Google Car: What's Next?

Parsing out what exactly Google is accomplishing with its self-driving car project isn't easy. The world awaits as dribs and drabs of information trickle occasionally from Google’s blog tease.

The latest leak, earlier this week, was a blog post by Chris Urmson, director of the Google Car project at Google. It offered a glimpse of how far Google's self-driving car has come, as it takes driving lessons on the streets of Mountain View, Calif.

The video clip posted on Urmson'’s blog also gives a sense of what the self-driving car’s machine vision is actually seeing as it tools along.

But what exactly have we learned? More important, what challenges are still ahead for Google (and the automotive industry as a whole) to move the self-driving car from an R&D project to a real product? We talked to a few industry analysts.

What computer vision sees

One thing that Urmason's post makes very clear is Google's ambition. It hopes to take its autonomous cars through every street and every city, in every terrain. Clearly, Google is eager to debunk the conventional assumption: Autonomous cars, most likely, will be deployed for driving on freeways.

Read the rest of this article on EE Times.