Self driving car coming to a theater near you

(Dutch below) What if you were told self driving cars had already been driving public roads for several months? Would you believe it? Well, it seems to be true. Google has been testing self driving cars on public roads for several months! Good tactic. What would happen if you would test this kind of technology in a lab and publicly announce you want to test them on public roads? A lot of protest, fear etc. Now you can say: no worry people, they have been amongst you for months :-).

The below video's show the cars, which where then thought to be StreetView-cars (when the guy in the autonomous car sees he's being filmed, he pushes the break, indicating he didn't want to be filmed ;-)). And you can read more about this on TechCrunch, and on the same site about why previous sightings.


Problems thinking of why self driving cars would be great? What about this blind person:

Update okt 2011: This video shows more about how the Google cars work and what the see. Fun, at 13:00, is how these cars can even race and stuff:-).
An Italian Vislab team is also testing a self driving car on public roads.


And autonomous vehicles are tested in German traffic (at 3:20 in the video, you get to see it is actually driving autonomous, the project is called AutonoMos):

Before that, under the Darpa Grand Challenge initiative, self driving cars have been tested on closed driving ranges.


And in 2004, there was this dessert Grand challenge:


So: when will this be available in cars we can actually buy? And: do you dare to drive the '1st' generation :-)?

So Knight Rider times actually will become true, well, for the autonomous driving part that is :-).


The German team has published a video that actually shows somebody with a touch-device with GPS signaling the car to pick him up and bring him to a destination!


Funny is that the German team has applied technology of their autonomous car to wheel chairs, and in their project-page the mention BCI-interfaces (Brain Computer Interfaces). I have a nice item about BCI here.

Update sept 2011: read about this autonomous tractor (Dutch article) that is able to manoeuvre a piece of land and work it while the farmer can do other work .

Update feb 2012: Mercedes is expected to launch a self steering car people (with enough money, i bet) can actually buy and use on the street. And Nevada has approved regulations for autonomous vehicles.

(Dutch)
Zoals je kunt zien in de bovenstaande video's, blijkt het snel te gaan met zelfsturende / zelfrijdende autonome 'robot' auto's. Google blijkt al maanden zulke auto's op publieke wegen te testen. En kennelijk zonder veel ongelukken! Een Italiaans team doet een test met een zelfsturende auto in een rit van Italie naar China (via openbare wegen). En in de andere video's zie je dat daarvoor in het kader van Darpa al testen werden gedaan met zelfsturende auto's in (1st) de woestijn, en (later) afgezette nagemaakte stads-achtige omgevingen (incl stoplichten, stopstrepen, ander verkeer etc).