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Self-driving cars: Will you trust a robot chauffeur?

Google has detailed its experiments with automated vehicles that drive themselves. The search giant has logged 140,000 miles in California. In addition, TU Braunschweig also has its self-driving car experiments. Trust will determine whether these efforts ever become mainstream.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Google has detailed its experiments with automated vehicles that drive themselves. The search giant has logged 140,000 miles in California. In addition, TU Braunschweig, a technical university in Germany, also has its self-driving car experiments. Trust will determine whether these efforts ever become mainstream.

Here's how Google's robot car works:

  • The cars use video cameras, radar and laser range finders to see traffic.
  • Detailed maps and GPS are used to navigate roads.
  • Google’s data centers crunch the information so the cars can handle their tasks.
  • The cars have a trained driver that can take over for the robot.
  • A sensor on the roof scans 200 feet in all directions. Sensors measure movements to locate position. A camera is the eyes and ears of the vehicle.
  • The cars can be programmed to be cautious or any other driving personality.

Judging from a video, the TU Braunschweig has a similar set-up that Engadget noted. All of this automated car talk has spurred conversation about research and development, business models and a future that includes what Google calls highway trains---essentially robots driving trains of connected vehicles.

The biggest question, however, may boil down to trust. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference recently:

Your car should drive itself. It’s amazing to me that we let humans drive cars. It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.

Do you agree with that? We trust autopilot to ferry us around in an airplane, but a robot car is going to be a bigger hurdle.

Nevertheless, Google may be right. Perhaps the day will come when cars do drive themselves, but it's going to take a while for mainstream adoption. It will take years for the app ecosystem that Ford talks about to take hold in the car cockpit. So far, automated cars are a great experiment and not much more.

Are you ready for an automated car?

Here are a few videos on the subject:

New York Times inside the Google car:

Robert Scoble spying the Google car live back in January:

TU Braunschweig's car:

And more on hands-free driving.

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This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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