Emerging Technologies Blog

The kids in California and Austin,Texas may have given all sorts of names to Google self-driving cars but that does not stop the fully autonomous vehicles from showing them love or learn how to treat children with civility when they are around them.

Google revealed in a Plus post on Friday that during Halloween it took the opportunity to test its prototype vehicles  around children who were playing around 'GooglePlex'  in their odd attires in order to 'train' its software and sensors to understand and recognize children no matter their shapes and sizes and what they are putting on. And from what the Google self-driving project team shared, you need not worry whenever your child jumps in front of  a Google car that is approaching. It is now safer around kids.

'We teach our cars to drive more cautiously around children. When our sensors detect children—costumed or not—in the vicinity, our software understands that they may behave differently' Google said in the blog post.

Google didn't go technical as to how its sensors and software were able to detect and understand  behaviour of  the cute kids in their weird costumes  running around  its California headquarters, it did say that the children walked around its parked cars and its cars also drove 'cautiously' around them. These acts let its sensors and software to detect the kids  ''in all their unique shapes and sizes, even when they're in odd costumes' and grasp that kids behaves differently--even understand completely the unpredictable ones.

Google said in one of its monthly report that it wants its cars to be capable of handling odd or rare scenarios and that the engineers would brainstorm for ways-even wielder and harder- to make this happen and run tests on their test track.''Our software benefits in two ways: we can validate that the software works as expected in extreme versions of common situations, and we can prepare for truly rare or odd occurrences'' Google revealed in the report.

So far there are 19 Lexus RX450h autonomous vehicles in Mountain View, California and four in Austin Texas. 21 prototypes are busy navigating Google headquarters on their own with the help of the software and 4 in Austin. Google cars have now logged more than 1.2 million miles in autonomous mode and are currently averaging 10,000-15,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets, according to Google.