[msb-alumni] Google's self-driving cars reach 2 million miles
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2016 17:23:57 -0400
BlankGoogle's self-driving cars reach 2 million miles By Marco della Cava,
@marcodellacava, USA TODAY Google's self-driving cars have hit another milestone
on the road to the automotive future, notching 2million miles on the
autonomous-testing odometer. That mark, which the Alphabet-owned company
announced
Wednesday, was hit as other companies spent the summer dominating self-driving
headlines. Uber recently began picking up Pittsburgh passengers in its small
fleet of driverless (though driver-monitored) vehicles, and Ford announced
plans
to sell transportation that lacked a steering wheel and pedals by 2021.
The path toward robotic transport -- so-called Level 5 autonomy, where humans
need not get involved -- is what the project has been traveling on for more
than seven years. And despite rivals suggesting autonomy is around the corner,
Google's self-driving car lead says his team is nowhere near finished with
the hard work of making computers drive better than humans. "There's definitely
a lot of things being said in the media, but my personal opinion is it's
a lot of noise and ambiguity," project lead Dmitri Dolgov tells USA TODAY.
Dolgov was in at the 2009 ground floor of the program and takes over after the
abrupt departure of longtime technical lead Chris Urmson. "I find the
terminology is over-loaded, and there are big gaps between what's out there and
what's
working. But it's exciting. Dolgov's point is clear. Upstarts may claim they
can
develop self-driving tech by leveraging increasingly sophisticated
machine-learning
algorithms, but nothing replaces the simple and often boring task of trolling
the streets of Mountain View, Calif., Phoenix, Phoenix and Kirkland, Wash.
While Google's engineers have refined their systems by running many millions of
miles of virtual testing, it remains a poor second place to encountering
and processing real-world road encounters that range from a woman chasing ducks
with a broom to buses failing to yield. In fact, the handful of accidents
suffered by Google's cars to date have, so far, all been the result of human
negligence on the part of the other drivers. "It's easy to build car that's
always in paranoid mode," Dolgov says with a laugh. "Reacting to the world is
the core of the challenge, reacting smoothly.
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