robocar

Intersections for Driverless Cars: Replacing Traffic Lights and Stop Signs with Computer Programs

by Socrates
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Driving through an intersection can be deadly. According the World Health Organization 3,500 people die every day in traffic accidents, and if conventional intersections controlling conventional traffic are dangerous, Peter Stone is trying to imagine a world where driverless cars are no longer experimental, but the norm. Together with other computer scientists at the University of Texas in Austin, Peter is developing intersections of the future, designed to accommodate the driverless vehicles they believe will soon take over our roads. Those intersections will have no traffic lights and no stop signs, just computer programs that will talk directly to each car on the road.

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Google’s Self-Driving Robocar at Singularity University

by Socrates
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Today the first 3 hours of lectures at Singularity University started with a workshop on robotic cars such as Google’s autonomous self-driving vehicle. We were pleasantly surprised when Brad Templeton – our awesome Networks and Computer Systems faculty chair, secretly brought one of the prototype cars on campus. Of course, for your benefit, I couldn’t help it but take a couple of short videos. The first one shows a few Singularity University students mobbing Google’s autonomously self-driven vehicle. The second video is a demonstration of the Lidar navigation and traffic control system i.e. the way that the car perceives the world around it. The third one is a 1 min video of the robocar exterior. You can see the roof-mounted lidar system used for traffic guidance and orientation. (For those video tech geeks of you who are about to ask me – the videos [...]

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