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DRIVERLESS CARS
Google will become the first automaker to build self-driving cars exclusively — ones that rely on the technology to such a degree that they lack steering wheels.
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The New York Times
Police, Pedestrians and the Social Ballet of Merging: The Real Challenges for Self-Driving Cars
Recently at a press event held to showcase Google’s research in self-driving vehicles, project leader Christopher Urmson said that the problems posed by driving on city streets are between 10 and 100 times more difficult than freeway driving. Robot vehicles confronted with other vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists do seemingly random things, and the roadway can change at a moment’s notice.
By dramatically slowing the speed of its robot car – limiting it to 25 miles per hour – and by removing the human driver entirely, Google is attempting to simplify the problem as well as mitigate any damage that the machines might cause should they fail.
Mr. Umson said that when a car breaks at 25 miles per hour, “you have half the kinetic energy you have at 35 m.p.h.”
Even at more languid speeds, one person who believes that Google has undertaken a tremendous challenge with self-driving cars on city streets is John J. Leonard, a veteran Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist, who developed one of the basic navigation techniques being widely used in autonomous vehicles. Dr. Leonard was a key member of the MIT team entered in DARPA’s 2007 Urban Vehicle challenge, a contest for robotic vehicles sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
He has taken his camera to the streets in Cambridge, Mass. and Boston to hunt for situations that might be challenging for robot vehicles. These “edge” cases – unusual events that might be unexpected by the car’s sensors and navigational equipment – are potentially a huge stumbling block to safe driving, even if they are extremely rare.
Read more:
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Fully autonomous driving has always been the goal of our project, because we think this could improve road safety and help lots of people who can’t drive.
We’re now developing prototypes of vehicles that have been designed from the ground up to drive themselves—just push a button and they’ll take you where you want to go! We’ll use these vehicles to test our software and learn what it will really take to bring this technology into the world.
Watch volunteers take a ride in Mountain View, California. Then read more at: http://goo.gl/qDUtgq
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YAHOO! NEWS SINGAPORE
Google jumps into the car business with its own self-driving vehicles
By Justin Hyde | Motoramic
Google’s cars will be limited to 25 mph — putting them under federal rules for “neighborhood” vehicles that require seat belts, headlamps and wipers, but not a full suite of air bags and other safety systems that would require far more complex automotive engineering. Umson said Google aimed to start a pilot test project in California in the next couple of years, one of the states that has legalized self-driving cars.
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weehingthong 
Need more testing to prove it’s safe.
Agreed. Everything has to be programmed into the car. In Malaysia, where one-way streets take over from two-way streets, think of the chaos when reprogramming is late!
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