The Google Driverless Car
Driverless cars are here already... sort of Much of the autonomous technology used in Google's self-driving cars is already found on the road.You may have seen commercials advertising the Volkswagen Polo's automatic braking or the Ford Focus' automatic parallel parking, which both build on the increasingly common use of proximity sensors to aid parking. Combine these sensors with the automated-steering technology used for parking, throw in the seemingly old-hat technology that is cruise control and you have the loose framework for a self-driving car. How many sensors does the car have, and what do they do? Google’s driverless car has eight sensors. The most noticeable is the rotating roof-top Lidar – a camera that uses an array of 32 or 64 lasers to measure the distance to objects to build up a 3D map at a range of 200m, letting the car "see" hazards. The car also sports another set of “eyes”, a standard camera that points through the w...