Google has published a May report on testing robomobiles

    A small PDF report from a team of engineers working on a robotic car project has appeared on the Google Self-Driving Car project website . Apparently, such documents will be published monthly. Despite the fact that the current report contains only a few pages, it describes in detail road incidents in which over the past six years since the start of testing robotic cars of the search giant managed to get into it.

    First of all, Google clarifies the numbers: 23 Lexus RX450h SUVs that drive along California roads, mainly in Mountain View, are participating in the program. In addition to them, there are 9 more prototypes at closed landfills. Since 2009, the robomobiles managed to drive 1,627,591 kilometers in robotic mode (it means that it is controlled only by software, and the driver of the steering wheel in the car does not touch). On average, over the course of a week, robocars traveled 16,000 km on open roads.

    In six years, 12 accidents involving robomobiles occurred, all of which occurred through the fault of people. The closest May accident happened to Lexus when it stopped at a red light at the intersection in Mountain View. At this time, a man-driven car crumpled the rear bumper of the Lexus and thus damaged the sensors on it. The speed of the culprit at that moment was only about 1.5 km / h, so that the accident ended without serious damage.

    It is interesting to evaluate the difficult traffic situations encountered by the robocars and how they managed to get out of them:

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    The diagram above shows the movement plan of a robocar at the intersection and two motorcyclists, which are indicated by red parallelepipeds (a broken red line is the way they move). Robokar stopped at the intersection, at which time the motorcyclist left with respect to him passed the intersection relatively successfully and drove on. But the motorcycle, turning right towards the robocar, for an unknown reason drove into the oncoming traffic so that it was right in the path of the Google car - its calculated trajectory is shown by a blue line. The car software decided to stop and not drive towards it, allowing the motorcycle to avoid a collision right at the intersection. As a result, the robocar and motorcycle safely missed each other, avoiding trouble in an accident. An additional difficulty was that everything happened in the dark,

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