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January 15, 2016 10:00 pm

Inside Google's Self-Driving Car Test Center

An anonymous reader writes: Steven Levy reports on his trip to the facility where Google tests is autonomous vehicles (here's a map). The company apparently has a four-week program to certify people to not-drive these cars, and they gave Levy an abbreviated version of it. "The most valuable tool the test team has for making sure things are running smoothly is the laptop on the co-driver's lap. Using an interface called x_view, the laptop shows the world as the car sees it, a wireframe representation of the area that depicts all the objects around the car: pedestrians, trees, road signs, other cars, motorcycles—basically everything picked up by the car's radar and laser sensors. X_view also shows how the car is planning to deal with conditions, mainly through a series of grid-like "fences" that depict when the car intends to stop, cautiously yield, or proceed past a hazard. It also displays the car's path. If the co-driver sees a discrepancy between x_view and the real world, that's reason to disengage. ... At the end of the shift, the entire log is sent off to an independent triage team, which runs simulations to see what would have happened had the car continued autonomously. In fact, even though Google's cars have autonomously driven more than 1.3 million miles—routinely logging 10,000 to 15,000 more every week—they have been tested many times more in software, where it's possible to model 3 million miles of driving in a single day."

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