Look Ma No Brain

More than 20 years ago I worked on an autonomous vehicle project. We had very little funding but managed to put something together that could follow roads, detect and avoid obstacles, and reach its target destination. Since that time I've known it would eventually be possible to replace a human driver with an automated system.

There have been a lot of advances since that time with the DARPA Challenges demonstrating progress this decade.

Honestly, I always thought it would be one of the big auto companies such as Ford, GM, Toyota, or Honda who would be the first to announce a significant real world demonstration. After all, they make cars, and they should have a lot of research dollars going towards automated driving. So I was a little shocked to read that Google is out on the roads with automated cars (probably for their "street view" application though they don't mention it in the blog post). Google is amazing! It's great that they see so many things as computer science problems.

On a side note, Honda does make cool dancing robots so maybe they can be excused for not working on car automation.

Who needs Lexus navigation when you can get a Google car that drives itself.

The future is here. I'm waiting for my flying car.