Self-driving cars: Will you trust a robot chauffeur?

Google has detailed its experiments with automated vehicles that drive themselves. The search giant has logged 140,000 miles in California. In addition, TU Braunschweig, a technical university in Germany, also has its self-driving car experiments. Trust will determine whether these efforts ever become mainstream.

Here's how Google's robot car works:

• The cars use video cameras, radar and laser range finders to see traffic.
• Detailed maps and GPS are used to navigate roads.
• Google’s data centers crunch the information so the cars can handle their tasks.
• The cars have a trained driver that can take over for the robot.
• A sensor on the roof scans 200 feet in all directions. Sensors measure movements to locate position. A camera is the eyes and ears of the vehicle.
• The cars can be programmed to be cautious or any other driving personality.

Judging from a video, the TU Braunschweig has a similar set-up that Engadget noted. All of this automated car talk has spurred conversation about research and development, business models and a future that includes what Google calls highway trains---essentially robots driving trains of connected vehicles.

The biggest question, however, may boil down to trust. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference recently:

Your car should drive itself. It’s amazing to me that we let humans drive cars. It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.

Do you agree with that? We trust autopilot to ferry us around in an airplane, but a robot car is going to be a bigger hurdle.

Nevertheless, Google may be right. Perhaps the day will come when cars do drive themselves, but it's going to take a while for mainstream adoption. It will take years for the app ecosystem that Ford talks about to take hold in the car cockpit. So far, automated cars are a great experiment and not much more.

Are you ready for an automated car?

Here are a few videos on the subject:

New York Times inside the Google car:

Robert Scoble spying the Google car live back in January:

TU Braunschweig's car:

And more on hands-free driving.

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This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com