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Google Showing Off New Self-Driving Cars Advanced Features

Internet-related services and products giant Google has now the most advanced technology when it comes to self-driving vehicles, being able to recognize a whole range of road objects, pedestrians and adapt to various situations.
Google autonomous driving 1 photo
Photo: screenshot from Youtube
Google director of the self-driving car project Chris Urmson, recently posted a blog update telling that over the past year the company increased focus on city driving near its Mountain View headquarters in California.

The researchers have improved the software used by the autonomous cars in order to detect hundreds of objects surrounding the vehicle simultaneously, including pedestrians, road signs, cyclists making gestures or buses.

“A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t—and it never gets tired or distracted,” Urmson said. “As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it).”

What started out as a mapping project, now became a more serious program for launching a fully functional autonomous vehicle around 2020, a race in which most automakers are involved.

So far, Google’s autonomous vehicles drove around 700,000 miles (1,126,540 km). However, the company still has a lot of problems to solve before testing the new updates in another town.

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