dr. raj rajkumar did you have to program every route ahead of time? can it go out on to a street it has never been on before? raj: it needs to have a map of the roads. peter: a g.p.s. map. would that count? raj: you can think of this as a g.p.s. map, g.p.s. navigation device and then you tell the system where it -- you want to go. it uses your navigation and your calculation for the route. and the red line is what the vehicle is deciding in real ime. he red line. now you'll see if i zoom back a ittle bit. you see a bunch of dots on the screen. those dots are the laser point from the laser sensors updating in real time. so what you see here is basically a bunch of yellow ots. peter: is that that it car? raj: that's the white car. and this dot -- dumpster there. and you basically see a -- peter: and all these white lines are the trees. raj: basically it's able to sense -- in this case the radars and cameras and lasers act as the eyes and ears of the vehicle. peter: how far can it see? raj: 775 meters. it has built-in wireless communications radios that c

we learn more about the move to self-driving cars and professor raj rajkumar at the lab where his experimental car is kept and worked on. dr. raj rajkumar, what's your job here at carnegie mellon? raj: i'm a professor of electric engineering and robotics at carnegie mellon. peter: how'd you get into that? raj: i did my post graduate

we learn more about the move to self-driving cars and professor raj rajkumar at the lab where his experimental car is kept and worked on. dr. raj rajkumar, what's your job here at carnegie mellon? raj: i'm a professor of electric engineering and robotics at carnegie mellon. peter: how'd you get into that? raj: i did my post graduate studies and got my masters at carnegie mellon. then i left c.m.u. joined i.b.m. research for three years or so and i came back to c.m.u. because i liked c.m.u. and pittsburgh that much. peter: what kind of things do you work on? raj: i work on what are called embedded systems, the technical term. these are things that embed computers inside them but the user basically uses different devices. for example, your smart phone is a sophisticated device but you don't worry about the components inside there. televisions, for example, it has a computer inside it but it is meant to be a television. think about a projector. it.as a computer inside of that toaster that we use on a daily basis that cost $10, it has a tiny computer embedded inside it. these are embedded systems that act smart but it's a dedi