Google self-driving car prototype ready to try road

Google self-driving car prototype ready to try road

AFP 37 minutes ago

This image provided on May 28, 2014 by Google shows a self-driving two-seat prototype vehicle conceived and designed by Google (AFP Photo/)
     
San Francisco (AFP) - Google on Monday announced that the first completed prototype of its self-driving car is ready to be road tested.

"We're going to be spending the holidays zipping around our test track, and we hope to see you on the streets of Northern California in the new year," the Internet titan's autonomous car team said in a post at Google+ social network.

The prototype is a manifestation of plans that California-based Google revealed in May to build its own autonomous car minus typical features such as steering wheels.

"They won't have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal... because they don't need them. Our software and sensors do all the work," Google's Chris Urmson said in a blog post in May.

Technical specifics about the prototype were not disclosed on Monday.

For Google, the car marks a shift away from adapting vehicles made by others in its quest to pioneer individual transport that needs only a stop-and-go function.

Google said early this year that the top speed of the battery-powered prototypes will be 25 miles (40 kilometers) per hour and that they would be designed for utility, not luxury.

The blog post on Monday showed a white, rounded bug-looking vehicle.

"We've been working on different prototypes-of-prototypes, each designed to test different systems of a self-driving car—for example, the typical car parts like steering and braking, as well as the self-driving parts like the computer and sensors," Google said.

"We've now put all those systems together in this fully functional vehicle—our first complete prototype for fully autonomous driving."

Several automakers have been working on autonomous or semi-autonomous features for cars, such as self-parking, but no fully autonomous car has come to market.

"Self-driving cars, if widely adopted, stand to be as transformative to consumer life as the smartphone," said Mike Hudson, who tracks the automotive industry for eMarketer.

Matt Inman, the former computer programmer behind popular technology-focused humor website The Oatmeal, depicted Google's car as a hyper-cautious marshmallow in a playful post about a test ride.

"I'm ready for our army of Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots," the post at theoatmeal.com concluded.

"I'm ready for the future. I'm ready for the marshmallows."

http://news.yahoo.com/google-self-driving-car-prototype-ready-try-road-204420167.html


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Report: World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China

World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 ·           A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media  reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling.  “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,”  he said.
Read more

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car

BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke
Read more

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM   A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is  flops , or  floating point operations per second . In this visualization,  Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses  November 2021 data from  TOP500  to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used  teraflops  as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku  was completed in March 202
Read more