Google proposed and tested the car without a driver. Google overcomes the limits of the Internet and takes advantage of the influence, the knowledge and the financial power to propose cars that drive without any intervention of the driver.
This project is developed in collaboration with the universities Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and supposes the testing of six Toyota Prius cars and an Audi TT in traffic, informs Financial Times. To be more specific, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the cars run with two people on board: one standing at the wheel to take control in case something occurs, and the other one, sitting in the right, who checks the equipments. These can run through heavy traffic with the help of video cameras, radar and laser sensors, and the department of Google Street View. The development of “artificial intelligence” proves the capacities of the company in the field of research and its ambitions, which overcome the main field of activity, the Internet, notes Financial Times. Google declared that the vehicles are still in the experiment stage.
In the development of cars, the company received the help of many winners of the competition Darpa Grand Challenge, a race of cars without driver organized by USA government starting with 2004. “Our objective is to prevent traffic accidents, to win free time, and to reduce the emission of carbon by fundamental changing the way of using the car”, notes Google on the official blog. More than that, the giant of Internet considers that the technology used on the seven test cars could lower the number of deaths by traffic accidents by half: “More than 1.2 million people are killed on roads every year worldwide, according to World Health Organization. We believe we can reduce this number by half with the help of technology”. Google has already mapped and photographed hundreds of thousands of roads from the entire world, for the service of Street View, this information being useful for the cars without a driver. Last year, the company invested $2.8 billion in research and development, the equivalent of 12% of incomes. Google also sponsors a reward of $30 million for landing on the moon of a robot, which must be able to move and send pictures back to Earth.
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