2017-04-11

April 11, 2017Newsletter archive →

SmartDrivingCar Summit

University, Princeton, NJ

Alain

April 10, 2017

F. Bruneteau, Apr 2017 "....Yet, despite their potential to reduce accidents, these features have been mostly ignored by insurers so far and have had little effect on premiums (p9)...." Read more

N. Randewich, Apr 11, "For the first time in the era of the modern automobile, the most valuable U.S. car maker is not based in Detroit..." Read more

B. Vlasic, Apr 3, "The record pace of auto sales in the United States is slowing down, leaving investors increasingly bearish on auto stocks.

But there is one exception. Tesla, the electric-vehicle upstart, continues to surge.

On Monday, Tesla surpassed Ford Motor in market value for the first time and moved within striking distance of General Motors, starkly illustrating the growing gap in investors' optimism over its future versus the prospects for the traditional carmakers from Detroit... Read more

B. Williams, Apr 10, " Make some room in the cruising lane, Tesla: Cadillac's Super Cruise is ready for action. The long-developed product, coming as an add-on feature for the 2018 CT6 sedan, will jockey with Tesla's Autopilot to be the best semi-autonomous experience on the highway..." Read more

Press Release, Apr 4, " Bosch and Daimler are joining forces to advance the development of fully automated and driverless driving. The two companies have entered into a development agreement to bring fully automated (SAE Level 4) and driverless (SAE Level 5) driving to urban roads by the beginning of the next decade. The objective is to develop software and algorithms for an autonomous driving system. The project combines the total vehicle expertise of the world's leading premium manufacturer with the system and hardware expertise of the world's biggest supplier.... The vehicle will then make its way autonomously to the user and the onward journey can commence...Read more

K. Kokalitcheva, Apr 5, "Aurora Innovation, the stealth startup founded by the former CTO of Alphabet's self-driving car project, has raised over $3 million in venture capital funding, according to an SEC filing.

Keep reading 230 words

The team: Along with CEO Chris Urmson, who left Alphabet last year, the startup also boasts Sterling Anderson, who previously oversaw Tesla's Autopilot software. The company has also hired several of Uber's self-driving car engineers in Pittsburgh (many of which Uber lured away from Carnegie Mellon a couple of years ago), as well as engineers who have worked at Tesla, Nvidia, and Google.

The company: Aurora will develop a "full package" of software, hardware, and data to sell to automakers who want to build their own autonomous cars, .....The company raised just over $3.1 million last month. Allen & Company managing director Ian Smith is listed as member of Aurora's board, likely a sign that his firm invested. Read more

A. Sage, Apr 3, "Autonomous car start-up Zoox said on Monday that former top U.S. safety regulator Mark Rosekind was joining the Silicon Valley company as its chief safety innovation officer, underscoring the key role regulation will play in the nascent autonomous driving sector.

The hiring of Rosekind, the former head of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), is a major play for Zoox, which has remained secretive about its plans and strategy, and a hire that shows the importance of regulation in how self-driving technology rolls out. Zoox said Rosekind would lead the company's efforts to "safely develop, test and deploy autonomous vehicles." Read more

A. Dalton, Apr 6, "...Udacity already trains engineers for work in the fast-growing autonomous vehicles field, but now the company is ready to harness all that talent and launch its own self-driving taxi company. Led by CEO (and former Udacity Vice President) Oliver Cameron, the new spin-off company will be called Voyage and has given itself the goal of getting autonomous taxis to "real users" in less than five years.... Voyage can hit that goal thanks to a "maturing" ecosystem that will allow the company to add autonomous functions to existing vehicles..." Read more

J. Yosida, Apr 11, "Renesas Electronics emerged from a prolonged silence with a bang Wednesday morning (Japan time), heralding the launch of Renesas Autonomy, a newly-designed advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving platform.

Although details of the platform remain sketchy (the company isn't yet disclosing all the plaform's building blocks), Amrit Vivekanand, vice president for automotive business at Renesas Electronics America, stressed that his company's autonomous vehicle platform stands apart from its competitors because, "This is an open platform."

The operative word here is "open." Read more

Apr 6, "...This new autonomous vehicle design competition is a three-year challenge to develop and demonstrate a fully autonomous passenger vehicle. The competition's technical goal is navigating an urban driving course in an automated driving mode as described by SAE Standard (J3016) level 4 definition by Year 3...GM will provide each team with a Chevrolet Bolt EV as the vehicle platform. Strategic partners and suppliers will aid the students in their technology development by providing vehicle parts and software...Read more

thoughts that deserve your attention

Parkgeddon, Apr 8, "Don't let people park for free...EVEN if the new headquarters that Apple is creating in California does not prove to be "the best office building in the world", as Steve Jobs boasted shortly before his death in 2011, it will be an astounding sight. ..And then, unfortunately, there's the car park. For 14,000 workers, Apple is building almost 11,000 parking spaces. ... Tot up all the parking spaces and the lanes and ramps that will allow cars to reach them, ... In all, the new headquarters will contain 318,000 square meters of offices and laboratories. The car parks will occupy 325,000 square meters...Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it....But parking influences the way cities look, and how people travel around them, more powerfully than almost anything else..

Water companies are not obliged to supply all the water that people would use if it were free, nor are power companies expected to provide all the free electricity that customers might want. But many cities try to provide enough spaces to meet the demand for free parking, even at peak times..

Some base their parking minimums on the "Parking Generation Handbook", a tome produced by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. This reports how many cars are found in the free car parks of synagogues, water-slide parks and so on when they are busiest...Read more

D. Thomas, Apr 5, "Over the next three weeks, about 100 people will travel in a prototype shuttle on a route in Greenwich, London. The vehicle, which travels up to 10mph (16.1kmph), will be controlled by a computer.

However, there will be a trained person on board who can stop the shuttle if required during the tests. Oxbotica, the firm that developed the technology behind the shuttle, said 5,000 people had applied to take part. Read more

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

stuff that probably doesn't deserve your time

D. Etherington, Apr 9, "Self-driving still seems to be a ways off from active public use on regular roads, but once it arrives, it could ramp very quickly, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group. The study found that by 2030, up to a quarter of driving miles in the U.S. could be handled by self-driving electric vehicles operating in shared service fleets in cities, due mostly to considerable cost savings for urban drivers..." Read more

folks didn't get/read the memo)

Navigant, Apr 2017, "This Navigant Research Leaderboard Report examines the strategy and execution of 18 leading companies developing automated driving systems. These players are rated on 10 criteria:...Read more

of Upcoming Events:

SmartDrivingCar Summit

May 17 & 18, 2017

Princeton University

Princeton, NJ

Highlights of:

April 3, 2017

M. Bergen, Mar 29, "... Uber Crash Shows Human Traits in Self-Driving Software...In a statement to police, Patrick Murphy, an Uber employee in the car, said the Volvo SUV was traveling 38 miles per hour, a notch below the speed limit. He said the traffic signal turned yellow as the Uber vehicle entered the intersection. He then saw the Honda turning left, but "there was no time to react as there was a blind spot" created by traffic. The Honda hit Uber's car, pushing it into a traffic pole and causing it to turn on its side. ...Eyewitness accounts can often be unreliable, and other witnesses in the police report did not say that the Uber car was at fault -- something the police agreed with. Still, Torres's account raises the question of whether Uber's self-driving sensors spotted the light turning yellow and, if so, whether it decided it could safely continue through the intersection....Self-driving cars have more often been criticized for driving too cautiously, slowing or stopping when human drivers would be more aggressive. Autonomous vehicles operated by Waymo have been rear-ended due to such issues and the company has been working to make its system more human..." Read more

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

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

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

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. )

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

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2017-04-11

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