As reported by BBC News: Dmitri Dolgov told Reuters
that when surrounding vehicles were breaking the speed limit, going
more slowly could actually present a danger, and the Google car would
accelerate to keep up.
Google's driverless prototypes have been widely tested on roads in selected areas of the US. The UK will allow driverless cars on public roads in 2015.
Google first announced its driverless car division in 2010,
and has been testing its technology in modified cars built by other
manufacturers.
The cars have traveled on more than 300,000 miles of open road, mostly in California.
In May, the US tech firm said it would start building its own self-driving cars.
The bubble-shaped vehicles will seat two people, propulsion
will be electric, and to begin with they will be limited to 25mph
(40km/h) to help ensure safety.
In July, the UK government announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year.
In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines.
This will cover the need for self-drive vehicles to comply
with safety and traffic laws, and involve changes to the Highway Code,
which applies to England, Scotland and Wales.
Commenting on Google self-drive cars' ability to exceed the
speed limit, a Department for Transport spokesman said: "There are no
plans to change speed limits, which will still apply to driverless
cars".
In a separate development on Monday, the White House said it
wanted all cars and light trucks to be equipped with technology that
could prevent collisions.
Radio signals emitted by the vehicles would allow them to "talk" to each other, and alert drivers to potential accidents.
Nissan is one of many companies developing self-drive vehicles
How do driverless cars work?
The label "driverless vehicle" actually covers a lot of different concepts.
Indeed, the cruise control, automatic braking, anti-lane
drift and self-parking functions already built into many vehicles offer a
certain degree of autonomy.
But the term is generally used to refer to vehicles that take
charge of steering, accelerating, indicating and braking during most if
not all of a journey between two points, much in the same way
airplanes can be set to autopilot.
Unlike the skies, however, the roads are much more crowded,
and a range of technologies is being developed to tackle the problem.
One of the leading innovations is Lidar (light detection and
ranging), a system that measures how lasers bounce off reflective
surfaces to capture information about millions of small points
surrounding the vehicle every second. The technology is already used to
create the online maps used by Google and Nokia.
Another complementary technique is "computer vision" - the
use of software to make sense of 360-degree images captured by cameras
attached to the vehicle, which can warn of pedestrians, cyclists,
roadworks and other objects that might be in the vehicle's path.
Autonomous vehicles can also make use of global-positioning
system (GPS) location data from satellites, radar, ultrasonic sensors to
detect objects close to the car and further sensors to accurately
measure the vehicle's orientation and the rotation of its wheels, to
help it understand its exact location.
The debate now is whether to allow cars, like the prototype
unveiled by Google in May, to abandon controls including a steering
wheel and pedals and rely on the vehicle's computer.
Or whether, instead, to allow the machine to drive, but insist a passenger be ready to wrest back control at a moment's notice.
No comments:
Post a Comment