Google's self driving cars can navigate drive-through restaurants.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/116899029375914044550/posts/MVZBmrnzDio

by maeon3 • 14 years ago

194 60 14 years ago

plus.google.com

We wanted to share one of our favorite moments from some special research we conducted. Watch this video of Steve, who joined us for a drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment outside of our core research efforts, but we think it’s also a promising look at what this kind of technology may one day deliver for society if rigorous technical and safety standards can be met.

joejohnson• 14 years ago

How did they tell the car to stop in front of the speaker (in the drive thru)? And how did they signal to the car that they were done ordering and to go to the pick-up window? The video conveniently skips those sequences.

barrkel• 14 years ago

"a drive on a carefully programmed route" - given careful enough programming, this appears to allow for an indefinite amount of smoke and mirrors specific to this demo.

jessriedel• 14 years ago

To be fair, it would be easily worth it for a blind person to spend a few hours carefully programming important routes like this. And of course, when self-driving cars are widely adopted, Taco Bell will automatically make instructions available. (This could be as simple as a standardized sign denoting the entrance and two windows of a drive through.)

wavephorm• 14 years ago

To sound like a researcher: "those are just implementation details".

fruchtose• 14 years ago

That should be,"Google's self driving cars can navigate drive through restaurant drive-throughs." Although I am highly impressed by Google's self-driving cars, I can't help but feel a little bit let down that the car did not navigate around tables, make way for waiters, or squeeze through tight spaces.

davidw• 14 years ago

Yeah, I had a mental image of Jackie Chan being chased around a restaurant by a Google car.

fudged6• 14 years ago

The Canadian version of the system will need to replace the horn with "Excuse me!" and "Sorry!" :)

MaxGabriel• 14 years ago

If I recall from Thrun's Udacity lecture, the Google self-driving car does not use the horn nor does it respond to others' horns to make decisions.

pilom• 14 years ago

I was more thinking of it crashing through the walls on one side and continuing out the other.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Actually the video doesn't show the car navigating through the drive through space, it shows it driving up to the speakers and stopping, then it cuts to a scene from the restaurant where he's ordering, then it cuts to a scene where the car is leaving the parking lot.

As a robotics junky all my red flags went off with that bit of creative editing.

Even if the car spent 10 minutes working out the close quarters navigation it would be more 'real' than the editing which makes me suspicious that the 'side seat' driver actually did that tricky bit of navigating.

Not hating on the Goog here, just really looking forward to the era of self driving vehicles but want to be realistic about their capabilities.

sad_panda2• 14 years ago

There's quite a bit of footage of the self driving car making its way through congested areas with people and obstacles. It was more competent than many of the minivan drivers in my neck of the woods. :)

libraryatnight• 14 years ago

For me, I was imagining a scenario similar to Top Gear driving a Fiesta and a Corvette through a shopping mall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e7R3y-qwZ0

AsylumWarden• 14 years ago

<sarcasm>Yea, had to be faked. The blind guy obviously grabbed the steering wheel after ordering and then drove the car around to the window.</sarcasm>

Pretty awesome accomplishment. Maybe I can get one of these cars and cut back on those tickets I keep getting in my 90 mile daily commute.

zht• 14 years ago

there's quite a lively discussion on the driving prowess of middle aged Asian women going on there

fudged6• 14 years ago

Driving seems to be the only daily activity in which a large population of people need to abide by a set of logic and rules to not die and not get hit by a big financial burden in the case of an accident or ticket. Recently I've found myself wondering if society would degrade if we lost our dependance on this sort of necessary logic in our daily lives.

electromagnetic3• 14 years ago

I not only drive to and from work, but because I'm in construction I also spend a portion of my day driving either to the job site or between job sites, often hauling a trailer that weighs over double what my truck does.

Just this morning I had a woman swearing at me and giving me the finger, with her two small children in the vehicle, because I abided by the 4-way stop outside an elementary school and she tried to run it.

Between the cell phone users, and the middle aged women in their SUV's that can't do a shoulder check or read a single lane sign, and the guy with the chronic one-upsman syndrome who guns it to 30 over the limit just to pass you on the highway and go slightly under the limit.

IMO only about 20% of people on the road actually follow the rules because they know they're right and help keep them and their passengers safe. Then there's probably another 60% who generally follow the rules simply because they don't want to get a ticket. The last 20% just don't give a shit, do what they want, when they want and god forbid they don't get it.

I'd also say there's an additional 10-30% who are purely seasonal drivers known the other 7-9 months as "cyclists". They only come out in the winter, and are likely responsible for as many if not more accidents than inclement weather. Living in southern ontario I actually dread the roads on that first heavy snow because, no joking around, I'm actually worried I'm going to kill someone and it won't be my fault.

I don't think driving is doing society any good except at providing a way for the stupid, and the stupidly unfortunate, ways out of the genetic pool.

mbell• 14 years ago

I think your percentages and impression of safety are off. Not sure what part of the country you live in but around here(Boston) going only the speed limit on the highways will get you about run off the road resulting in all sorts of unsafe driving. In other words going the speed limit doesn't make you safe, and going 10mph over the limit doesn't mean you don't care, the safest speed to travel is with the flow of traffic.

Additionally I happily drive well over the speed limit when visiting Maine, 2 lane wide highway, nearly straight, 5 exits in 180 miles and nearly no traffic. A speed limit of 65mph isn't about whats actually safe, its about government bureaucracy (and income from tickets).

mindslight• 14 years ago

Are you really saying that many cyclists who switch to driving in the winter are characteristically terrible drivers? This is just really at odds with my cycling experience - A biker always needs to be on the defensive just based on the fact that the average driver is likely to not even perceive a smaller vehicle. Even though I haven't seriously biked in several years, I'm still generally aware of what most cars are going to do before they actually do it. (Then again, I guess I've also seen my share of moronic bikers - the kind that think they don't really need to think about what they're doing as long as they're doing it slowly). The first snow is indeed always a mess of bad drivers, but I blame that on people forgetting how slippery snow really is.

fudged6• 14 years ago

"Living in southern ontario I actually dread the roads on that first heavy snow because, no joking around, I'm actually worried I'm going to kill someone and it won't be my fault."

Yeah, in Calgary people lose their shit when there's a light dusting of snow... it's ridiculous.

jules• 14 years ago

In my experience it is the cyclists who are trained to keep a careful eye on everyone else on the road and anticipate what others are going to do, because if they do not, they die. People who are always driving are much less aware of what their high speed air-bagged (only on the inside, of course) steel tanks can do to a human body, especially if the thing they might hit is just 70kg and not a 2 metric tonne object.

Speaking as a person who has had several accidents with cars while biking and zero accidents while driving.

true_religion2• 14 years ago

We didn't used to drive. We used to fall onto our horses drunk and trust the well trained beast to carry us back home.

Yet somehow, we built our way to modern society from those humble beginnings.

Self-driving cars are a step backwards to a benefit we previously attained gratis from animals. For instance, in remote parts of the world where mules are still used for transportation, farmers on the mountain top load their mule with the days goods then let it navigate home (e.g. 'in take') all by itself.

Mules don't get lost, run away from danger, and feed themselves on their way to the destination. They navigate treacherous terrain and need no looking after on their way. If we had a truck with the basic intelligence of a mule, it'd be a godsend to industry.

A car with the intelligence of a palfrey---enough to not run into things, and maintain a smooth ride regardless of terrain/environment----would be an amazing luxury vehicle.

enf• 14 years ago

No, privately owned horses were always a rarity. Walking was the dominant form of transportation in all towns and cities.

fudged6• 14 years ago

"A car with the intelligence of a palfrey---enough to not run into things"

The transition into a world with only self-driving cars brings up the issue of pedestrians and other drivers with malicious intent. Your car is going 120km/h and someone purposefully jumps in front of the car; what does the car do? Or maybe other drivers would try to snake their way through traffic like an emergency vehicle by attacking this accident avoidance system vulnerability. Do we record all these instances on camera and report them automatically to police?

aqme28• 14 years ago

As a New Yorker who doesn't even have a car (and gets to take the subway everywhere), I've gotta say that I think we'll do alright.

dawie• 14 years ago

The car does a pretty average parking job in the dude's driveway at the end of the video..

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

Unmentioned in the article is that 'Steve' is Daniel Steve Mahan, who's 95% blind. He's CEO of the Santa Clara Blind Center: http://www.visionbeyondsight.org/About-Staff.htm

lusr2• 14 years ago

"We announced our self-driving car project in 2010 to make driving safer, more enjoyable, and more efficient."

OK so Google Labs is shut down and Google starts charging for various APIs but decides the world needs to be a better place so invests into this? I'm skeptical (even though I think this is AWESOME). What's the real story here?

Is it the extra eyeball time they get by having self-driving cars? Whereas in the past people would spend 20-60 minutes, or more, concentrating exclusively on driving each day, they could now spend that time online? I guess growth at Google is difficult when you're already the most popular search engine in the world and there's a fixed 24 hour day, the best you can do is change the % of that time people spend online, and implicitly, using your search engine. No doubt the front-end will feature Internet connectivity with a Google portal.

dmnd• 14 years ago

I'm confused by your comment. Do you really think self driving cars cannot be monetized?

juiceandjuice• 14 years ago

All I could think of when I saw this were the jokes about McDonald's having braille for their drive through window.

ck2• 14 years ago

How does it do on rainy days and at night?

CountHackulus• 14 years ago

To say nothing of snow.

jonknee2• 14 years ago

Cars are already better at navigating snow by themselves than with people at the [direct] controls. Traction control and drive by wire are common.

Game_Ender• 14 years ago

Last I have heard Google's system is not really focused on solving perception problems, especially in inclement weather. They are waiting for the research community to catch up.

The perfect conditions they drive in allow for very precise localization against a detailed (sub-cm accuracy) map of everywhere they will drive which includs pre-marked stop signs, light, cross walks, etc.

brownbat• 14 years ago

Much better than my ad for Google Driverless cars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2SBX2nnUw

(Warning: Link is to a near endless string of awful car crashes with sad music in the background. Cannot be unseen.)

barefoot• 14 years ago

> Cannot be unseen*

*http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/the...

arethuza• 14 years ago

Or allowing people to text and drive safely:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC3x7K3EOTk

sad_panda2• 14 years ago

I thought that the title was a typo, and I was imagining a Prius navigating straight on through the glass windows of a strip mall restaurant. The reality is safer, but less hilarious.

jhaile• 14 years ago

My biggest question was how the car knew when to stop at the window and when to continue driving. Wish the video had shown that.

rdl• 14 years ago

I followed one of these on US101N the other day, near Mountain View. It was one of the better drivers on the road, although it was an easy driving environment.

I have to admit I wanted to be a dick to it (tailgate, brake check, etc) to see what it would do. I wonder if anyone has crashed into one yet.

erikpukinskis• 14 years ago

When Google wants to put these into the market, they should run ads with video of the cars in extremely dangerous situations.

Imagine watching a video of a robot car navigating coolly and safely, with split-second timing in the midst of a snowy 12 car pileup involving an 18-wheeler. That'd sell the things as a public good.

Google's self driving cars can navigate drive-through restaurants.

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