2014-02-20

February 20, 2014Newsletter archive →

BY Sarah Silbert @sarahsilbert February 20th, 2014 at 2:25PM ET "Google's just announced Project Tango, a 5-inch Android smartphone prototype equipped with Kinect-like 3D sensors and other components to track motion and map your surroundings. Unlike other 3D-sensing devices including Kinect, Project Tango includes the Myriad 1 vision processor from Movidius, which allows for advanced motion and depth tracking without sucking a ton of power. Available to a limited group of developers today, the handset could enable enhanced indoor navigation and immersive gaming, among other things..." Read more

YouTube "GM's Motorama exhibit in 1956 featured a film that looked into the far distant future of 1976 with predicted a jet age future with electronic digital displays and an On Pase 2Star like central command that would guide us along our uncrowded path to adventures." View

Circa 1956 such "wire sniffing" concepts were tested at RCA's Sarnoff Lab test track located across US 1 from Princeton University. Artifacts from that test track still exist. Published was a seminal paper: Zworykin V. K., & Flory, L. E. (1958). Electronic control of motor vehicles on the highways. Highway Research Board Proceedings, 37. Alain

YouTube: Rinspeed ExchangE, concept de masina electrica autonoma pe baza Tesla Model S

Brussels, 12 February 2014 "...Two European standards organizations, ETSI and CEN, confirmed today that the basic set of standards requested by the European Commission to make connected cars a reality has been fully completed. The norms which they have adopted ensure that vehicles made by different manufacturers can communicate with each other. The EU invested more than €180 million in research projects on cooperative transport systems, whose results helped develop the standards. This will put the European car industry, which provides 13 million jobs, out in front in the race to develop the next generation of cars...." Read more ESTI Announcement Standards are good. Hopefully, the US will simply adopt these Standards. Alain

February 16, 2014 PlanPhilly "What would life in Philadelphia look like if cars, buses, taxis and other vehicles drove themselves around the city, communicating with each other and with the people who summon them to get to work or play? This was the question tackled by 15 student teams competing in the Better Philadelphia Challenge – the student competition portion of the Bacon Awards, presented annually by the Philadelphia Center for Architecture. (140 teams from 80 schools and 35 countries registered for the competition, with just 15 producing and submitting a project for judging)... The change to a "pick-up, drop-off culture," as the IndePENNdense team calls it, means less need for parking in Center City and other neighborhoods. That freed-up space could be used for infill development, putting the "dense" in IndePENNdense..." Read more

Hank Flynn: Feb 20, 2014 11:45 AM EST Princeton, New Jersey (My9NJ) - Imagine a world where you are chauffeured to whatever destination your heart desires every day! Then imagine being chauffeured by a computer-- instead of by a human being. At Princeton University, students are experimenting to create the ultimate driverless machine... Read More Video We're trying. Alain

Eric Mack, 2/19/2014 "...Musk claimed that Tesla would lead the way in nascent autonomous car technology, and also admitted to meeting with Apple AAPL -1.56% about… something. "We had conversations with Apple. I can't comment on whether those revolved around any kind of acquisition," Musk told Bloomberg's Betty Liu... Musk clarified that Tesla wasn't necessarily working on a self-driving car like those Google has received so much press for over the years, but that he prefers the term "autopilot" like the function commonly used in aircraft. He explained that he sees a role for an autopilot function in vehicles that would allow the car to go into autonomous mode for a period of a time, but still require a driver to be able to take over control..." Read more

Whattt??? "...Not like Google"?? Then what he's describing is what Mercedes has in the showroom today. Can't be first with that. Is everything photoshop and hype? Where's the Beef? Alain

17 February 2014 | By Stephen Harris "When will we be able to take to the roads in a self-driving car? And what breakthroughs will make this safe and legal? Our expert panel answers your questions on self-driving cars[..." Read more

Hmm...Fairly pedestrian and superficial. I probably should not have included it. Inserted comments aren't much better. Dave: This is a marketplace. If you don't want to buy one, you won't have to. These are taxis, driverless ones. Should be a lot cheaper. Anonymous: True there is no mention of approaching cyclist, but of course these will handle these situations. Also, if "...humans don't see them...", then they're in deep trouble today, they'd better see us and get out of the way. Alain

February 13, 2014, by Haney Louka ".. Best New Technology, Safety: Infiniti Predictive Forward Collision Warning (PFCW): The inaugural safety category was a bit of an oddity this year. Infiniti takes a double win this year, and this second one comes thanks to its Predictive Forward Collision Warning (PFCW) system. Its only competitor in the group was Mercedes-Benz, which entered no less than four technologies. And it's not that any of those technologies is less deserving than Infiniti's, but I think what ended up happening was that votes for Mercedes-Benz became diluted because of the number of entries it had. More on that in a bit...

Mercedes-Benz wanted to make sure our safety ballots were full of entries this year...."Read more... At least the Canadians are recognizing this technology and some of its fundamental values. Alain

February 17th, 2014 | by K Kaufmann "Driving Volvo's S60 model with adaptive cruise control is a matter of trust. The car is equipped with a mass of radar and computer controls that allow semi-autonomous driving. You set the car at a certain speed, as you would with normal cruise control, but then all the high-tech stuff takes over, so you can follow a car in front of you, automatically slowing down or speeding up in line with that vehicle, while also keeping a preset distance behind it. You have to steer, but that's about it..." Read more

Susan Thurston, Monday, February 17, 2014 "When it comes to driverless cars, the question isn't whether we have the technology to make them, because we do. The question is, "Will people want to buy them?''... Read more

By Lou Fancher Wednesday, Feb 19 2014 "Before 2009, it was a secret. In 2010, it became an announcement. And from 2011 on, Google's self-driving car program has been an intriguing spectacle.

Now, five years on, Google cars regularly traverse Bay Area byways, sensing their surroundings and operating off internalized maps. At a late-January lecture at Livermore's Bankhead Theater, Google senior staff engineer Mike Montemerlo played a video compilation. A windshield-mounted camera showed faultless journeys: through dark mountain roads filled with big rigs and leaping deer; a residential, stroller-infested Mountain View neighborhood; a FasTrak toll booth; and highway construction sites. And what Bay Area driving test would be complete without a meander down pedestrian-rich Lombard Street? Throughout 10 challenging routes and 1,000 miles, the self-driving phenomenon performed like a robotic Galileo..." Read more

With Walking, Cycling, aTaxis and Trains; Mobility, Congestion and Environmental Consequences. Very interesting student PowerPoints and Drafts of Chapters. A little rough in places but still well worth browsing. Alain

Drafts of chapters: http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/NJ_aTaxiOrf467F13/Orf467F13_FinalReports/

Andrew Chatham, Principal Software Engineer, Google will lead the plenary session on Tuesday, March 11. Chatham leads the offboard software and mapping efforts for Google's self-driving cars. He joined the project in 2009 and has helped the team achieve over 500,000 miles of autonomous driving. He is especially interested in the intersection of Google's technology and the existing transportation world. He joined Google in 2002 and is a graduate of Duke University.

Sponsored by the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society

February 14, 2014v2

Eric Jaffe Jan 13, 2014 "...The problem with buying the drink today, says Kornhauser, is that the labor cost of on-demand taxi service is enormous. As a result, we buy the bottle just in case we want a drink. Driverless cars change the whole equation. Read more

February 9, 2014

I prefer to call this: Volvo's "Texting Machine" concept video. It demonstrates very clearly that it is the "NHTSA Level 3" feature that will be needed to make the car as good as transit; otherwise everyone is simply going to take transit. Who cares about far the walk, how long the wait and the ride and the crowded conditions. I can be in my own world doing what I want to do during that whole process. Without Level 3 I have to be off the grid focused on keeping the hulk between two white lines and not running into things. Transit wins. Play video Alain

February 4, 2014

European Commission agreed upon the demonstration schedule Adrianon Alessandrini

By far the BEST Super Bowl Commercial Play video Alain

January 26, 2014

by Emily Badger, Jan 17, 2014 "...The great promise of autonomous cars is not that we could each own one in our own driveway – the 21st century's version of owning your own Model T, or your own color TV, or your own bulky Macintosh – but that no one would need to own one at all..." Read more In fact read the whole thing as well as the 266 Comments.

January 17, 2014

by James M. Anderson, Nidhi Kalra, Karlyn D. Stanley, Paul Sorensen, Constantine Samaras, Oluwatobi Oluwatola

This report is excellent

January 6, 2014

Jan. 2, 2014 "Accident rates will plunge to near zero for SDCs, although other cars will crash into SDCs, but as the market share of SDCs on the highway grows, overall accident rates will decline steadily". Self-driving cars (SDC) that include driver control are expected to hit highways around the globe before 2025 and self-driving "only" cars are anticipated around 2030, according to an emerging technologies study on Autonomous Cars from IHS Automotive, driven by Polk. Read more

December 27, 2013

December 20, 2013

How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups" by Chunka Mui and Paul B. Carroll Now Available Highly Recommended. See also Chunka's Dec. 19 Forbes article Will The Google Car Force A Choice Between Lives And Jobs? Unsubscribe | Re-subscribe

2014-02-20

This may be Revolutionary:

Now for the fun and straight-forward stuff that I had planned for this issue:

Calendar of Upcoming Events:

June 8 - 11, 2014, Dearborn, Michigan, USA

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