Google is continuing to look for new ways of fine-tuning its self-driving vehicle in order to make it safer for city use, a concept it believes will help revolutionize driving in urban areas. Currently, the vehicle is only being tested and used on rural roadways of California.
But now, the company believes it is doing a better job at improving the vehicle's existing software that will allow it to be able to see and recognize city driving situations, including but not limited to pedestrian crossings, bus stops, stop signs being held up by crossing guards at schools. It is also now able to recognize hand signals made by bicyclists.
"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," Chris Urmson, the head of Google's self-driving-car project said in a blog post.
The vehicles first became street legal in Nevada back in 2011 and Urmson believes that through the continued effort of engineers, self-driving cars could become the thing for the future on America's streets.
"A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can't -- and it never gets tired or distracted," Urmson wrote. "As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer."
In the four states such as Nevada, Florida, California and Michigan, they are currently legal to use, but all do require a human to be behind the wheel at all times. It is still a ways off before there will be an empty space where a driver would traditionally have been placed.
Urmson does admit that there is a lot of work that needs to be done before the vehicles are safe and ready for all urban environments and all potential changes on the street from moment to moment. However, Urmson is confident that the future may not be as far away as some tend to believe.
The question will remain - even as Americans are on the ropes about future technology - whether the country and subsequently the world, will want self-driving cars at all.
For now, they are sticking to the highways of America, but could soon be on a street near you.
