This is part one of a three part series on the keynote presentation by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on self-driving cars at the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

Most of us use a car every day. But unlike airplanes, which have been flying on autopilots for decades, cars are still driven manually - just the way they were driven 100 years ago. This talk introduces the transformative concept of a self-driving car. Following early research in the 1990 in Germany and the US, and more recently the DARPA Challenges, this technology has now been advanced to a point where it is within reach of commercial realizations that may provide benefits to pretty much anyone who drives a car. At the core of this progress is a new generation of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, which enables a self-driving car to understand its environment and to interact with other traffic.

The speaker discusses the Google Self-Driving Car project, in which a fleet of self-driving cars navigated more than 160,000 miles on public roads in California and Nevada, including the downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The speaker also discusses some of the societal implications of this new technology.