More than 225,000 miles have come Google cars without drivers, with minimal intervention by dependents of the evidence, walking familiar streets of Santa Monica, crossing major highways, or even across the Golden Gate of San Francisco.

The search company is developing autonomous cars, and as is clear in the introduction to the story, not talking about ideas on paper, but an important evolution of what we already have in the market.

On the basis of a Toyota Prius

Google did not invent the cruise control based on radars and cameras that control lanes available, a good example is the work that has made Toyota a relatively inexpensive car like the Prius, and that Google has chosen for his project. As a curiosity we inform you that there is also a unit of Audi TT.

But as everything has a beginning, let’s watch a video courtesy of blogger Robert Scoble, which demonstrates the basic idea discussed, an automatic speed control fully operational Toyota (not the only one working on this line) :

We can see how the car brakes and accelerates the vehicle bearing in mind that we have ahead, in addition to complying with the speeds that you have marked. But it presents some problems in turns, losing the direction of the car before we actually have to manually stop sometime.

We can also note that does a good job when vehicles change lanes in front of us, but there must be a minimum distance that the system is confused. Obviously any time we can manually control the brake and accelerator.
Autonomous cars caught in operation

Google’s idea of the base shown in the previous point, but wants to go further by incorporating three-dimensional road maps, GPS, laser technology, digital image recognition, and more sensors and algorithms to refine the system.

Emphasis on control of what goes 360 degrees around us, not only for the car that we have before, for it has a rotating sensor (above the car) and recorded a three-dimensional map of 200 feet in diameter in our around.

To develop the technology they are using these cars, are working side by side with the best engineers in the DARPA Challenge (Research Projects Agency Defense Advanced USA), an autonomous vehicle race must come from a U.S. to another without human intervention.

The current state of development includes up driving profiles, being able to load the software you want in each situation, choosing whether we want a more sporty behavior or more calm.

The first evidence that cars powered by Google are operational, are appearing in different videos on the web:

Autonomous cars are not sleeping

Safety is the priority of the project and the local police are aware of the situation with drivers fully prepared to take charge in situations that require it.

From my point of view, I believe that driving is far from completely autonomous, but an attendance of these features can save many lives, given that the systems are operating in poor weather or night driving, as well as freedom from distractions and dream.

We read in the Google blog that according to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost each year in traffic accidents, and the search engine company believes that its systems could halve these numbers.