Nathaniel Fairfield, Technical Lead at Google, presents the "Self-Driving Cars" keynote at the May 2014 Embedded Vision Summit.
Self-driving cars have the potential to transform how we move: they promise to make us safer, give freedom to millions of people who can't drive, and give people back their time. The Google Self-Driving Car project was created to rapidly advance autonomous driving technology and build on previous research. For the past four years, Google has been working to make cars that drive reliably on many types of roads, using lasers, cameras, and radar, together with a detailed map of the world.
Fairfield describes how Google leverages maps to assist with challenging perception problems such as detecting traffic lights, and how the different sensors can be used to complement each other. Google's self-driving cars have now traveled more than a half a million miles autonomously. In this talk, Fairfield discusses Google's overall approach to solving the driving problem, the capabilities of the car, the company's progress so far, and the remaining challenges to be resolved.
