As we all know that Google is one of the major company, who is spending a lot of money and time to build driverless cars.
However, Google is not alone in the race, as Tesla motors, Ford, and several other giant companies have already jumped in.
What is Driverless Car:
As the name suggests, a car which is completely controlled by machine is called as a driverless car. It means, it only needs passengers, no driver at all.
However, in almost every country, it is either illegal or unsafe to have a ride in a driverless car, so it would be really tough for the companies to get into this technology completely.
How driverless car works:
Now, as we all know that advanced robots work using sensors, images, videos etc to react to the outer world, so similarly these driverless cars run by analyzing the surrounding area using sensors, images or videos.
If we talk about Google’s Driverless Cars, then it works analyzing the information gathered from Laser Sensors, Radar Sensors, Ultrasonic Sensors, Video Camera etc.
For better results, sensors are fixed all around the vehicle to give a perfect data from all the sides.
Another secret of these driverless cars is, the laser sensor fixed at the top of the vehicle, which sends 360-degree image and millions of other data in each second.
When it comes to driving without a driver, GPS is not enough for analyzing traffic. As it doesn’t transmit data at that speed, and this is one of the major reason, why Google is using so many other sensors to analyze the current scenario.
Once information are collected, the CPU or the Central Processing Unit of that car analyze them all and decides whether to stop, turn, continue driving, accelerate or whatever.
The system learns every time it comes across some critical situation, like Google Search learns from our past searches about our preferences and decisions.
Almost all the companies are having same hardware but what makes them different from each other, is the software which they use in their system.
So far, Google has done a tremendous and very impressive job in the field and its testing driverless car has completed more than a million KM traveling on almost every type of roads and condition, which is definitely a positive sign.
Is it really Useful:
Like every other technology, it has both cons and pros.
One of the major advantages is, you don’t need to be a driver anymore, you can now get drunk and get back home safely.
With the driverless cars, you are safe in almost every situation. If you fall asleep while driving and nothing would happen to you.
However, with dozens of pros, there are few cons as well.
In my personal opinion, one of the major issue with driverless cars is, it can’t predict the next movement of another driver (human driver) like we humans do, which may make us little slower in the driverless cars.
Overall, technology changes every day, so it may happen that one day we could see a machine which can analyze or think like humans.
