Belén Simoncini
Senior 4A
PC. 17
Google gets driverless car law passed in Nevada
Recently, a new law has been authorized: autonomous vehicle. Nevada
just passed a law that could let self-driving cars on the road on March 1, 2012.
The autonomous vehicles are considered vehicles which use “artificial intelligence,
sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention
of a human operator.”
These cars have been tested by Google and Volkswagen, which use a
Temporary Autopilot program that has the function of controlling the car while
using a radar system, a laser scanner and an ultrasonic sensors to know which its
position is in relation to other cars, to also slow down when getting near curves
in the road. Google had betted a higher proposal to the self-driving cars, by
saying that it believes that those vehicles could minimize road accidents in half,
reduce highway congestion, maximize fuel economy and free up time for drivers
to perform other tasks. In other words, those problems concerned by Google are
car safety and efficiency. “Even a devoted driving enthusiast like former General Motors
vice chairman Bob Lutz concedes that driverless cars are the way of the future.”
Concerning the hardware and software involved in those cars, the New
Google Driverless Car system connect imputs and video camaras inside the car . “It
involves a LIDAR sensor placed on top of the vehicle, radar sensors on the front of the vehicle,
and a position sensor attached to one of the rear wheels that helps locate the car's position on
the map.” “LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging)is an optical remote sensing technology that
measures the distance by illuminating the target with light.” Google´s
driverless cars are
never unmanned, that means, there is always a “trained safety driver behind the wheel
who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control”. Furthermore, there is also a
trained software operator in the passenger´s seat with the function of
monitorizing the software. To test these cars, it is sent a trained driver ina a
conventionally driven car to know and map the route and road conditions. In this
way, the software of the car gets familiar with the characterisctics of the road.
As regards the social and ethical issues that can be mentioned, Google
affirms that those driverless cars could reduce traffic fatal accidents, “ of which
there were 34,000 in the U.S. in 2008—in fact, they estimate that a million lives per year could
be saved.”
But maybe, those cars could get “confuse” when some events that they
do not expect are presented. If something wrong happens, who is to blame? The
driverless car? The pedestrian? Those issues are essential to take into account
because if something not expected happens, it is very important to know how to
act. One of Google´s employee admitted to Scientific American: “There are things
that right now are a challenge for us,” Urmson says. “For instance, if most of the world stayed
the same but the lanes are shifted—so the physical road didn’t move but, for whatever reason,
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ITGS
Belén Simoncini
Senior 4A
PC. 17
the department of transportation decided we should drive a half lane to the left—that would
probably confuse the car today.”
What´s more, the existence of the most accurate and well-designed
driverless cars on the road promotes some troublesome ethical questions. “An MIT
engineer hits the nail on the head when he asks whether people are more comfortable with
human failures than those of machines when it comes to deaths: “Suppose 10 human-generated
fatalities are replaced with five robot-generated fatalities, is that an ethical trade that society
To answer these questions, it is required to take some special
time to think about it, wheter which of both sides is most supported.
wants to make?””
Analyse this topic using three different points of view:
Point 1: Hardware and software involved (investigate)
Point 2: Social and ethical issues that can be
mentioned
Point 3: Social Impact
Words: from 1000 to 1500
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/autonomous-vehicle-law-nevada_n_884307.html
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/23/autos/google_driverless_cars.fortune/index.htm
http://googleblog.blogspot.com.ar/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html
http://www.technologyandgadgets.net/2012/05/new-driverless-car-by-google-nowbeing.html#.T7uKK9woTXo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIDAR
Villa Devoto School
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Belén Simoncini
Senior 4A
PC. 17
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/05/23/google-tries-to-jump-start-thedriverless-car-but-big-questions-loom/
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/trends-innovations/driverless-car5.htm (VER)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
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