Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Self-driving cars, a concept that could save lives. An interesting TED talk by Sebastian Thrun

I have always been a little skeptical about computers and machines taking over our everyday taks. Trusting a machine to make a judgement about handling my precious car scale model collection itself is unthinkable to me so far, let alone trusting it to drive my family through the crowded streets of India. At the same time this is something a number of us are curious about — who wouldn’t want to have the convenience of their own car without the hassle of driving — and a technology that could have a serious impact on our lives within a relatively short time period.


TED speaker, Sebastian Thrun, mentioned some interesting facts about the driverless cars that you might not know, such as the fact that they’ve driven over 3,20,000 kilometers since testing began and that the cars navigate not only during the day in optimum conditions, but also at night, and down difficult roads.




In this video we can see that the car clearly senses obstacles and the lines in the road. Some of the technology packed into these cars includes radar, LIDAR, GPS, and an array of cameras, technologies that we come across in our daily lives now.


The speaker raises an interesting point towards the end of his talk, one that you might not have considered while pondering driverless cars. That is the case of efficiency. This comes down to the fact that the average person just is not as good a driver as a computer. This relates not only crashes — which are almost always due to human, as opposed to mechanical, error — but also inefficacy, as humans weave around the road, lacking the precision of a driverless car. Within a matter of years we might be relaxing in the back seat playing around on our internet-connected tablets while a computer drives us home in a both a safer and more efficient manner than we would ever be able to. This may finally be a solution to most traffic indiscipline related problems. Hmmm now how do we get the auto-rickshaws in Mumbai to adopt this?


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