before self-driving vehicles are safe enough for road use. For instance, GPS can be unreliable, computer vision systems have limitations to understanding road scenes, and variable weather conditions can adversely affect the ability of on-board processors to adequately identify or track moving objects. Self-driving vehicles have also yet to demonstrate the same capability as human drivers in understanding and navigating unstructured environments such as construction zones and accident areas.
These barriers though are not insurmountable. The amount of road and traffic data available to these vehicles is increasing, newer range sensors are capturing more data, and the algorithms for interpreting road scenes are evolving. The transition from human-operated vehicles to fully self-driving cars will be gradual, with vehicles at first performing only a subset of driving tasks such as parking and driving in stop-and-go traffic autonomously. As the technology improves, more driving tasks can be reliably outsourced to the vehicle.
A Ride in the Google Self Driving Car
