Google says it's making its autonomous cars even smarter as a whip as it has equipped them with sensors and software which will soon enable the cars to drive more carefully around children.
On Saturday, the Mountain View-based tech titan invited kids sporting a multitude of Halloween costumes to hang out around the parked prototypes of its autonomous cars to silently learn about the youngsters' behaviors and movements, in a bid to make its mini cars a lot safer down the road.
"This gives our sensors and software extra practice at recognizing children in all their unique shapes and sizes, even when they're in odd costumes," Google explains in its Google+ post.
Google points out kids may behave erratically and unpredictably, as they suddenly jump into the road to retrieve a stray ball or run down a sidewalk. Additionally, the company is mindful of the fact that children are often difficult to see behind parked vehicles or any other objects.
But with Google's extra vigilance, its self-driving cars will soon drive more careful around kids.
Google boasts that even if its cars can't appreciate the effort these children put in dressing as their much-loved movie characters, these autonomous cars still come equipped with the ability to pay full attention.
In December last year, Google unwrapped the very first completed build of its autonomous car, rocking a sleek body akin to a mini Volkswagen Bug and sporting functioning headlights.
Way back in June, the company commenced testing the prototype, hitting the roads of California at a speed of 25 mph.
Later in September, Google apologized to car enthusiasts who wished to grab one of its cars. The company told expecting fans it does not intend to be a car manufacturer.
Google has always been claiming its vehicles are a lot safer and more predictable than human drivers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has revealed 94 percent of all accidents are due to human errors.
"If there is support for making the right investments, we can open the door to a revolutionary era on our roads. Many of you are helping spur that revolution. A suite of related innovations - vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, and automation that relies on advanced sensors and sophisticated computer systems - are opening new opportunities to save lives," NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind said.
"For nearly a century, vehicle safety has been about protecting vehicle occupants from the inevitable crashes they would endure. Today, we are moving toward a fundamentally different goal - preventing those crashes from ever occurring. From the start, motorists have had to accept the risk of death or injury as the cost of mobility. Now, we're poised to massively reduce that risk," he added.
However, researchers at the Transportation Research Institute of the University of Michigan have recently uncovered that autonomous cars were five times as possibly to get into accidents as vehicles driven by humans. They noted, however, that the accidents are not the fault of the autonomous cars. Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle revealed that there have been 9.1 crashes recorded for the self-driving cars while 1.9 logged for human-driven vehicles.
