2017-02-05

February 05, 2017Newsletter archive →

J. Hedlund, Feb 2017Fully autonomous vehicles – cars and trucks that can drive themselves, without a human

at the controls – are coming soon. In fact, they already are on the road. Yes! ...Autonomous vehicles will change our lives in many ways. Yes! ... But all vehicles on the road will not be autonomous for a very long time, perhaps never. Until then, autonomous vehicles must share the road with vehicles driven by humans. Yes! How can this be done safely? States are responsible for safety on the roads – for licensing drivers, registering vehicles, and establishing and enforcing traffic laws. So states must take the lead in dealing with the many traffic safety issues that a mix of driver-operated and autonomous vehicles will bring. Yes! In particular, states should help educate the public about the benefits that autonomous vehicles will bring and the risks that they may present, educate drivers of semi-autonomous vehicles about their driving responsibilities, and educate all drivers about how to share the road safely with autonomous vehicles. Yes! This report should help states understand and address these issues. It's written for state Departments of Transportation (DOTs), Departments of Motor Vehicles (DMVs), and State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs)....Great!

The public's views on new technology can change quickly. AVs today may well be similar to automobiles a century ago or smart phones only 10 years ago: a new technology with a few ardent supporters and many skeptics initially but which quickly became both acceptable and highly desirable. As Henry Ford is purported to have said regarding automobiles (probably incorrectly), "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Also, today's teenagers are more accepting of AVs: in the Kelley Blue Book survey, 48% of respondents age 12-15 said they would be comfortable riding in an AV compared to 36% of all respondents....Yes!

Laws or regulations formed in haste may hinder rather than help AV testing and implementation. (p17) Yes! " Read more

AP, Feb 1, "Self-driving car prototypes appear to be getting better at negotiating California streets and highways without a human backup driver intervening, according to data made public Wednesday by California transportation regulators. ... Waymo, ..., did far more testing than the other 10 companies combined — and had much greater success. Its fleet drove itself more than 635,000 miles with 124 safety-related "disengagements," which must be reported when the technology fails or the backup driver takes control out of concern the car is malfunctioning.

The Google project's disengagement rate was the equivalent of two incidents every 10,000 miles, a notable decrease over the prior year, when there were eight disengagements per 10,000 miles.

"This four-fold improvement reflects the significant work we've been doing to make our software and hardware more capable and mature," Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo's head of self-driving technology wrote in a blog post .

Waymo's chief critic acknowledged the improvement, but John Simpson of the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog said the number of disengagements shows the cars still "simply aren't ready to be released to roam our roads" without human backup drivers." Read more

A. Kornhauser, et al. Feb 3, "Orf467F16 Final Project Symposium quantifying implications of such a Nation-wide mobility system on Average Vehicle Occupancy (AVO), energy, environment and congestion, including estimates of fleet size, needed empty vehicle repositioning, and ridership implications on existing rail transit systems (west, east, NYC) and Amtrak of a system that would efficiently and effectively perform their '1st mile'/'last-mile' mobility needs. Read more

F. Fishkin, Feb 3, "Techstination, your destination for gadgets and gear. I'm Fred Fishkin. Driverless cars…better sooner than later. You've been hearing about autonomous vehicles…or driverless cars…for years now. As the kids in the back seat like to say…are we there yet? And the answer…" Listen

M. Turck, Jan 29, "In a future driven by shared autonomous vehicles, transportation becomes a utility. The name of the game is efficiency — you pay for what you use, and how you use it. No car ownership, no car insurance, no maintenance, no gas, no driveways or garages… you pay for a ride from A to B, and when you get out, you've washed your hands of the investment.

But all those things have a cost, so it must mean someone else is coughing up the dough, right?..." Read more

D. Hull, Jan 30, "There was chatter for months within the tight-knit network of Silicon Valley self-driving whizzes: Where was one of their industry's most-prominent players going to land? The world found out last week when Tesla Motors Inc. sued Sterling Anderson, the former director of its Autopilot program. The electric-car maker alleged Anderson started working months ago with Chris Urmson, the former head of Google's self-driving car program.

The legal fight involving autonomous-driving hot shots is the latest to show how the war for talent in Silicon Valley is heating up, as tech and auto companies alike compete for skilled engineers...."All of the sudden, people realize that self-driving cars are becoming a reality," said Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google's self-driving car project and researches robotics and artificial intelligence as a professor at Stanford University. "Every CEO of an automaker has made autonomous cars a priority, and 2016 was the year when people of influence woke up to the potential of this." Read more

Feb 3, "The country's biggest automotive testing facility outside Columbus will receive a $45 million grant to expand as the state furthers its efforts to become a national leader in advancing autonomous vehicle research and smart road technology, Gov. John Kasich and other officials announced recently at Ohio State University in Columbus.

The state, OSU and JobsOhio are providing the grant for the Transportation Research Center in East Liberty, a testing facility about 45 miles northwest of Columbus. The university is contributing $25 million, the state $12.5 million and JobsOhio $7.5 million..." Read more

Press Release, Jan 9 "Scania will design the world's first full-scale autonomous truck platooning operations, based on its own advanced technology. The platoon will traffic public roads while transporting containers between port terminals in Singapore. The aim is to organise convoys of four trucks – with the following three trucks behind the lead truck autonomously driven, as well as to fully automate the processes for precise docking and undocking of cargo..." Read more

P. Fairley, Jan 31, "Robotic cars are great at monitoring other cars, and they're getting better at noticing pedestrians, squirrels, and birds. The main challenge, though, is posed by the lightest, quietest, swerviest vehicles on the road. "Bicycles are probably the most difficult detection problem that autonomous vehicle systems face," says UC Berkeley research engineer Steven Shladover.

Nuno Vasconcelos, a visual computing expert at the University of California, San Diego, says bikes pose a complex detection problem because they are relatively small, fast and heterogenous. "A car is basically a big block of stuff. A bicycle has much less mass and also there can be more variation in appearance — there are more shapes and colors and people hang stuff on them." Read more

for Fun..

Watch video

other thoughts that deserve your attention

J. Ewing, Feb 1, "When Volkswagen executives decided in 2006 to use software to evade emissions rules, they needed help. No one inside Volkswagen knew how to write the software. So the company turned to one of its most trusted partners: the German supplier, Robert Bosch. Working from Volkswagen specifications, Bosch developed code that instructed computers in diesel engines to fully deploy pollution controls only when the cars were being tested in laboratories, according to lawsuits in the United States and Germany....

In 2008, Bosch asked Volkswagen to guarantee that it would take responsibility if the fraud were discovered, according to court documents filed as part of the lawsuit by the German owner. Volkswagen refused. Bosch maintains that a letter seeking the guarantee has been misinterpreted and actually refers to a gasoline engine, not the diesel engines at the heart of the scandal...." Read more

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

that probably doesn't deserve your time

C. Jensen, Feb 1, " Tesla has long promoted its cars as among the safest available. After its Model S electric sedan was reviewed by the federal government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2013, Tesla said it had received the best safety rating of any car ever tested.

But a more rigorous safety review has reached a different conclusion: that the Tesla S is not on a par with several of its luxury rivals. On Wednesday, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a group known for its strict testing, announced that the Tesla Sdid not receive either of its safety awards. That was, in part, because in one of five crash tests the dummy's head hit the steering wheel....

The insurance institute did not test the Model S's forward collision prevention and automatic braking system because it bought the car before Tesla added new hardware and software in October..." Read more

didn't get/read the memo)

J. Jaillet, Feb 2, "Department of Transportation regarding the high-profile 2016 crash involving a Tesla Model S and a tractor-trailer reached the conclusion — again — that the inattention of the Tesla's driver was to blame for the crash. NHTSA says the car's operator, who died in the collision, was leaning too heavily on the car's driver assist systems, which failed to brake when a tractor-trailer crossed the road in front of the car..." Read more

'Onioned' in the last edition of SDC ... This was a fake reporting: Trump team compiles infrastructure priority list

L. Horsley, Jan 24, "President Donald Trump's team has compiled a list of about 50 infrastructure projects nationwide, totaling at least $137.5 billion, as the new White House tries to determine its investment priorities,... Among the projects could be a new terminal for the Kansas City airport, upgrades to Interstate 95 in North Carolina (

Line Extension... all projects that, at best, have no hope of being able to operate without perpetual public subsidies. Moreover, each is likely to have been made totally obsolete by driverless MaaS systems before they serve their first customer. Seems like some of these infrastructure projects will be filling rather than draining the swamp. So sad! Alain

Events:

of:

January 27, 2017

A. Kornhauser, Jan 14, "Orf467F16 Final Project Symposium quantifying implications of such a Nation-wide mobility system on Average Vehicle Occupancy (AVO), energy, environment and congestion, including estimates of fleet size, needed empty vehicle repositioning, and ridership implications on existing rail transit systems (west, east, NYC) and Amtrak of a system that would efficiently and effectively perform their '1st mile'/'last-mile' mobility needs. Read more

January 20, 2017

Public Announcement, Jan 22: "Pierce Transit will receive $1,664,894 to deploy buses equipped with collision avoidance warning systems or automatic braking features. The objective of this project is to deploy and demonstrate collision avoidance technology in partnership with the Washington State Transit Insurance Pool (WSTIP), a collaborative organization of 25 Washington public transit agencies that combine their resources to provide and purchase insurance coverage, manage claims and litigation, and receive risk management and training. Pierce Transit will work with WSTIP to accurately determine the business case for investing in these technologies." Read more

(Above link should work) Jan 19, "... Summary: ... NHTSA's examination did not identify any defects in the design or performance of the AEB or Autopilot systems of the subject vehicles nor any incidents in which the systems did not perform as designed. AEB systems used in the automotive industry through MY 2016 are rear-end collision avoidance technologies that are not designed to reliably perform in all crash modes, including crossing path collisions. The Autopilot system is an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) that requires the continual and full attention of the driver to monitor the traffic environment and be prepared to take action to avoid crashes. Tesla's design included a hands-on the steering wheel system for monitoring driver engagement...

... ODI analyzed data from crashes of Tesla Model S and Model X vehicles involving airbag deployments that occurred while operating in, or within 15 seconds of transitioning from, Autopilot mode. Some crashes involved impacts from other vehicles striking the Tesla from various directions with little to no warning to the Tesla driver. Other crashes involved scenarios known to be outside of the state-of-technology for current-generation Level 1 or 2 systems, such as cut-ins, cut-outs and crossing path collisions....

...The Florida fatal crash appears to have involved a period of extended distraction (at least 7 seconds)..." .

...A safety-related defect trend has not been identified at this time and further examination of this issue does not appear to be warranted. Accordingly, this investigation is closed. " Read more

News, Jan 10, "...U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "I'm proud to announce this new automation committee, and look forward to seeing its members advance life-saving innovations while boosting our economy and making our transportation network more fair, reliable, and efficient."... Read more

January 4, 2017

M. Sena, Jan. 5, "In This Issue:

Report from Dispatch Central 1 "...While the 12 million people in the EU who earn their livings directly from the automotive industry are delighted by the news that car sales figures for Novem-ber were up significantly, and it looks like 2016 will be another banner year, there are people in governments doing everything in their power to make both building and owning motorized vehicles economically unviable..." Read more

Autonomous Driving News Apple's Letter to NHTSA 1 "...The Vehicle Safety Act requires companies to certify vehicles to the FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards) before first sale. But this law applies to new motor vehicles intended for sale to the public, and by implication, by companies that make and sell cars, not companies like Apple that may or may not intend to sell cars. Further, FAST Act2 specifically allows car makers, but not non-car makers, to test on public roads without requiring ex-emptions from FMVSS...Read more "

What Car Companies Are Doing 2 "...So Uber must have made Volvo a pretty sweet offer when it gets rid of all the drivers with their own cars and has its own fleet of driverless cars...Read more"

Reurbanization or Spreading the Sprawl 3 "...Where do you want to go? My chart below has two opposing scenarios. In the top scenario, we keep doing what we have been doing. In the bottom sce-nario, we try to match policies with desired results. You choose...Read more"

traffic information is useless..Read more"

Musings of a Dispatcher – Civilis cogitationes 6 "...I did not see a lot of people cycling to their jobs when I was in Västerås in the early autumn of this year. Like most places in Europe

and the U.S., when cars became affordable for people with even modest incomes—starting in the 50s in the U.S. and in the 60s in Europe—it was a delight for workers to get out of the rain and snow and into their own car. It's the same today in emerging markets, especially China,.." Read more

December 24, 2016

J. Golson, Dec 19, "Chrysler has completed the 100 autonomous Pacifica minivans that will join the Waymo (née Google) fleet in early 2017. The vans, which are plug-in hybrid variants with Waymo's self-driving hardware and software built in, are part of a partnership between Fiat Chrysler (FCA) and Waymo that was announced earlier this year.

Waymo CEO John Krafcik said last week that his company is not interested in "making better cars." Instead, it wants to make "better drivers."..."

December 14, 2016

A. Hawkins, Dec 13, "Today, Google announced that it would be spinning off its six-year-old self-driving project into a standalone business called Waymo, which stands for "a new way forward in mobility," according to John Krafcik, the CEO of the new company.

It was previously reported that Google would be dropping its plan to build its own vehicle without steering wheels and pedals, instead focusing on creating the self-driving technology that can be installed in third-party vehicles. Krafcik didn't provide much clarity there, but did state definitively that the new company was still fully committed to fully autonomous vehicle technology.

"We are all in, 100 percent, on Level Four and Level Five fully driverless solutions," he said.

Krafcik didn't comment on a report in Bloomberg that Google would be starting its own ride-sharing service in partnership with Fiat Chrysler using the Italian car maker's Pacifica minivans as its fleet of self-driving taxis. Google and FCA announced their collaboration earlier this year. Krafcik did confirm that the self-driving Pacificas were still in the build phase, but would hopefully be on the road for testing very soon.

It may be too soon to say that Google is abandoning its plans to build it's own fleet of driverless cars, without steering wheels and pedals. That said, Krafcik made it clear that Waymo "is not a car company, there's been some confusion on that point. We're not in business of making better cars, we're in the business of making better drivers."...Read more

R. Mitchell, Dec 6, "Silicon Valley voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, but companies working on driverless cars seem overjoyed with President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Transportation secretary, Elaine Chao. Chao will wield great power over how driverless cars and other automated vehicles will be regulated — or not....Industry insiders say they don't want Chao to ignore driverless car policy....

Instead, they hope to avoid a patchwork of differing and conflicting rules across the 50 states. "This should be centralized," said Alain L. Kornhauser, director of the transportation program at Princeton University and an autonomous vehicle expert, "but that doesn't mean the states don't play a part. It would be better if we had a common understanding...." Read more

November 20, 2016

J, Yoshida, Nov 15, "...Qualcomm's pending takeover of NXP Semiconductors isn't making the path to V2X any clearer.

NXP remains a staunch advocate for DSRC-based V2X (as demonstrated via truck platooning on Munich roads last week during Electronica). Qualcomm, a leading voice and force behind the progress of the cellular standards, is sticking to its cellular radio technology-based V2X evolution...We see this as a continued cellular revolution with new elements coming in... " Read more

October 27, 2016

B. Grush, Oct. 2016, "Two contradictory stories about our transportation infrastructure are currently in circulation. One is that Ontario's aging, inadequate and congested infrastructure is perennially unable to catch up with a growing and sprawling GTHA. The other is that vehicle automation will soon dramatically multiply current road capacity by enabling narrower lanes, shorter headways and coordinated streams of connected vehicles to pass through intersections without traffic signals to impede flow.

Since the premature forecast of peak car in 2008 and now the hype surrounding the automated vehicle, we are often told that we have enough road capacity; that shared robotic taxis will optimize our trips, reduce congestion, and largely eliminate the need for parking. This advice implies we need wait only a few short years to experience relief from our current infrastructure problems given by decades of under-investment in transportation infrastructure.

This is wishful thinking. Vehicle automation will give rise to two different emerging markets: semi-automated vehicles for household consumption and fully automated vehicles for public service such as robo-taxi and robo-transit. These two vehicle types will develop in parallel to serve different social markets. They will compete for both riders and infrastructure. The purpose of this report is to look at why and how government agencies and public interest groups can and should influence the preferred types and deployment of automated vehicles and the implication of related factors for planning..." Read more

October 7, 2016

D. Victor, Oct. 5, "Traffic deaths in the United States rose 10.4 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2015, maintaining a steady climb....

The numbers were released on Wednesday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which noted that Americans drove about 50.5 billion more miles in the first six months of 2016 than in the first half of 2015, an increase of 3.3 percent....Officials have not identified a specific cause for the most recent increase... " Read more

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. )

August 28, 2016

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

2016

2016 7 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

2016

March 23

17, 2016

18, 2016

19, 2015

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2017-02-05

Just

Some

Half-baked stuff

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I was

24 M-1 Rail, Detroit, #24 MBTA Green

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