Google’s self-driving car – a trip through Mountain View

Disclaimer – I work for Google but have nothing to do with the self-driving car team. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent that of my employer.

I found Eric Jaffe’s article on Google’s self-driving car and its handling of city streets immensely fascinating. He describes being a passenger in the self-driving car as it drives around Mountain View, CA (where I’m currently living) with minimal intervention from the Google engineer sitting in the driver’s seat.

It details some of the history of the self-driving car project, from its roots in DARPA’s Grand Challenge, a race through the desert with autonomous vehicles, through driving on the highway, to the vastly more complicated challenge of driving in an urban environment.

The article points out that Mountain View isn’t as crowded or chaotic as a city like New York or San Francisco, but it still has many interesting technological and algorithmic challenges, such as trying to intuit whether people at a crosswalk are really going to cross, or whether a bicyclist is going to get into the lane in front of the car.

I recommend reading the article to see how autonomous vehicles combine software engineering, robotics, machine learning, and computer vision in one sophisticated package.