Nevada paves way to get robotic cars on the road
By Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld
It looks like self-driving cars may be on the road sooner than most people had thought — at least in Nevada.
The state passed Bill 511 last month, authorizing executives at the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to begin coming up with a set of rules of the road for autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles .
This is the first step in what could be a lengthy process in getting autonomous cars, which are designed to use artificial intelligence, computer sensors and GPS instead of human drivers, on the nation’s roads.
But the move must be seen as good news to companies such as Google and General Motors, along with researchers at institutions such as Stanford, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon University. All of these organizations have been working on autonomous cars.
Just last fall, Google announced that its engineers were working on software for self-driving cars . Google’s self-driving car reportedly logged 140,000 miles in California, driving — with a trained driver and software engineer on board — around Lake Tahoe, across the Golden Gate Bridge and along the Pacific Coast Highway.