Sick of driving? This robot car takes the wheel
“Leave the driving to us” was a clever slogan for Greyhound buses – but Sebastian Thrun foresees a day when it’ll work for the auto industry.
The 39-year-old Stanford professor of electrical engineering is the world’s most successful manufacturer of self-driving vehicles: He and his graduate students built Stanley, the first car to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 131-mile robot car race across the desert near Las Vegas organized by the research arm of the Pentagon.
That historic success in 2005 netted Thrun a $2 million prize. He reinvested some of it in an even more intelligent Stanley, which will be unveiled at the next iteration of the robot car contest – one that takes place on city streets. Obstacles include stop signs, lights, and cars driven by humans.
Thrun is confident that Stanley is the Model T of self-driving cars. “It might take 20 years, but people said we would never fly massive numbers of people over the Atlantic,” he says. “There’s an enormous waste of productivity in commuter traffic. We could increase the capacity of highways with precision driving.”
That means the auto industry gets to sell us more cars, not to mention safer ones – there were 43,443 U.S. highway fatalities in 2005, and Thrun thinks self-driving vehicles, equipped with cameras and motion sensors and all networked with one another, could reduce that number by 50 percent.
Read complete story here.
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