2017-03-27

March 27, 2017Newsletter archive →

Deployment/Commercialization Summit;

University, Princeton, NJ

Alain

N. Lomas, mar 25, "More bad news for Uber: one of the ride-hailing giant's self-driving Volvo SUVs has been involved in a crash in Arizona — apparently leaving the vehicle flipped onto its side, and with damage to at least two other human-driven cars in the vicinity.

The aftermath of the accident is pictured in photos and a video posted to Twitter by a user of @FrescoNews, a service for selling content to news outlets. According to the company's tweets, the collision happened in Tempe, Arizona, and no injuries have yet been reported....Local newspaper reports suggest another car failed to yield to Uber's SUV..." Read more

G. Cherelus, Mar 25, "Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] suspended its pilot program for driverless cars on Saturday after a vehicle equipped with the nascent technology crashed on an Arizona roadway, the ride-hailing company and local police said.

The accident, the latest involving a self-driving vehicle operated by one of several companies experimenting with autonomous vehicles, caused no serious injuries, Uber said. Even so, the company said it was grounding driverless cars involved in a pilot program in Arizona, Pittsburgh and San Francisco pending the outcome of investigation into the crash on Friday evening in Tempe..." Read more

D. Muoio, Mar 20, "...We got a ride in Uber's self-driving Ford Fusion back in September and experienced firsthand how regularly the car disengaged. Here's what happens when the car fails and what it says about Uber's place in the autonomous space:..." Read more

S. Casner, E. Hutchinson, D. Norman, May 2016, "What does increasing automation require of drivers? The role of the driver in the extreme cases of fully manual or fully autonomous driving is clear. In manual cars, people drive, and in fully autonomous cars they do not drive. But what is the role of a driver in a partially automated car in which some of the driver's responsibilities are replaced by computers, some of the time? Partial automation makes us part driver and part passenger, having to deal with the familiar problem of working together with computing systems. Even though totally autonomous driving will arrive someday, the transition will be difficult, especially during the period when the automation is both incomplete and imperfect, requiring the human driver to maintain oversight and sometimes intervene and take closer control.28

Here, we review two kinds of emerging car automation systems and discuss the challenges drivers will likely face when expected to work cooperatively with them behind the wheel. These automation systems range from those that offer informational assistance to drivers to those that can assume control of the vehicle for extended stretches of time—or even seize control of the vehicle when the driver wanders into unsafe situations. We draw on the state of the art in driving research, along with decades of previous work that examined the safety effects of automation as it was gradually introduced in the airline cockpit. We discuss a variety of challenges we expect to arise as automation assumes increasing responsibility for driving tasks once performed solely by humans. Some problems seem counterintuitive and some paradoxical, with few of them lending themselves to simple solutions. In the end we invite the reader to consider the evidence we present and decide whether drivers are ready to "go on autopilot" behind the wheel of the next generation of cars...Read more

MrTopSStep.com, Mar 20, "It's been a busy week in the world of self-driving cars, from the Intel Corporation (INTC) acquisition of Mobileye NV (MBLY), to Uber and Alphabet Inc (GOOGL) Waymo high stakes lawsuit. But, missed in all the fuss was actual real news — the undisputed leader, Nvidia Corporation (NVDA), is making waves to further its lead in self-driving cars and turn the segment into a multi-billion dollar business...." Read more

D. Dixon, Mar 26, "... The current Skyway route runs from San Marco along the south bank across the St. Johns River and then runs mainly from the Prime F. Osborn Convention Center to just north of Hemming Park. The proposed routes for the autonomous vehicle extension of that service stretch well into Riverside's Five Points area to the west and all the way to the Sports Complex to the east. It also runs along Main Street to the north in Springfield to UF Health and well into San Marco along Hendricks Avenue. "It's about connecting those places," said Brad Thoburn, JTA vice president of planning, development and innovation...." Read more

K. Korosec, Mar 21, "...The top U.S. cities primed for self-driving cars is led by New Orleans, Albuquerque, Tucson, Ariz., Portland, and Omaha, according to a new index created by Inrix, a company that aggregates and analyzes traffic data collected from vehicles and highway infrastructure..." Read more

F. Lambert, Mar 21, "Unsurprisingly, the Autopilot is most popular option among reservation holders and maybe a little more surprising, a majority of Tesla Model 3 reservations holders in the US want a battery upgrade over the base "more than 215 miles" option..." Read more

T. Simonite, Mar 20, "Many components go into making a vehicle capable of driving itself, but one is proving to be more crucial and contentious than all the rest.

That vital ingredient is the lidar sensor, a device that maps objects in 3-D by bouncing laser beams off its real-world surroundings....Still, many in the self-driving-car industry think lidar needs reinventing if it is to become practical enough. Velodyne is one of several companies working on designs that don't use spinning mirrors to direct their laser beams out into the world, as the devices on the road today do. Versions that steer their lasers electronically, described as solid state, should be much cheaper, smaller, and more robust, because they don't have moving parts..." Read more

S. Greenhouse, Mar 21, "Self-driving (sic) vehicles will threaten the jobs of as many as five million people—workers who make a living as taxi drivers, long-haul truckers, Uber and Lyft drivers, local delivery drivers, limo chauffeurs, and even many bus drivers. ... Read more

T. Lee, Mar 20, "Mark Zuckerberg popularized the slogan "move fast and break things" to describe the breakneck pace of innovation at Facebook, and the phrase has become popular across Silicon Valley. So what happens when technology companies start to build a technology — self-driving cars — that can literally move fast and break not just things but people?

It's a crucial question not only for the major Silicon Valley companies working on self-driving technology — including Google, Uber, and Tesla — but also for regulators. The balance is tricky: If regulators are too lax, people could die from malfunctioning self-driving vehicles. But overregulation could delay the introduction of cars that drive themselves much better than a human driver, costing many more lives in the long run..." Read more

that deserve your attention

R. Brooks, Jan 12, "...In this post I will explore two possible consequences of having self driving cars, two consequences that I have not seen being discussed, while various car companies, non-traditional players, and startups debate what level of autonomy we might expect in our cars and when. These potential consequences are self-driving cars as social outcasts and anti-social behavior of owners. ..." Read more

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

probably doesn't deserve your time

M. Chapman, Mar 23, "Single, childless and 68, Steven Gold has begun to think about future mobility and independence. Although in good health, he can foresee a time when he won't be a confident driver, if he can drive at all. While he hopes to continue to live in his suburban Detroit home, he wonders how he will be able to get to places like his doctor's office and the supermarket if his driving becomes impaired.

For Mr. Gold and other older adults, self-driving cars might be a solution...." Read more

didn't get/read the memo)

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March 20, 2017

J. Bhuiyan, Mar 16, "Some of Uber's self-driving cars aren't driving as smoothly as the company hoped they would. Documents circulated throughout the company's self-driving group, which Recode obtained, gives us a first look at the progress of the ride-hail company's robot cars in Pennsylvania, Arizona and California.

The top line: Uber's robot cars are steadily increasing the number of miles driven autonomously. But the figures on rider experience — defined as a combination of how many times drivers have to take over and how smoothly the car drives — are still showing little progress....

For example: During the week ending March 8, the 43 active cars on the road only drove an average of close to 0.8 miles before the safety driver had to take over for one reason or another...

The good news is the number of miles between these "critical" interventions has recently improved. Last week, the company's cars drove an average of approximately 200 miles between those types of incidents that required a driver to take over..." Read more

M. Scott, Mar 13, "Intel agreed on Monday to buy Mobileye, an Israeli technology company that specializes in making sensors and cameras for autonomous cars, for $15.3 billion, as the global microchip giant tries to expand its reach in the fast-growing sector....As part of the deal, Intel said it would buy Mobileye's outstanding shares at $63.54 a share, a 34 percent premium to Mobileye's closing price on Friday....

Intel's deal for Mobileye seems to be a recognition that chip-making rivals like Nvidia and Qualcomm have moved slightly ahead in the race to provide the computing power needed for autonomous cars... Intel said it would continue investing in the autonomous-driving industry, a sector that it said would be worth about $70 billion by 2030..." Read more

R. Mitchell, Mar 10, "California is back on the map as a state that's serious about welcoming driverless cars.Truly driverless cars — vehicles with no human behind the wheel, and perhaps no steering wheel at all — are headed toward California streets and highways starting in 2018...

The regulations lay out "a clear path for future deployment of autonomous vehicles" in California, said Bernard Soriano, deputy director at the Department of Motor Vehicles...." Read more

E. Gurdus, Feb 27, "The self-driving car business could become a major threat to insurance companies when the technology hits the market, billionaire investor Warren Buffett told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday.

If autonomous vehicles prove to be safer than regular cars, insurance costs will plummet, and by the time roads are filled with self-driving cars insurers like Geico will have taken a serious hit, Buffett said...

"If I had to take the over and under [bet] ten years from now on whether 10 percent of the cars on the road would be self-driving, I would take the under, but I could very easily be wrong," he said...." Read more

February 24, 2017

M. Bergen, Feb 23, "It took Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo seven years to design and build a laser-scanning system to guide its self-driving cars. Uber Technologies Inc. allegedly did it in nine months.

Waymo claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that was possible because a former employee stole the designs and technology and started a new company....Anthony Levandowski, a former manager at Waymo, in December 2015 downloaded more than 14,000 proprietary and confidential files, including the lidar circuit board designs, according to the complaint. He also allegedly created a domain name for his new company and confided in some of his Waymo colleagues of plans to "replicate" its technology for a competitor...." Read more

Press release, Feb. 15, "NSC offers insight into what drivers are doing and calls for immediate implementation of proven, life-saving measures...

With the upward trend showing no sign of subsiding, NSC is calling for immediate implementation of life-saving measures that would set the nation on a road to zero deaths:..." Read more

M. Ross, Feb 8, "Technology and telecommunications groups opposed to a federal mandate that cars automatically communicate with each other are hoping the proposal is an early victim of President Donald Trump's regulatory clampdown.

The Department of Transportation rushed to publish a draft rule in the final days of the Obama administration that would mandate all new cars and light trucks be equipped to transmit data to other vehicles to warn their drivers of potential collisions. The department and automobile manufacturers have been laying the groundwork for such a rule for more than a decade, with millions of dollars in testing indicating that the radio-based technology could immediately save lives. No, that's its fundamental flaw. Even if you have it, it can't do you any good unless the other guy has it. Thus it can't do anything immediately ...The draft rule could save up to 1,365 lives each year by 2060. Immediately??? I'll surely be dead and gone. All that money spent to get such a finding.

....The total annual costs to comply with the mandate 30 years after the rule's launch range from $2.2 billion to $5 billion, according to 2016 NHTSA data. Consumers can expect to pay about an extra $300 per vehicle equipped with DSRC technology, the data show. That's a lot of 'good money to be thrown after bad'. Let's spend Billions to justify our Millions in sunk costs? Much worse than 'doubling down' ...Meanwhile, artificial intelligence, camera technology, sensors and radar, which are already being used in autonomous vehicle development, improve vehicle safety and don't require cars to be connected to each other, Paul Brubaker, president and CEO of the Alliance for Transportation Innovation,..."

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

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

September 23, 2016

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. )

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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2017-03-27

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