2013-11-23

November 23, 2013

Auto Correct: Has the self-driving car at last arrived?

by Burkhard Bilger November 25, 2013: “Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids. They have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel, wrestle with maps, fiddle with knobs, have marital spats, take the curve too late, take the curve too hard, spill coffee in their laps, and flip over their cars…” An absolutely great article featuring Anthony Levandowski, Product Manager, Google Self-Driving Car and more. A MUST read. Alain

Florida transportation leaders say automated cars not too far off

Thursday, November 14, 2013 As crazy as it might sound, the day motorists will be able to take their hands off the wheel and let their car do the driving could be just around the bend…. Read more and even more. See my summary below Alain

Reports on Recent Events:

House hearing on driverless cars

November 19, 2013, House hearing on “How Autonomous Vehicles Will Shape the Future of Surface Transportation” held by the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, chaired by U.S. Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI)

Click: to Watch the webcast of this hearing

Hearing starts @ 17:20 into the webcast with a Statement by Chairman Tom Petri (R-WI) which is basically a Summary of Subject Matter

Here are a few overriding comments:

Neither Google nor any of the European autonomous vehicle efforts, such as CityMobil2 or VisLab.IT, were part of this hearing. Google’s name may have been uttered only once in the entire 2 hour hearing. Interesting!
The word “Transit” was never mentioned even though this is a hearing of the Subcommittee of Highways and Transit!
All witnesses continued to push for V2V and some witnesses (Strickland and Streudle) seemed to promote V2V ahead of automated collision avoidance systems.
The questioning by the congressman/women was very insightful. Some excellent questions seemed to not be understood by any of the witnesses.

Summary of the Questioning of the witnesses

Summary of the Testimony of the witnesses Alain

Florida Automated Vehicles Summit

November 14 – 15, 2013, Marriott Waterside Hotel, Tampa, FL. I had the pleasure of being a keynote speaker at this Conference last week. I gave a retrospective of the evolution of the concept of Automated Vehicles over the past 75 years as well as a prospective of their possible evolution over the next 75 years. My presentation is linked here. There were many other excellent presenters including Anthony Levandowski from Google Car, Chunka Mui, writer from Forbes Magazine (an advance copy of his book “The New Killer Apps: How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups” was appropriately distributed to each attendee. The technological revolution associated with Smart Driving Cars is a central theme of the book.), Tom Bamonte, N. Texas Toll Authority, Chandra Bhat, U. of Texas and others. More importantly, the key players from Florida were there in substance, not just form, including Tom DiGiacomo, Exec. Director, Florida Transportation Commission and State Senator Jeffery Brandes (22nd District) who has spearheaded Florida’s welcoming automated vehicles. Senator Brandes made it perfectly clear that now is not the time to regulate or legislate Smart Driving Cars. Instead we need to encourage their deployment and learn fast. The downside risk is miniscule relative to the upside potential for Florida and the nation. Much the same view was expressed by Ranking Member Eleanor Norton (D-DC) at the conclusion of the recent House hearing on Autonomous Vehicles (@ 1:56:10 see below).

This was an excellent conference. I highly recommend that each State do something similar in terms of form, substance and commitment. This Summit had the right balance of in-state and out-of-state presenters. The 1.5 day format was perfect. Most everyone was there for the entire program. The exchange and discussion between the podium and the audience was excellent. All contributed and learned. The focus went beyond personal cars to encompass commercial freight and near term opportunities to test and begin to deploy driverless transit vehicles in Florida’s many retirement communities. Alain

3rd International Conference on Urban Public Transportation Systems

November 14-17, 2013, National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, Paris, FR. While small, this was an excellent public transportation conference with a substantial focus on automation and its opportunities to substantially enhance everyone’s mobility. I presented a summary of my work on area-wide PRT and aTaxi concepts. David Nelson gave an excellent presentation on the state of Un-attended Train Operations (UTO, aka driverless metros) of which today exists 32 cities encompassing 48 lines, 674 route kilometers servicing 700 stations. 40% of the km are in Asia, 19% in France, 13% in the rest of Europe. Read Peter Muller’s Summary

Prof. Vukan Vichic, a giant in rail transit (but long time PRT skeptic) admitted at the conference that he sees the value of automation in transit. His focus is strictly on serving the needs of the traveling public using the most appropriate technology. (I hope I’m not paraphrasing too much.) Well that is exactly how many of us got to PRT years ago. Today the potential opportunities of autonomousTaxis are very interesting. Outside of dense urban cores, travel demand is spatially and temporally diffuse. Very few people want to travel between the same places at about the same time. Even if one includes people wanting to go between a few places along one’s route, the ride-sharing potential remains small. Asking people to wait until more riders show up degrades the level-of-service without attracting many additional riders. I’ve found that even for the densest state, New Jersey, less than 10% of the state’s daily trips could travel in groups of greater than 6 people. This 10% can be served efficiently with vehicle holding more than 6 people. However, using these large vehicles to serve the other 90% would be extremely wasteful. Other than asking the “90%” to change their lifestyles, the only way to efficiently serve them is to use small vehicles. To serve them economically one needs automation; paying the many drivers needed by the many small vehicles is simply unaffordable. Since the spatial distribution of the trips is so diffuse, one needs a network of lines. If they must be new, they are too expensive and disruptive. However, if only the existing infrastructure could be shared with these new automated vehicles. That’s SmartDrivingCars (aka autonomousTaxis, aTaxis). They are explicitly designed to operate harmoniously on existing streets with existing conventional vehicles. This is the opportunity to begin to offer public transit service to the “90%” and for Prof. Vuchic to embrace aTaxis and PRT. :-) Alain

Calendar of Upcoming Events:

2013 ITS New Jersey Annual Meeting

MetLife Stadium

December 16, 2013, East Rutherford, NJ 07073

First International Workshop on Computer Vision for Autonomous Driving

Sydney, Australia December 2, 2013

Recent Versions of:

November 08, 2013

Clifford I. Nass‘81,*86 expert on human/computer interactions, dead at 55

Tragic!! What a terrible loss. We have all taken an enormous step backwards. His simulator. Alain

November 05, 2013

On the Road with Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) Systems

Press Release: Brussels 29 October – “Euro NCAP releases the first results of rear-end crash avoidance systems tested against the upcoming 2014 rating protocol. Eight vehicles have been compared with respect to their performance on the test track.

A good summary of the tests appears in FleetDirectory First self-braking cars rated by Euro NCAP by John Simpson 30 October 2013. Eight (8) car models equipped AEB systems were tested and are reported on Euro NCAP’s website. Both “City” tests and “Inter-Urban” tests were conducted of the Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) systems. While the test results indicate that at least some of these systems work some of the time, only one perfect score was achieved (MB 2013 E-Class w. Given that the test environment is not really challenging (no adverse weather or obstructions; good weather and running surface, straight course) one would hope that each of these systems should be able to accurately measure distance, relative speed and friction coefficients continuously so as to avoid collisions in each of their scenarios. Apparently not! The 2013 MB E-Class with PRE-SAFE BRAKE earned a perfect score 3.0/3.0 in the slow speed “AEB City” test and 2.7/3.0 in the higher speed “Inter-urban” test. The other seven (7) cars tested were significantly worse. See table below. The model names link to a description of their test results and the video links to a video of the tests. Hopefully, their poor performance is due to the fact that the vehicles tested were from 2011-2013 and not the new 2014. Alain

October 18, 2013

The Ethics of Autonomous Cars

Patrick Lin Oct 8 2013, “If a small tree branch pokes out onto a highway and there’s no incoming traffic, we’d simply drift a little into the opposite lane and drive around it. But an automated car might come to a full stop, as it dutifully observes traffic laws that prohibit crossing a double-yellow line….” Read more Good article as are some of the comments that follow. I’ll add mine: Yes, ethics are really important here, but we also need to not be sophomoric. Laws, even traffic laws, are created and interpreted with human behavior in mind. They haven’t been written as deterministic absolutes. There are nuances. It is necessary that those who are writing the logic and code for these SmartDrivingCars (They are NOT autonomous, nor will they be in my foreseeable future.) understand that these laws are NOT absolutes and that they direct and constrain in a real-world context. Code that applies traffic rules rigidly and without regard for context will fail in the marketplace. If these cars are going to do some of the driving for us, their behaviors are going to have to meet our minimum expectations. Some of us actually rode with our teenagers when they began to drive. We pointed out mistakes, we pointed out that “Yes” you can cross the yellow line when there is a branch in the road and no car is coming. Code writers for the smart driving vehicles will build these kinds of cues into the system. Sometimes rule-breaking is the right choice on the road because our legal rules necessarily oversimplify to cover the generality of cases. The beauty of code is that nuances that cannot be captured in law can be accounted for in algorithms. The Smart Driving Car challenge is not an ethical challenge it is a computer code generating challenge. Alain

October 4, 2013

Special Issue

September 28, 2013

IIHS issues first crash avoidance ratings

IIHS News

Sept. 27, 2013 ARLINGTON, Va. — “A new test program by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) rates the performance of front crash prevention systems to help consumers decide which features to consider and encourage automakers to speed adoption of the technology. The rating system is based on research by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) indicating that forward collision warning and automatic braking systems are helping drivers avoid front-to-rear crashes.

The Institute rates models with optional or standard front crash prevention systems as superior, advanced or basic depending on whether they offer autonomous braking, or autobrake, and, if so, how effective it is in tests at 12 and 25 mph. Vehicles rated superior have autobrake and can avoid a crash or substantially reduce speeds in both tests. For an advanced rating a vehicle must have autobrake and avoid a crash or reduce speeds by at least 5 mph in 1 of 2 tests… The Institute awards as many as five points in the autobrake tests, based on how much the systems slow the vehicle to avoid hitting the inflatable target or lessen the severity of the impact. In the case of an unavoidable collision, lowering the striking vehicle’s speed reduces the crash energy that vehicle structures and restraint systems have to manage. That reduces the amount of damage to both the striking and struck car and minimizes injuries to people traveling in them.

“We decided on 25 mph because development testing indicated that results at this speed were indicative of results at higher speeds — and because higher-speed tests would risk damaging the test vehicles,” Zuby says. “As such, we expect crash mitigation benefits at higher speeds as well.”

Hats off to Subaru for leading the pack in this first round of tests!

Be sure to look at the scoring table at the bottom of the IIHS news release. It is disheartening to learn that for the most part, these systems didn’t work! Only Subaru, Cadillac and Volvo didn’t crash in the 12 mph test and only Subaru in the 25 mph test. The purpose of these systems is crash avoidance! Each knew the crash was coming.

Why would manufacturers that took the effort to include automatic braking would wait until it is too late to avoid a collision or apply the brakes too lightly, allowing a crash to occur. Even a slight crash causes a high “cost” (least of which requires you to pull over, talk to the person that you just ran into); whereas no crash incurs zero “cost” (except an elevated heart beat). Alain

September 27, 2013

September 20, 2013

At Frankfurt Auto Show, the Driver Began to Take a Back Seat

By JACK EWING Sept. 15, 2013 FRANKFURT —” A wide grin beneath his bushy mustache, Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Daimler, did as car executives often do at auto shows, cruising onto the stage in the company’s newest model. But at the Frankfurt motor show last week, Mr. Zetsche added a surprise: he sprang from the back of a Mercedes S-Class that had no one in the driver’s seat…” Read more This is how Daimler chose to spend a substantial amount of money to introduce its automotive products at the 2013 Frankfurt Auto Show on Sept. 9, 2013. They must believe that consumers are ready to spend money on Smart Driving Cars. Alain

Video: MB Self-Driving Manheim 2 Pforzheim 2:08 long

S 500 MB Intelligent Drive (Self-Driving) TV footage:

SmartDrivingCars_110813v0