Making sure our software won’t get spooked by vampires

October 2015

Halloween’s a great time to get some extra learning done. This week, lots of little ghouls, superheroes and even robots were running around Google with their families, so we asked them to hang out around our parked cars.

This gives our sensors and software extra practice at recognizing children in all their unique shapes and sizes, even when they’re in odd costumes. 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. Children’s movements can be more unpredictable — suddenly darting across the road or running down a sidewalk — and they’re easily obscured behind parked cars. So even if our cars can’t quite appreciate the effort the kids put in dressing as their favorite character from Frozen, they’re still paying full attention!