Every time the subject of Google's driverless cars comes up, here or anywhere, almost 100% of the discussion always seems to presume that this technology is heading directly towards consumers as a travel solution. While I'm sure it'll get around to that eventually, I think the realization of a scifi-like fantasy might be distracting people from a more obvious, practical reason for Google to be doing this.
Sebastian Thrun co-developed Street View. You know, with all those cars driving around gathering information about meatspace? One might say... crawling meatspace? Thrun is also a major force behind the driverless car project. Isn't it likely that for Google, at least for now, this is all about making a system of real-world crawlers, exactly analogous to its web crawlers?
What is it about google that causes people to throw all of their thinking ability out the window?
This isn't some conspiracy to inundate you with ads, this has nothing to do with building "crawlers" for meatspace (seriously?).
This is a multi billions dollar industry that is potentially as large as google is on the internet, but in "meatspace".
This is as disruptive as google was to the internet, probably moreso. Actually, almost certainly moreso. Our ties to automobiles dictate the way cities are built, and the way that we interact with our environment.
Gee whiz, google employs an absolute shitload of brilliant engineers and encourages them to work on side projects. It appears that some of them have built something.
NO NO! Must be some alterior motive! Couldn't be that google is a business, and this is a viable revenue stream for them!
I see your point about the tone, but it's true that widespread adoption of such technology would yield interesting new technology for Google too. As a simple example, shifting traffic patterns are a useful leading indicator of economic change at a very high resolution. You can get a lot of statistically useful data from a surprisingly small sample size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination). Consider, for example, the length of time cars spend in the parking lot at a shopping center. When you have that for hundreds of individual cars per day and/or longitudinally (over repeat visits) you can infer an awful lot of data about the local business climate in a non-intrusive way. Even if you make the cars wholly autonomous and don't collect data on individuals there's still a lot of environmental data that can be usefully harvested.
I see it the other way around. One thing driverless cars need is very accurate geo-data to be any use. If a car is going to turn up at 1 Long st, it needs to know exactly where that is.
While there is no doubt these 'crawlers' will gather data while 'crawling', to me it's unlikely that this is their intended purpose.
The real winner for automated vehicles is automated delivery of stuff. The big cost for a pizza delivery service is paying the guy behind the wheel to drive a 1 ton vehicle around to deliver 1 pizza.
With automated delivery comes a reduction in size, weight, fuel consumption and of course, cost. It also gets around the problem of people not wanting to 'passenger' in an automated car.
I've said it before - think of those little box-like droids that zip around in star wars films. Imagine each one of those in UPS livery taking a small set of packages to a set of destinations. Tied in with online shops, I think you're looking at the future of retail.
People talk about automatic delivery, but how does the car get inside the pedestrian gate at my apartment building and up the stairs to leave the package outside my door?
1) It's not real-time: it would likely refresh data every couple of weeks. That limits the number of applications.
2) The data gathered would be... well, my lack of imagination is stumping me here. The number and species of trees people have? The color of their houses? New business openings? Typical length of lines outside the door? The existence and extent of potholes on the road?
3) I'm sure even expanding street view would be valuable. But the leap from effective autonomous vehicles providing street view data on public roads to autonomous vehicles providing transportation to real consumers seems pretty small to me.
I have a strong hunch on this one that the limitations are on our imaginations, and not on the potential applications once such an infrastructure existed.
I agree that the leap to transportation is small and that it will happen. I just can't see why Google would have been motivated to do it for that reason, but I can see World Crawlers as a natural evolution of their core mission.
It seems to me that a fleet of driverless information-gathering cars would be a natural component of a world with driverless cars. Primarily they'd be used for continuously mapping roads for any potentially useful information or dangers, eg lane closures, construction, potholes, etc. From there, though, there's no reason you wouldn't naturally start gathering more information: traffic, weather conditions, strength of cell/wifi signals, ambient noise levels, and all sorts of other things. A highly distributed network of sensors could provide all sorts of interesting information.
(Note that there's no reason that they'd even have to be empty cars. I see no reason why every car couldn't or wouldn't be decked out with sensors and reporting back to Google.)
Sebastian Thrun co-developed Street View. You know, with all those cars driving around gathering information about meatspace? One might say... crawling meatspace? Thrun is also a major force behind the driverless car project. Isn't it likely that for Google, at least for now, this is all about making a system of real-world crawlers, exactly analogous to its web crawlers?