Stanford's Autonomous Car Passes Initial Tests For DARPA's Urban Challenge
Wow, progress. Technology Review is running a wonderful article on Stanford's new autonomous car that's capable of making three-point turns and following the rules at a four-way stop. With nearly 42,000 people dying of vehicle related deaths per year in the United States alone, the research related to this project could prduce amazing results.
Importantly, says Thrun, Junior has a lot more "intelligence" than Stanley so that the computer can deal with intersections and traffic. Such tasks simply weren't a part of the previous race, which basically involved driving down a curvy desert road. This intelligence comes in the form of about 500 different probabilistic algorithms that process all the environmental information collected by the sensors and make the decision that is most likely to be the best. Thrun says that these decisions are made in less than 300 milliseconds, which is sufficient for slowing down or changing lanes if a car in another lane tries to merge into Junior's. "In the last race, you basically only had to decide whether to speed up or slow down," says Thrun, "but this time there are discrete decisions on top of that."
