SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the no-they-don't-make-frisbees dept.
Google's self-driving car project will become an independent company within Alphabet Inc. called "Waymo".
From the announcement post on Medium:
Today, we're taking our next big step by becoming Waymo, a new Alphabet business. Waymo stands for a new way forward in mobility. We're a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around.
[...] Waymo may be a new company, but we're building on advanced self-driving technology developed over many years at Google. On October 20, 2015, we completed the world's first fully-self driven car ride. Steve Mahan rode alone in one of our prototype vehicles, cruising through Austin's suburbs. Steve is legally blind, so our sensors and software were his chauffeur. His route reflected the way millions of people could use a self-driving car in everyday life: riding from a park to a doctor's office and through typical neighborhoods. This ride was possible because our cars can now handle the most difficult driving tasks, such as detecting and responding to emergency vehicles, mastering multi-lane four-way stops, and anticipating what unpredictable humans will do on the road. We've honed these skills over 2 million miles of real-world driving, and in the last year alone we've completed one billion miles of testing in simulation.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday December 14 2016, @12:30PM
I get the idea the SDC's will discover each other and negotiate who is doing what before we have time to realize the car is approaching the stop sign. If we were all SDC, we would not even need the sign or the stop. They would already have it figured out who goes at what speed so they all neatly miss each other at an intersection. I get the idea watching intersections would be akin to watching the teeth of gears meshing in a transmission.
Being I am past 65 years old and have seen a lot of things happen right in front of me... it would not surprise me if in our near ( before I die of old age ) future, all cars will be SDC, and trying to take a manual car onto the public highway will be like trying to access the Information Superhighway with an abacus. Remember, I grew up with vacuum tubes, and the idea of having a computer with the capacity of even an IMSAI 8080 was just a dream.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @09:06PM
My abacus has RFC 1149 support, you insensitive clod!