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Group of Indian Street Dogs Gathered On Road Around Luxury Car And Barking At Car Owner
Google’s Lame Demo Shows Us How Far Its Robo-Car Has Come
For so futuristic a car, the interior of Google’s self-driving car prototype is, well, cheap.
The seats look and feel like they were pulled from the battered and
bruised 1998 Ford Escort I drove in college. So do the bulky black
buttons for the windows, climate control, emergency stop, and “go.” The
car of tomorrow has teal accents and lots of flimsy grey plastic that
looks cheap. Instead of a dashboard, steering wheel and pedals, there’s
an empty bin big enough for a carry-on suitcase.
It’s a stark contrast to the sleek, sophisticated concept cars we’ve seen from Google’s competitors. The Mercedes-Benz F 015 is a gleaming ingot packed
with white leather, blonde wood, black carbon fiber, and more
touchscreens than a big box store. Audi’s autonomous A7 has a user interface that’s as elegant as it is logical. The cab of Daimler’s self-driving semi resembles a Swedish sauna.
And then there’s Google, with a car that looks like a Roomba, and
sounds like one, too. Yes, it’s just a prototype, And no, Google doesn’t
plan to sell this thing to the public. But it’s still the vehicle the
company uses to show us its vision of the future of transportation, and
in that sense, it’s not the most appealing sales pitch. It doesn’t even
have a futuristic code name.
The fact Google invited journalists to ride around a rooftop parking lot didn’t make the car seem any cooler.
The ride was more carefully choreographed than a Taylor Swift
concert. I pressed the the big black “Go” button, and the car rolled
away with a whir. It made a few turns, and maxed out at around 15 mph. A
Google employee stepped in front of me, and the car slowed and let him
continue on his way unhindered. A car pulled up alongside me, and the
Google Car slowed to ensure we didn’t collide. Then a cyclist made a
similar move, and the car responded in a similar fashion. I saw the car
make the exact same trip 10 times in all.
Look past the econobox styling and appointments of the car and the
boring drive around that parking look, though, and you can see just how
far Google has come in its quest to make drivers irrelevant—and how far
ahead of the competition it is.
Killing the Driver
Google has been developing this technology for six years, and is
taking a distinctly different approach than everyone else. Conventional
automakers are rolling out features piecemeal, over the course of many
years, starting with active safety features like automatic braking and
lane departure warnings.
Google doesn’t give a hoot about anything less than a completely
autonomous vehicle, one that reduces “driving” to little more than
getting in, typing in a destination, and enjoying the ride. It wants a
consumer-ready product ready in four years.
This is how good human drivers think. And the cars have the added
advantage of better vision, quicker processing times, and the inability
to get distracted, or tired, or drunk, or angry.
The Silicon Valley juggernaut is making rapid progress. Its fleet of
modified Lexus SUVs and prototypes has racked up 1.2 million autonomous
miles on public roads, and covers 10,000 more each week. Most of that
has been done in Mountain View, and Google expanded its testing to
Austin last summer.
It’s unclear how this technology will reach consumers, but Google is
more likely to sell its software than manufacture its own cars. At the
very least, it won’t sell this dinky prototype to the public.
Predicting the Future
As the Google car moves, its laser, camera, and radar systems
constantly scan the environment around it, 360 degrees and up to 200
yards away.
“We look at the world around us, and we detect objects in the scene,
we categorize them as different types,” says Dmitri Dolgov, the
project’s chief engineer. The car knows the difference between people,
cyclists, cars, trucks, ambulances, cones, and more. Based on those
categories and its surroundings, it anticipates what they’re likely to
do.
Making those predictions is likely the most crucial work the team is
doing, and it’s based on the huge amount of time the cars have spent
dealing with the real world. Anything one car sees is shared with every
other car, and nothing is forgotten. From that data, the team builds
probabilistic models for the cars to follow.
“All the miles we’ve driven and all the data that we’ve collected
allowed us to build very accurate models of how different types of
objects behave,” Dolgov says. “We know what to expect from pedestrians,
from cyclists, from cars.”
Those are the key learnings the test drive on the roof parking lot
was meant to show off. If I may anthropomorphize: The car spotted a
person on foot walking near its route and figured, “You’re probably
going to jaywalk.” It saw a car coming up quickly from left and thought,
“There’s a good chance you’re going to keep going and cut me off.” When
the cyclist in front put his left arm out, the car understood that as a
turn signal.
This is how good human drivers think. And the cars have the added
advantage of better vision, quicker processing times, and the inability
to get distracted, or tired, or drunk, or angry.
Detecting Anomalies
The great challenge of making a car without a steering wheel a human
can grab is that the car must be able to handle every situation it
encounters. Google acknowledges there’s no way to anticipate and model
for every situation. So the team created what it calls “anomaly
detection.”
If the cars see behavior or an object they can’t categorize, “they
understand their own limitations,” Dolgov says. “They understand that
there’s something really crazy going on and they might not be able to
make really good, confident predictions about the future. So they take a
very conservative approach.”
One of Google’s cars once encountered a woman in a wheelchair, armed
with a broom, chasing a turkey. Seriously. Unsurprisingly, this was a
first for the car. So the car did what a good human driver would have
done. It slowed down, Dolgov says, and let the situation play out. Then
it went along its way. Unlike a human, though, it did not make a video
and post it on Instagram.
