Google's Smart Car – Google always breaking the innovation that makes people amazed. This digital giant indeed has always been a pioneer in many things including gadgets such as smart phones android, tablets, 3D glasses and smart watches. But not just dwelling on the device only, Google Gadgets are secretly has developed a smart car named smart car. Google's smart car is very unique because it could run without using the accelerator, brakes and steering, even without a driver. Passengers stayed seated and gave the order in which the intended place, then the car will automatically goes to the intended place armed with navigation from Google Map.
The car had just tested this goes with Google maps navigation drape as well as a variety of information collected from the map. As for the security on the highways, the smart car uses laser sensors and cameras to detect obstacles in the way. The car that pioneered by Sergey Brin this plan would be mass-produced, but is still considering a few things related to security and permissions. Car without crew is not something new in the automotive world, but a car without brakes, gas, and steering wheel might be an interesting innovation for leading technology automation.
The race to put a self-driving car on the road is in
full swing with BMW, Tesla, Apple, and Google all competing to be the first. Volvo announced that it will put 100 production ready autonomous cars in the hands of actual consumers by 2017. The 100 car pilot program will take place on the streets of Volvo’s hometown in Gothenburg, Sweden. It is reportedthat the city has given the company and its customers approval to cruise around selected public streets with car’s autonomous drive program in control. According to Volvo, its autopilot system is reliable enough and it will be able to take over every aspect of the driving experience. The automaker says its system will be able to handle everything from everyday driving to gridlock traffic to emergency situations. To achieve this, the Swedish car maker will depend on a complicated network of sensors, cloud-based positioning systems and intelligent braking and steering tech. The sensors include seven radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, five cameras, and a laser scanner. All of them work together to allow the driver behind the wheel to do anything except drive the car. If any of the systems on the car do fail, Volvo said that there are redundant backup systems ready to take over. Volvo is so confident in its autopilot system that its engineers believe their self-driving tech is better than humans when confronted with an emergency. “In a real emergency, however, the car reacts faster than most humans,” Volvo’s Dr. Erik Coelingh said. In cases where the autopilot must shut off due to weather or malfunction, the car will prompt the driver to take over. If the driver fails to take control in a timely manner or if the driver is incapacitated, the car will actually bring itself to a safe stop.
full swing with BMW, Tesla, Apple, and Google all competing to be the first. Volvo announced that it will put 100 production ready autonomous cars in the hands of actual consumers by 2017. The 100 car pilot program will take place on the streets of Volvo’s hometown in Gothenburg, Sweden. It is reportedthat the city has given the company and its customers approval to cruise around selected public streets with car’s autonomous drive program in control. According to Volvo, its autopilot system is reliable enough and it will be able to take over every aspect of the driving experience. The automaker says its system will be able to handle everything from everyday driving to gridlock traffic to emergency situations. To achieve this, the Swedish car maker will depend on a complicated network of sensors, cloud-based positioning systems and intelligent braking and steering tech. The sensors include seven radars, 12 ultrasonic sensors, five cameras, and a laser scanner. All of them work together to allow the driver behind the wheel to do anything except drive the car. If any of the systems on the car do fail, Volvo said that there are redundant backup systems ready to take over. Volvo is so confident in its autopilot system that its engineers believe their self-driving tech is better than humans when confronted with an emergency. “In a real emergency, however, the car reacts faster than most humans,” Volvo’s Dr. Erik Coelingh said. In cases where the autopilot must shut off due to weather or malfunction, the car will prompt the driver to take over. If the driver fails to take control in a timely manner or if the driver is incapacitated, the car will actually bring itself to a safe stop.
How does it work?
Powered by an electric motor with around a 100 mile range, the car uses a combination of sensors and software to locate itself in the real world combined with highly accurate digital maps. A GPS is used, just like the satellite navigation systems in most cars, to get a rough location of the car, at which point radar, lasers and cameras take over to monitor the world around the car, 360-degrees.
The software can recognise objects, people, cars, road marking, signs and traffic lights, obeying the rules of the road and allowing for multiple unpredictable hazards, including cyclists. It can even detect road works and safely navigate around them.
Google’s driverless car tech uses an array of detection technologies including sonar devices, stereo cameras, lasers, and radar. All these components have different ranges and fields of view, but each serves a particular purpose according to the patent filings Google has made on its driverless cars. According to Google engineers, this is at the heart of object detection.
The LIDAR system bolted to the top of Google’s self-driving car is crucially important for several reasons. First, it’s highly accurate up to a range of 100 meters. There are a few detection technologies on the car that work at greater distances, but not with the kind of accuracy you get from a laser. It simply bounces a beam off surfaces and measures the reflection to determine distance. The device used by Google — a Velodyne 64-beam laser — can also rotate 360-degrees and take up to 1.3 million readings per second, making it the most versatile sensor on the car. Mounting it on top of the car ensures its view isn’t obstructed.
Google mounts regular cameras around the exterior of the car in pairs with a small separation between them. The overlapping fields of view create a parallax not unlike your own eyes that allow the system to track an object’s distance in real time. As long as it has been spotted by more than one camera, the car knows where it is. These stereo cameras have a 50-degree field of view, but they’re only accurate up to about 30 meters.
Google’s LIDAR system is great for generating an accurate map of the car’s surroundings, but it’s not ideal for monitoring the speed of other cars in real time. That’s why the front and back bumper of the driverless car includes radar. This is one of the few technologies Google employs in its driverless car that you can already get in mainstream vehicles. Conventional vehicles use radar to warn you of an impending impact or even apply the brakes to prevent one, but the Google car uses radar to adjust the throttle and brakes continuously. It’s essentially adaptive cruise control that always takes into account the movement of cars around you.
The radar system is probably paired with sonar in at least some of Google’s test cars. While radar works up to 200 meters away, sonar is only good for 6 meters. They both have a narrow field of view, so the car knows things are about to get messy if another vehicle crosses the radar and sonar beams. This signal could be used to swerve, apply the brakes, or pre-tension the seatbelts.
Google’s software integrates all the data from these remote sensing systems (as much as 1GB per second) to build a map of the car’s position. Other cars are rendered as rough blocks with shifting, amorphous edges. It doesn’t have to be perfect — it’s not like the Google car needs to get close enough to test the accuracy of the borders. GPS is only accurate to within a few meters, so it’s remarkable the car can even stay in the right lane, let alone avoid collisions. Combine such an obstacle detection system with millions of miles driven in a Matrix-like simulation of California, and you have a very advanced autonomous driving system that’s getting more advanced all the time. That’s the power of data.
The Road Ahead
Car manufacturers have made significant advances in the past decade towards making self-driving cars a reality; however, there still remain a number of technological barriers that manufacturers must overcome before self-driving vehicles are safe enough for road use. 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.
The technology for self-driving cars is not quite ready, but I am looking forward to the self-driving cars of Minority Report becoming a reality.
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