Ken Goldberg on Driverless Cars
BCNM professor Ken Goldberg was quoted in NY Times article "How Driverless Cars See the World Around Them." The article by Cade Metz, focused on the technology integrated in driverless technology.
From the article:
When designing these vehicles, companies like Uber and Waymo begin by building a three-dimensional map of a place. They equip ordinary automobiles with lidar sensors — “light detection and ranging” devices that measure distances using pulses of light — and as company workers drive these cars on local roads, these expensive devices collect the information needed to build the map.
Once the map is complete, cars can use it to navigate the roads on their own. As they do, they continue to track their surroundings using lidar, and they compare what they see with what the map shows. In this way, the car gains a good idea of where it is in the world.
Self-driving cars can have difficulty duplicating the subtle, nonverbal communication that goes on between pedestrians and drivers. An autonomous vehicle, after all, can’t make eye contact with someone at a crosswalk.
'It is still important to realize how hard these problems are,' said Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in robotics. 'That is the thing that many don’t understand, just because these are things humans do so effortlessly.'
Read the rest of the article here.
(note: NYTimes has a limit on free articles)