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How Google's Self-Driving Car Works

IEEE Spectrum · 647.2K views · 2011-10-14 · 14:28

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Overview

Part 2 of the IROS 2011 keynote by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on Google's self-driving car. It shows how the car perceives its surroundings with a lidar point cloud and recognizes traffic lights and pedestrians. The audio is poor because it was recorded on a pocket camcorder.

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HN recommends it as a technical talk aimed at a real engineering audience, with live demos of perception and pre-mapped roads.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2012–2016

Topics

Self-driving & autonomous vehiclesComputer vision, speech & NLP
Search by tags
google self-driving carlidarsebastian thrunautonomous vehiclesperception

What people said

magicalist · 2012-03 · Strong recommendation

[VIDEO] 9:00 has a good example, recognizing the state of a traffic light, other cars and pedestrians at an intersection, but lots of cool videos starting around 3:40. The whole talk is awesome and a presentation for an actual technical audience, too.

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iharris · 2013-04 · Recommendation

There's a great presentation about Google's self-driving car here (check the second half for video of the real-time telemetry that it gathers): [VIDEO] One of the things that I found really interesting is how the car inches forward at a stop sign in order to show the "driver's" intent to other drivers. Lots of actions that seem to be second-nature for human drivers have to be carefully emulated here.

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amjaeger · 2016-12 · Reference

If I'm not mistaken, this is the presentation that discusses mapping the roads before autonomous travel. They compare the maps to what the car sees as it drives. [VIDEO] But there are a number of reasons the need pre-mapping are not a huge issue. A) When autonomous cars start to be introduced people will still know how to drive, and can pilot the car through unmapped areas. By the time everyone has an autonomous car, and no one knows how to drive the world will be mapped. B) Google has already shown with Streetview that they can create detailed, up-to-date maps of most roads. C) This problem will likely be solved in time.

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Sources

Video by IEEE Spectrum, played through YouTube.

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