Oct 28 2010
Google has launched a self-driving car, which is a remodeled Toyota Prius integrated with navigation sensing units and imagers, which has traveled about 1,000 miles on common roads without human involvement.
Some of them have even navigated over 140,000 miles without human assistance. The cameras, sensing devices and radars installed in them monitored the entire conditions during the drive.
According to a popular mechanics report, this is the most intensively tested self-driving car that has ever been launched and that referring to 2011 Infiniti M56 employs radar to detect the car navigating ahead of it, regulates the distance between other cars automatically and coaxes a drifting car back into the middle of a lane.
The computer navigating devices have improved with the innovative technology, but the sensing devices that tracks and determines the location of a car require still more experimentation and advancement.
The thought behind the development of autonomous cars began with a Google engineer and co-inventor of Street View mapping service, Sebastian Thrun, reported Technovelgy.com.