Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Google Has A Secret Fleet Of Automated Cars

I know you all want the upgrade kit for your car!





At the TechCrunch Disrupt event a couple weeks ago in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give an impressive speech across a wide range of topics. But the most interesting thing he had to say what about automobiles. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” he said. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense.”


As they’ve revealed on their blog, Google has developed a technology for cars to drive themselves. And they haven’t done it on a computer, or in some controlled lab, they’ve been out on California roads testing this out. “Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research,” Google engineer Sebastian Thrun (the brainchild of the project who also heads the Stanford AI lab and co-invented Street View as well) writes.