Finally, the Self-Driving Car

Google’s sister company Waymo built the self-driving car. Now it needs to bring it to life.

The car took off down the street, destined for a strip-mall bar called the Priceless Prime Time, one of a handful of destinations that Waymo allowed us to go to as part of a press preview of the technology. It got to a stop sign at Arizona Avenue, the name for busy Highway 87, which pulled this town into existence as a crossroads outside a still-tiny Phoenix. Traffic surged past us, and the car waited patiently—maybe a hair too patiently—and then pulled out and merged with the stream of dumb machines heading north.

Inside the car, none of the technologies that make the service work were particularly obvious. There was a screen in front of me, and it showed an abstracted view of what the car “sees”: how it synthesizes all of its inputs into a sense of where it is, what else is there, and where it needs to go. The screen is, essentially, a map drawn by engineers imagining what a normal human would want to know about how the robot he has temporarily entrusted his life with understands the world.

Источник — TheAtlantic

Поделиться
Отправить
Популярное