Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #6

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there is 412 amazingly great,

even better students in the world

that don't make it to Stanford.

Just before heading into

the mountain section

of the course, Stanley tracked down

and passed the crippled Highlander,

putting Stanford racing

team's Volkswagen Touareg

into the leader position and effectively

ending the Highlander's bid for glory.

As Stanley crosses the finish line,

the Stanford racing team

has made its way into the history books.

This was Sebastian Thrun's

moment of glory back in 2005.

Most of his competitors were a sorry sight.

History has already been made

as Highlander crosses the 8-mile mark,

further than any vehicle traveled

in the inaugural Grand Challenge.

20 more teams followed

the big three out of the gate,

all hoping to complete the

132-mile course in a winning time.

Team Dad, with its rotating cluster

of sensors, sped off the line,

making up ground and passing

team Axion in the process.

Team ENSCO's buggy style robot, Dexter,

also left the line with a full head of steam,

fiercely attacking the desert terrain.

Kat-5, the Ford Escape hybrid

from Louisiana's Gray team,

eased its way past the crowd,

and TerraMax, the 16-ton cargo hauler,

left the gate determined

to finish the course.

Autonomous cars are developing rapidly.

Today you don't see big radar installations

or tons of equipment.

So the primary objective

when we built this car

was to basically make it look very normal

on the outside and the inside.

The vehicle can send information

about what it is seeing

to the internet.

This can be useful to

other vehicles on the road.

It can also download information

about what is happening on the roads

before it reaches an accident area

or a traffic jam, for example.

So the internet will be decisive very soon?

The internet will play

a very important role in this, yes.

Can you open it?

It must be packed with electronics.

- Show us.

- Yes.

So just like we humans have

brains to basically process

the incoming signals,

we need to have computers,

basically, which process all the signals from

the lidars and the radars and the cameras.

I can't see anything.

It turns out there really

is nothing to see.

It's a completely useable

empty trunk space,

but hidden behind...

under the... trunk,

is a set of computers.

There are four computers,

each with four so called processing cores

which is really equivalent to

16-piece personal computing machines

which basically crunch all the data

coming in from the sensors.

These dots that you see are basically

reflections from laser beams

from the laser lidar sensors on the car.

They emit light beams, hit obstacles,

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