The car drives itself. The passengers are being chauffeured by computer.
Seen at the VAIL autonomous driving and parking demonstration at Stanford this weekend.
Here’s a short video of this VW parking itself.
The roof if festooned with spinning LIDAR and cameras, feeding into the server farm in the trunk. With more processing power, I’m guessing that the expensive laser rangefinders will be less essential as the 2D video cameras alone can render a 3D map of the world, much like our brain.
In case you’re wondering, they do have an idea of how to hide all of that equipment, and with Moore’s Law, it will all be soon affordable. Example video with no people in the car.
The next generation may wonder why we wasted 80% of the carrying capacity of our highways, why truckers fell asleep, or what all the fuss was about parallel parking.
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