Google Inc said it has begun testing its self-driving cars on US city streets, a crucial new phase in its quest to eventually make the technology a standard feature in automobiles.
After several years of testing self-driving cars on freeways, where driving conditions are more predictable, Google in the past year shifted its focus to city driving, the company said in a post on its official blog on Monday.
Google said it has driven thousands of miles on the streets of Mountain View, California, a small suburban community where the company maintains its headquarters about 56km south of San Francisco. Google’s driverless cars rely on video cameras, radar sensors, lasers and a database of information collected from manually driven cars to help navigation, the company has said.
“A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area,” self-driving car project director Chris Urmson wrote in Monday’s blog post.
“We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously — pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn,” Urmson said.
Google is one of several companies, including automakers Nissan Motor Co, Volkswagen AG’s Audi and Toyota Motor Corp, testing self-driving car technology. Both Nissan and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG say they plan to start selling self-driving cars by 2020.
It is unclear whether Google, the world’s No.1 Internet search engine, intends to partner with other companies or develop its own self-driving vehicles.
The company’s test cars have logged more than 1.1 million kilometers in self-driving mode since 2009. Google said its cars have not caused any accidents while operating in self-drive mode.
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