If you find yourself in a tight spot when you’re driving and you’re trying to get out, you might resort to the three-point turn. Of course depending on your skill and how you judge distance and space, you could make a three-point turn, or you might even up taking more turns, like 5 or 7, but basically there is skill involved.Recently it seems that this is a skill that Google has taught its self-driving cars. In their monthly report that Google releases to keep the public informed of their progress, Google revealed that the three-point turn is a skill that their self-driving cars have recently managed to master, thanks to bevy of cameras and sensors placed around the vehicle that helps them see things that human drivers might otherwise miss.
According to Google, “Our self-driving cars, on the other hand, can see a full 360 degrees, measure distance down to a few centimeters, and precisely calculate the quickest path for the car. Our cars don’t just follow a few standard turns either. We’ve taught them to adapt to all kinds of variables — including dead end streets stacked with parked cars, trash bins littered on the curbs, and narrow bottlenecks.”
Google also noted how they wanted to make it so that their cars would perform the turns naturally, as in how a human driver would do it, which is why they have opted to use maneuvers that humans would do as opposed to doing something a robot might, like going back and forth in small and short movements, or reversing all the way.
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