[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="54" height="22">  Transportation safety agency tees up regulations for driverless cars

C. Gunther, May 24, "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is setting the stage for addressing the safety of self-driving cars: how to regulate them and what regulatory changes may be to adequately assess their safety.

In a Federal Register notice to be published May 28, the NHSTA points out as self-driving cars could reduce the number of vehicular crashes and injuries, it plans to develop a new "comprehensive strategy" to update safety standards for automated vehicles "while addressing regulatory barriers to the compliance verification of these vehicles."... "   Read more  Hmmmm...  Read the notice carefully!!!  This is important.  Unfortunately, NHTSA continues to use the SAE levels and doesn't properly address Driverless, which should be created as a new mode and taken out of NHTSA's domain with the creation of a new Federal Driverless Motor Vehicle Safety Administration (FDMVSA)  focused on establishing FDMV Safety Standards (FDMVSS) focused on collision avoidance as well as collision mitigation, not visa versa as is NHTSA's heritage.  This is important!!! NHTSA has enough to do in dealing with vehicles with drivers in the loop because the driver is a major part of the problem.  Another entity should regulate vehicles where that part of the problem is irrelevant.  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="">DOT to seek public input on integrating autonomous cars and trucks into U.S. roadways

M. Cole, May 23, "Two agencies within the U.S. Department of Transportation are seeking public input on removing regulatory barriers to allow the integration of autonomous vehicles onto public roads.  The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced Wednesday they will publish advance notices of proposed rulemaking “to ensure that all potential approaches are fully considered” while moving forward with autonomous vehicle regulations.

FMCSA’s notice will seek public comment on questions regarding several regulatory areas to better understand how changes to its rules can account for differences between human drivers and automated driving systems (ADS). The agency says the questions focus on requirements of human drivers; CDL endorsements; hours of service rules; medical qualifications; distracted driving; safe driving; inspection, repair and maintenance; roadside inspections; and cybersecurity.

“FMCSA is hoping to receive feedback from commercial motor vehicle stakeholders and the motoring public on how the agency should adapt its regulations for the development of increased automated driving systems in large trucks and buses,” said FMCSA Administrator Ray Martinez. “We know that while many of these technologies are still in development, it is critical that we carefully examine how to make federal rules keep up with this advancing technology.”...

NHTSA will seek comment on identifying and addressing regulatory barriers to the deployment of ADS vehicles posed by certain existing Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).  ...See above article... =The agency also wants to hear from the public on different approaches that could be used to measure compliance with the FMVSS for vehicles without conventional controls, including steering wheels and brake pedals...."  Read more  Hmmmm...  Read the notices carefully!!!  FMCSA's and NHTSA's This is important.!  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="156" height="24">  Could Tesla merge with SpaceX? A Morgan Stanley analyst raises the possibility

R. Mitchell, May 22, "Morgan Stanley stock analyst Adam Jonas told clients Wednesday that if Tesla’s troubles continue, it’s unlikely to be acquired by a tech company, an auto company, or someone from China. But it could end up merging with SpaceX, another Elon Musk company.

A recording of the 55-minute conference call with clients was leaked online. The meeting was held two days after Jonas, a longtime Tesla bull, put a “worst-case” price of $10 on Tesla stock, although he didn’t change his current $230 target price.

While the SpaceX option is “an admittedly fantasy case,” Jonas said it’s more likely than any established player buying the debt-ridden electric car maker.

Tesla is moving “from a growth story to a distressed credit and restructuring story,” Jonas said.... But if demand doesn’t pick up substantially and the capital market for Tesla dries up, the company will need to pursue other options, Jonas said. 

That includes a possible acquisition, but Jonas said it’s unlikely. Tech companies such as Apple are unlikely to be interested, he said, to avoid the financial risk of “being involved in owning a business where occasionally a car catches on fire, takes down a building, accidentally kills a pedestrian or a passenger … the auto industry has an ugly side to it, the roads are very dangerous.”  Tech companies working on driverless cars “realize that the autonomous race is more of a marathon” that might take 10 or 20 years for full deployment. ...

Auto companies probably would not want to take on Tesla’s substantial debt and infrastructure, Jonas said. With 49,000 employees, Tesla takes in $500,000 revenue per worker, Jonas said, while Ford and General Motors pull in $850,000 per worker.  “They built this hulking infrastructure to support more like 1 million cars a year, not 350,000 cars year,” Jonas said. And most analysts don’t think Tesla will build that many cars in 2019.

The company’s $13 billion in gross debt is the biggest impediment, Jonas told his clients. “If someone could get access to Tesla’s assets and have it with the right number of employees and no debt, there is asset value there,” he said. ... Chapter 11?... ...

A possible sale to Chinese investors is out, he said. Given the current trade war, passing U.S. government review at this time is would be impossible.

That leaves SpaceX, the private rocket company that Musk also founded. The latest public information available, from 2016, shows “Mr. Musk’s trust” owns 54% of the company, and has voting control of 78% of the stock....  "  Read more  Hmmmm... Wow!!!  A space company bailing out a fundamentally terrestrial company.  We have come a long way since Oct. 4, 1957, 7:28pm GMT.  One view of how much we have spent is at http://stuffin.space/. And these are only the stuff still in orbit.   A lot has decayed and de-orbited, including Sputnik 1.  Who would have thought?  Mow SpaceX puts 60 in orbit with one rocket.   Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="31" height="29">  Watch GM Cruise Automation Self-Driving Car Execute Difficult Left-Hand Turns

S. Szymkowski, May 24, "Cruise Automation is humming along as General Motors works to beat the industry to a proper commercial platform for self-driving cars.  The latest bit of Cruise propaganda to show off how smart its cars are becoming focuses on unprotected left-hand turns. The maneuver is characterized by any time a driver needs to make a left as oncoming traffic flows and pedestrians cross in the path of turning vehicles. The kind of turn is even more difficult in metropolitan areas, like San Francisco where Cruise continues to test its technology....

“In an unpredictable driving environment like San Francisco, no two unprotected left-turns are alike,” Kyle Vogt, the company’s president and chief technology officer, said in a release. “By safely executing 1,400 [left turns] regularly, we generate enough data for our engineers to analyze and incorporate learnings into code they develop for other difficult maneuvers.”... "  Read more  Hmmmm... See video!!  We can call it propaganda or we can simply be impressed by the fact that it may just work.  1,400 left turns is impressive; however, every day there are about 800,000 car trips that execute say and average of 2, 3 (?) unprotected left turns per trip (pick a number).  That's > 1 million per day.  Most, say 99% are trivial, but that still leaves 10K that are challenging, 99% of which are no-problem.  That still leaves 100 per day that may well be WTx?  And that's on a daily basis.  However, we are getting there and if we go through those turns without trying to power slide through them, we actually may be able to do this.  :-) Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="124" height="17">  GM faces blowback on federal driverless car petition

K. Lang, May 23, "General Motors Co. is running into opposition to its petition to federal regulators for permission to put up to 5,000 driverless cars — without steering wheels or control pedals — on public roads.

In comments submitted to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, groups that represent car dealers, insurers and road safety advocates took issue with the Detroit carmaker's request to put 2,500 "driverless zero‐emission autonomous" vehicles on the road annually for a two-year period beginning this year....

Thomas Karol, general counsel for federal issues for the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, which lobbies for property and casualty insurance providers, said NHTSA "... Read more  Hmmmm... Shame on Insurance!  Totally self-serving.  If you were a true safety advocate, you'd be lobbying on the other side of the fence.  What you fear is that the carnage that you currently insure will disappear and you'll be out of business.  So UGLY.   Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="46" height="34">  Self-driving startup Aurora Innovation just acquired a lidar company. But so have competitors.

C/ Linder, May 24, "Self-driving car startup Aurora Innovation is revving up against the competition.  The Lawrenceville-based company announced this week it has acquired Blackmore, a Bozeman, Mont.-based firm that makes lidar — a sensor that helps the vehicles “see” — to shore up development of its own self-driving system.The deal makes Aurora the latest in the industry to bulk up its in-house computer vision tech. Other industry players, which in Pittsburgh include Uber, Aptiv and Argo AI, have been gobbling up lidar companies like wildfire....

Details of the financial transaction were not disclosed. As part of the deal, Aurora has opened a fourth engineering center in Bozeman, in addition to keeping offices in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Palo Alto, Calif.  Having in-house lidar, which is the most important sensor for self-driving computer vision, is far more cost-effective than relying on off-the-shelf units....

In October 2017, Argo AI in the Strip District acquired Princeton Lightwave, a New Jersey-based lidar company. The company’s technology will aid Argo’s virtual driving system, increasing the accuracy of object detection in unusual and challenging circumstances caused by poor weather. ...weather???... ..." Read more  Hmmmm... See video.   Interesting and in line with the discussions during Workshop 7 of the 3rd Princeton SDC Summit.  Congratulations Steve Crouch!  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="">Driverless Cars Are 90% Here. Another 90% Is Left to Go.

J. Stoll, May 24, "Here’s what we know about autonomous vehicles: They’ll be safer and smarter than the cars parked in our driveways today. Anyone who speculates beyond that is just, well, speculating.  It wasn’t long ago that a top automotive supplier was talking about providing fully driverless systems for production vehicles by 2019. Uber thought it would have 75,000 autonomous vehicles operating by this year. Elon Musk pointed in to a similar horizon in 2014 when a group of Journal editors and reporters asked him when he thought an entirely autonomous Tesla would hit the road.

If building a robocar were simply about figuring out how to best arrange a box of sophisticated parts, these predictions may have come true. Most of the necessary components—sensors, cameras, chips, those bulky lidar units that sit on top of the car—have been around for awhile. Any car maker or parts supplier worth its salt could figure out how to gin up a remote-control SUV.

But it takes gobs of engineers, data, software, patience and cash to teach that 4,000-pound vehicle to think for itself..."  Read more  Hmmmm... Yup!!! But the value to society that can be delivered has NOT dissipated.  It is just going to take blood, sweat, tears and money, not lipstick to accomplish it.  Silicon Valley and Wall Street are going to need to earn this one.  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="84" height="28">  Tesla's Updated Navigate on Autopilot Requires Significant Driver Intervention

K. Barry,  May 22, "Tesla added the lane-changing update to its Navigate on Autopilot feature last month as part of a promised upgrade to the package of driver assist features. We first reviewed Navigate on Autopilot in November and found it technologically impressive. But we also raised concerns about its performance in heavy traffic.

To enable the new feature, a driver must first change the system's settings, essentially giving the car permission to change lanes on its own. The driver can cancel an automated lane change that’s in progress at any time by using the turn-signal stalk, braking, or holding the steering wheel in place.  .Excellent...

In practice, we found that the new Navigate on Autopilot lane-changing feature lagged far behind a human driver’s skills. ...Not at all surprising for most "driver's skills", for which there is a wide distribution of capabilities... The feature cut off cars without leaving enough space, and even passed other cars in ways that violate state laws ... As is done regularly by many/most human drivers... , according to several law enforcement representatives CR interviewed for this report. As a result, the driver often had to prevent the system from making poor decisions.

“The system’s role should be to help the driver, but the way this technology is deployed, it’s the other way around,” says Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ senior director of auto testing. “It’s incredibly nearsighted. It doesn’t appear to react to brake lights or turn signals, it can’t anticipate what other drivers will do, and as a result, you constantly have to be one step ahead of it.”...All true.  The system needs to be better ... "“In essence, the system does the easy stuff, but the human needs to intervene when things get more complicated,” Fisher says.  ...At least it does something .

...“Tesla is showing what not to do on the path toward self-driving cars: release increasingly automated driving systems that aren’t vetted properly,” he says. “Before selling these systems, automakers should be required to give the public validated evidence of that system’s safety—backed by rigorous simulations, track testing, and the use of safety drivers in real-world conditions.” ... ...I hate to be supporting Tesla, but there is no evidence that Tesla hasn't done what is suggested here and is now at the next stage...

Autopilot has been engaged during at least three fatal crashes in the U.S., according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The latest one occurred in March, when the driver of a Tesla Model 3 was killed after the vehicle struck the side of a semitrailer in Florida. The driver turned Autopilot on 10 seconds before the collision, according to the NTSB’s preliminary findings released last week.  "..."  Read more  Hmmmm... With all of its wisdom, CR fails to call out the Automated Emergency Braking (AEB) system as the system of failure in Teslas and essentially all other cars on the road.  When is CR going to call out the real nemesis here?  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class=""> Final project report

May 2019, "Mission accomplished.   When UK Autodrive got underway in October 2015, it was the largest trial of connected and self-driving vehicles ever to have taken place in the UK. Back then, the concept of autonomous cars would still have struck many people as the stuff of science fiction. And yet, in the space of just three years, we have gone from concept to reality – delivering on our promise to trial fully connected and self-driving vehicles on UK streets...."  Read more  Hmmmm... For what it is, this is a good report; however, it seems more like GW's Mission Accomplished.  Yes, progress has been made, but if the objective was "connected", that hasn't progressed, and if it was "self-driving", then what has been accomplished isn't much more than what Tesla and GM/CT6  sell today.  Driverless in everyday conventional situations is as GW's Mission Accomplished.  Yes there has been enormous progress, but we are still at the "Gentlemen, start your engines", if we're even at the start line of actually providing mobility to anyone, let alone the people whose quality of life could be most enhanced.  (to which there is no mention in this report (or if it is, I missed it. Please let me know so that I can correct this post.)  Alain 

  [log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="52" height="24">  Self-driving tech attracts investors, but Uber still relies on its drivers

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="102" height="20"> Self-Driving Trucks Will Carry Mail in U.S. for the First Time

I. Boudway, May 21, "The United States Postal Service is going to put mail on self-driving trucks.  Starting on Tuesday morning, letters and packages moving between Phoenix and Dallas will travel on customized Peterbilt trucks run by TuSimple, an autonomous startup based in San Diego. There will be five round trips between the two cites, with the first haul leaving from Phoenix this morning. It’s the first time that the Postal Service has contracted with an autonomous provider for long-haul service...

For now, however, TuSimple will have a safety driver behind the wheel for the 1,000-mile trip between Phoenix and Dallas, as well as an engineer in the passenger seat monitoring the autonomous systems. In the future, the startup aims to provide “depot-to-depot” service without drivers. (Alain added Bold)    ..." Read more  Hmmmm...  Another conception, but we need to get to an actual live birth.  Pay attention to the bold print before you get too excited. At least this is termed "Self-driving" and not "Driverless".  It is actually "worse" than self-driving in that there is " as well as an engineer in the passenger seat " .  I hope that the "engineer" can also serve as a tandem driver to get around hours of service rules.  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="110" height="23">  Tesla (TSLA) stock tumbles as Wall Street starts piling up the negativity

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class=""> Tesla’s autonomy event: Impressive progress with an unrealistic timeline

T. Lee. April 24, "There's an old joke in the software engineering world, sometimes attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs: "the first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."...

You can think of self-driving car development as occurring in two stages. Stage one is focused on developing a static understanding of the world. Where is the road? Where are other cars? Are there any pedestrians or bicycles nearby? What are the traffic laws in this particular area?

Once software has mastered this part of the self-driving task, it should be able to drive flawlessly between any two points on empty roads—and it should mostly be able to avoid running into things even on crowded roads. This is the level of autonomy Musk has dubbed "feature complete." Waymo achieved this level of autonomy around 2015, while Tesla is aiming to reach it later this year....

In this second stage, a company also needs to handle a "long tail" of increasingly unusual situations: ...Waymo has spent the last three years in the second stage...

Tesla says that's a 21-fold improvement over the Nvidia chips the company was using before. Of course, Nvidia has produced newer chips since 2016, but Tesla says that its chips are more powerful than even Nvidia's current Drive Xavier chip—144 TOPS compared to 21 TOPS.

But Nvidia argues that's not a fair comparison. The company says its Xavier chip delivers 30 TOPS, not 21. More importantly, Nvidia says it typically packages the Xavier on a chip with a powerful GPU chip, yielding 160 TOPS of computing power. And like Tesla, Nvidia packages these systems in pairs for redundancy, producing an overall system with 320 TOPS of computing power.... Regardless, both companies are working on next-generation designs, so any advantage either company achieves is likely to be fleeting....", Read more  Hmmmm... An absolute MUST read.  Alain

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="155" height="20"> 10 Lessons From Uber's Fatal Self-Driving Car Crash

Sunday, March 17, 2019

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="116" height="32">Automated vehicles could provide mobility to the ‘mobility disadvantaged’

A. Kornhauser, March 13, "The following testimony was provided to the New Jersey State Assembly’s Transportation and Independent Authorities Committee on Monday, March 11....

What we need, what my ask is, that we create in New Jersey a “welcoming environment” for the research, testing and demonstration of this technology and work to focusing it on improving the mobility of the mobility disadvantaged...

While such a demonstration is not prohibited in New Jersey, it is not permitted.  

Consequently, this provides excuses and hurdles to bringing such mobility to our communities and tarnishes any other welcoming efforts aimed at enabling New Jersey to lead instead of follow in what may well address the fundamental objective of this hearing."  Read more  Hmmmm....Seems so simple. I have found it so incredibly hard. Alain

Friday, March 1, 2019

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="" width="35" height="38">  FORM S-1 REGISTRATION STATEMENT Lyft, Inc.

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="">Autonomous Vehicles

• Andrea Censi: "Liability, Ethics, and Culture-Aware Behavior Specification using Rulebooks"  Abstract, Slides, video (via click on  Schedule 11:30 Monday;
• Adam Oberman:"Generalization and adversarial robustness of Regularized Deep Neural Networks "  Abstract, Slides, video (via click on  Schedule 11:30 Tuesday);
• Alain Kornhauser: "Market Forces and Market Potential for SmartDrivingCars (aka Autonomous Vehicles) "  Slides, video, (via click on  Schedule 11:15 Tuesday);
• Hani Mahmassani: "Shared Autonomous Fleet Services and Multimodal Urban Mobility: Optimization, Prediction and Dynamic Network Modeling "  Abstract, video, (via click on  Schedule 4:00 Thursday);

[log in to unmask]" alt="" class="">  Facing opposition, Amazon scraps New York HQ2 plans

 Amazon tests autonomous vehicle for deliveries

Waymo’s early rider program, one year in

Thursday, April 26,  2018

 This startup’s CEO wants to open-source self-driving car safety testing

Saturday, March 24,  2018

Experts say video of Uber's self-driving car killing a pedestrian suggests its technology may have failed

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Tuesday, April 17, 2017

  Don't Worry, Driverless Cars Are Learning From Grand Theft Auto

[log in to unmask]" alt="imap:[log in to unmask]:993/fetch%3EUID%3E/INBOX%3E3022058?part=1.36&filename=ajafjpkfaclhelpc.png" class="" width="44" height="50" border="0">Extracting Cognition out of Images for the Purpose of Autonomous Driving

announce historic commitment of 20 automakers to make automatic emergency braking standard on new vehicles

Sunday, December 19, 2015

[log in to unmask]" alt="imap:[log in to unmask]:993/fetch%3EUID%3E/INBOX%3E3022058?part=1.38&filename=ccalfjfhllohpdpa.png" class="" width="96" height="63" border="0">Adam Jonas' View on Autonomous Cars

Video similar to part of Adam's Luncheon talk @ 2015 Florida Automated Vehicle Symposium on Dec 1.  Hmmm ... Watch Video  especially at the 13:12 mark.  Compelling; especially after the 60 Minutes segment above!  Also see his TipRanks.  Alain

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