2016-09-23

September 23, 2016Newsletter archive →

September 2016, "Executive Summary...For DOT, the excitement around highly automated vehicles (HAVs) starts with safety. (p5)

...The development of advanced automated vehicle safety technologies, including fully self-driving cars, may prove to be the greatest personal transportation revolution since the popularization of the personal automobile nearly a century ago. (p5)

...The benefits don't stop with safety. Innovations have the potential to transform personal mobility and open doors to people and communities. (p5)

...The remarkable speed with which increasingly complex HAVs are evolving challenges DOT to take new approaches that ensure these technologies are safely introduced (i.e., do not introduce significant new safety risks), provide safety benefits today, and achieve their full safety potential in the future. (p6)

"...we divide the task of facilitating the safe introduction and deployment (...defines "deployment" as the operation of an HAV by members of the public who are not the employees or agents of the designer, developer, or manufacturer of that HAV.) of HAVs into four sections:(p6)

"...1. Vehicle Performance Guidance for Automated Vehicles (p6)..."

"...2. Model State Policy (p7) The Model State Policy confirms that States retain their traditional responsibilities...but... The shared objective is to ensure the establishment of a consistent national framework rather than a patchwork of incompatible laws..."

"...3. NHTSA Current Regulatory Tools (p7) ... This document provides instructions, practical guidance, and assistance to entities seeking to employ those tools. Furthermore, NHTSA has streamlined its review process and is committing to..."

"...4. New Tools and Authorities (p7)...The speed with which HAVs are advancing, combined with the complexity and novelty of these innovations, threatens to outpace the Agency's conventional regulatory processes and capabilities. This challenge requires DOT to examine whether the way DOT has addressed safety for the last 50 years should be expanded to realize the safety potential of automated vehicles over the next 50 years. Therefore, this section identifies potential new tools, authorities and regulatory structures that could aid the safe and appropriately expeditious deployment of new technologies by enabling the Agency to be more nimble and flexible (p8)..."

"...Note on "Levels of Automation" There are multiple definitions for various levels of automation and for some time there has been need for standardization to aid clarity and consistency. Therefore, this Policy adopts the SAE International (SAE) definitions for levels of automation. )

C. King, Sept 20. "Federal regulators announced their first safety checklist ever for semiautonomous and driverless cars this week. In the guidelines, the United States Department of Transportation urged automakers and tech companies to prove that their semiautonomous and autonomous vehicles could meet a 15-point list of safety expectations before the autos hit the road.

We broke down the 15 points:

DATA SHARING These giant computers on wheels collect piles of driving data. Carmakers should store that data and share it with regulators who can use the information to reconstruct what went wrong in a crash or system breakdown.

PRIVACY Car owners should have a clear understanding of what kind of data is being collected by the vehicles. They should also be able to reject any collection of personal information such as on biometrics or driver behavior.

HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACE Carmakers must show how their vehicles can safely switch between autopilot and human control.

CRASHWORTHINESS Driverless cars must meet the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's regular standards for "crashworthiness,..."

CONSUMER EDUCATION Automakers must train their sales representatives ..."

CERTIFICATION Any software updates or new driverless features must be submitted to NHTSA...."

POST-CRASH BEHAVIOR Automakers should prove their cars are safe to use again after a crash.

LAWS AND PRACTICES The vehicles should follow various state and local laws and practices that apply to drivers.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Many human driving decisions carry ethical considerations, so the way a car is programmed also carries ethical consequences.

OPERATIONAL DESIGN This is similar to a manual that describes where, when and under what conditions a driverless system works.

DETECTION AND RESPONSE How will a car respond to other cars, pedestrians, animals and falling trees?

FALLBACK The car should be able to change modes safely when there is a technological malfunction.

VALIDATION Automakers need to develop testing and validation methods that account for the wide range of technologies used in driverless cars.

J. Rigg, Sept 21, "Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to announce the latest update to his company's EVs will begin rolling out tonight. ...Autopilot will rely more heavily on radar, rather than these sensors playing second fiddle to camera feeds. The idea is radar is much more reliable than cameras when visibility is poor, such as when you're driving through snow or fog...."Read more

Team Tesla, Sept 11, "...After careful consideration, we now believe it can be used as a primary control sensor without requiring the camera to confirm visual image recognition....

"...Therefore, the big problem in using radar to stop the car is avoiding false alarms..."

"...As the system confidence level rises, the braking force will gradually increase to full strength when it is approximately 99.99% certain of a collision. This may not always prevent a collision entirely, but the impact speed will be dramatically reduced to the point where there are unlikely to be serious injuries to the vehicle occupants...."

"...The net effect of this, combined with the fact that radar sees through most visual obscuration, is that the car should almost always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions...."

"...Taking this one step further, a Tesla will also be able to bounce the radar signal under a vehicle in front - using the radar pulse signature and photon time of flight to distinguish the signal - and still brake even when trailing a car that is opaque to both vision and radar. The car in front might hit the UFO in dense fog, but the Tesla will not..."

K. Barrow, Sept 21, "SIEMENS presented the first driverless Inspiro metro train for Riyadh metro Line 1 (Blue Line) to representatives of Arriyadh Development Authority (ARA) at InnoTrans on September 20.

As E&M partner in the Bechtel-led Bacs consortium, Siemens is supplying 45 four-car trains for Line 1 and 29 two-car trains for Line 2 (Red Line) under a turnkey contract which also includes automatic train control systems and electrification for the two lines. ..."Read more

http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/

Paulina Lustgarten & Scott Le Vine. Under review for presentation at the 96th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board and publication in Transportation Research Record (2017). Read more

Oct 1-2

C. Kang, Sept.19, "Federal auto safety regulators on Monday made it official: They are betting the nation's highways will be safer with more cars driven by machines and not people.

In long-awaited guidelines for the booming industry of automated vehicles, the Obama administration promised strong safety oversight, but sent a clear signal to automakers that the door was wide open for driverless cars.

"We envision in the future, you can take your hands off the wheel, and your commute becomes restful or productive instead of frustrating and exhausting," said Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council, adding that highly automated vehicles "will save time, money and lives."...

The policies unveiled on Monday were designed to walk that line. In a joint appearance, Mr. Zients and Anthony Foxx, secretary of the United States Department of Transportation, released the first guidelines, which outlined safety expectations and encouraged uniform rules for the nascent technology. The instructions signaled to motorists that automated vehicles would not be a wild west where companies can try anything without oversight, but were also vague enough that automakers and technology companies would not fear over-regulation. .." Read more

key passage:

"emphasizes that semi-automated driving systems – ones in which the human continues to monitor the driving environment and perform some of the driving task – that fail to adequately account for the possibility that a distracted or inattentive driver-occupant might fail to retake control of the vehicle in a safety-critical situation may be defined as an unreasonable risk to safety and subject to recall". Read more

September 4, 2016

B. Simpson, Aug 25, "Isn't this supposed to be a quiet time for business? ...Not in transportation technology.

For instance, Ford announced it was working to launch fully autonomous automobiles by 2021. BMW, Intel and Mobileye joined to say they will have vehicles in production for the same target date. Ridesharing titan Uber says it will launch this month driverless vehicles in Pittsburgh, though some employees will be in the car to ensure safety.

Forget the 10 years down the road baloney. We'll be Level 4 Autonomous in three to five years.

Yet for all the excitement there's been some downer news.... Lyft was seeking a buyer, despite the $500 million that GM pumped into it ...Earlier this year Lyft pledged... to keep its U.S. losses under $50 million a month....Uber told its investors it lost $520 million in the first quarter, and more than $750 million in the second. This after losing about $2 billion in 2015....It's valuable to keep in mind the shaky foundations of Uber and Lyft because the two have been touted as an important foundation for the growth of autonomous vehicles. Read more

August 28, 2016

T. Simonite, Aug 23, "BMW, Ford, and Uber have all recently said they plan to have "fully autonomous" cars ready to drive themselves on the road in 2021 (see "2021 May Be the Year of the Fully Autonomous Car"). Ford says its fleet of vehicles will lack steering wheels and offer a robotic taxi service.

But don't expect to toss out your driver's license in 2021. Five years isn't long enough to create vehicles good enough at driving to roam extensively without human input,....

"Probably what Ford would do to meet their 2021 milestone is have something that provides low-speed taxi service limited to certain roads—and don't expect it to come in the rain," says Steven Shladover. ...Alain Kornhauser, ... "By then we may be able to define [a] 'fenced' region of space where we can in fact let cars out there without a driver," he says. "The challenge will be making that fenced-in area large enough so that it provides a valuable service."...Jeffrey Miller, ...says figuring out how sensors limit the situations a vehicle can reliably handle on its own is one of the most crucial challenges for companies working on autonomous driving. Read more

August 19, 2016

N. Boudette, Aug 16, "In the race to develop driverless cars, several automakers and technology companies are already testing vehicles that pilot themselves on public roads. And others have outlined plans to expand their development fleets over the next few years. At a news conference on Tuesday at the company's research center in Palo Alto, Calif., Mark Fields, Ford's chief executive, said the company planned to mass produce driverless cars and have them in commercial operation in a ride-hailing service by 2021....

"That means there's going to be no steering wheel. There's going to be no gas pedal. There's going to be no brake pedal,'' he said. ...." Read more

August 8, 2016

J. Markoff, Aug 5, " A roboticist and crucial member of the team that created Google's self-driving car is leaving the company, the latest in a string of departures by important technologists working on the autonomous car project. Chris Urmson, a Carnegie Mellon University research scientist, joined Google in 2009 to help create the then-secret effort. ... Read more

August 1, 2016

M. Ramsey, July 26, " A key supplier of semiautonomous car technology ended a supply agreement with Tesla Motors Inc. following a high-profile traffic fatality in May involving one of the Silicon Valley company's electric vehicles. Read more

July 21, 2016

Editorial Board, July 11, "A recent fatal crash in Florida involving a Tesla Model S is an example of how a new technology designed to make cars safer could, in some cases, make them more dangerous. These risks, however, could be minimized with better testing (

On May 7, 2016 at about 4:40pm EDT, there was a crash between a Tesla and a Class 8 Tractor-Trailer. The accident is depicted in the Diagram from the Police Report: HSMV Crash Report # 85234095. (1) Google Earth images from the site.
The driver of the Tesla was Joshua Brown. "No citations have been issued, but the initial accident report from the FHP indicates the truck driver "failed to yield right-of-way."" (2)
Hmmm....No Citations??? Did the truck have a data recorder? Was the truck impounded, if so, how is the truck driver making a living since the crash?

Chenyi Chen PhD Dissertation, "...the key part of the thesis, a direct perception approach is proposed to drive a car in a highway environment. In this approach, an input image is mapped to a small number of key perception indicators that directly relate to the affordance of a road/traffic state for driving....." Read more

March 23

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2016-09-23

Some other thoughts that deserve your attention

Half-baked stuff that probably doesn't deserve your time:

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C'mon Man!(These folks didn't get/read the memo)

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