Self driving car only requires the push of a button

The automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from Google's Mountain View campus to it's 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, the self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. Google thinks this is a first in robotics research.

The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to see other traffic, as well as detailed maps to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centres, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

To develop this technology, the company gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organised by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside.

Safety has been the first priority in this project. The cars are never unmanned. The company always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. They also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By mapping features like lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes familiar with the environment and its characteristics in advance.

According to the WHO, more than 1.2m lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. Google believes that its technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half. It is also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new 'highway trains of tomorrow'. These highway trains should cut energy consumption while also increasing the number of people that can be transported on our major roads.

Google is now exploring what fully self-driving vehicles would look like by building some prototypes; they’ll be designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention. They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal... because they don’t need them. The software and sensors do all the work. The vehicles will be very basic, but they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. The first of these vehicles are capped at a maximum speed of 25mph.

On the inside, the cars are designed for learning, not luxury, so it's light on creature comforts, but it will have two seats (with seatbelts), a space for passengers’ belongings, buttons to start and stop and a screen that shows the route.