Google’s self-driving car passes 700,000 accident-free miles

Google, and several other companies, have been working for quite some time on developing cars that can travel autonomously – at least in some degree. Google is of course in the media spotlight and for good reason. They have been pushing this concept hard and now find themselves at the point where they have a concept that has proven its ability to travel hundreds of thousands of miles accident free.

In addition, the vehicle isn’t travelling on barren paths or other “safe” areas. Their self driving car is operated on roads, around pedestrians, and other obstacles – a truly impressive feat that leaves us wondering when we’ll be able to get our hands on a “google car”.

Google’s self-driving cars, of which there are usually a dozen on the roads of California and Nevada at any given time, have now logged 700,000 miles of awesome accident-free autonomous driving. To celebrate, Google has released a new video that demonstrates some impressive software improvements that have been made over the last two years: Most notably, its self-driving cars can now track hundreds of objects simultaneously, including pedestrians, an indicating cyclist, a stop sign held by a crossing guard, or traffic cones. You really should watch the video — it’s one of the coolest bits of tech that I’ve seen in a long time.

While Google’s driverless car makes it look easy, there is a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes. Not only is there around $150,000 of equipment in each car performing real-time LIDAR and 360-degree computer vision (a complex and computing-intensive task), but the software itself is the result of years of development. Basically, every single driving situation that can possibly occur must be painstakingly programmed into the software. It isn’t like Google has built an artificial intelligence that can learn how to drive a car from basic principles — if Google doesn’t tell the car what to do, it doesn’t do anything.

As you can imagine, there are quite literally thousands of situations that can occur while driving around a town. As always, Google’s blog post is short on exact numbers, but it does say this: “thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously” — and, back in 2012, the software had already successfully piloted the cars for 300,000 accident-free miles. In the video, you can see that Google’s cars can now react to railroad crossings, large stationary objects, roadwork signs and cones, and cyclists. The cyclist detection is particularly impressive — not only can it see when a cyclist is indicating to move left or right, but it even watches out for cyclists coming from behind when making a right turn.

While a lot has been said about the expensive LIDAR hardware used by Google’s driverless cars, most of the innovations here are likely based on computer vision. While LIDAR gives you a very good idea of the lay of the land and the position of large objects like parked cars, it doesn’t help with spotting speed limits or “construction ahead” signs. LIDAR might tell you that an object is passing your blind spot or that there’s an obstruction in front of you, but computer vision tells you that it’s a cyclist or a railroad crossing barrier. As we have seen previously with its Street View and Google Glass efforts, computer vision is one of its stronger suits — and it’s now bringing its expertise to bear in its driverless cars.

Another upside of this developing technology is the fact that it can be applied in areas other than just driving cars. Expect this to help reduce human intervention in a wide range of transportation areas in the coming years.

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