Monday, August 22, 2016

Loud Wake Up Calls from Columbus and VW

Two mostly inactive contestants in different aspects of the race to driverless are announcing plans to push full steam ahead. One is a car manufacturer and the other is a Midwestern state in the US.

Join the label club

I didn't even have Volkswagen in the index to this blog. The company has been absent from the driverless race. Not any more. The company is making waking up noises to signal its intentions.

Like Ford Motor Company, VW is aiming for a 2021 rollout of fully autonomous vehicles. Both companies are rejecting the Tesla/Nissan approach of incrementally increasing autonomous features of partially self-driving cars. According to the Reuters article, VW is hiring 1,000 software engineers and developing a much larger presence in Silicon Valley.

On the way to Chicago, Get Graeters Ice Cream

There is a reason to go to Columbus, OH, and it is Graeter's Ice Cream. I like the place on Main Street in Bexley, which is a town surrounded on all four sides by the city of Columbus, but that is a whole other story. Columbus is the state capital, though driverless testing will not be happening there anytime soon.

Ohio is planning to open up a highway - actually one US interstate highway - to driverless testingI-80 does not go through Columbus, so sorry about the Graeters recommendation. You'll be going to a different ice cream place somewhere in Cleveland or Toledo. So we're talking an interstate highway, with cars switching lanes at 80 mph, or 70 mph in heavy traffic, in the mix with testing vehicles. Okay, I'm told that I-80 has much less traffic than I-70, but still. The testing could begin by the end of this year.

Four benefits of driverless testing on I-80:
1. Ice and snow in the winter.
2. Flat and straight. (I'm not sure why that is a benefit as the people of Seattle and San Francisco will one day be clamoring for rides in driverless vehicles.)
3. The road already has a fiber network.
4. Space available on the roadway for maintenance.

Friday, August 19, 2016

Uber or Jetsons Flying Taxi?

By now, you and the entire world know about the Uber driverless announcement and all of you are contemplating a trip to Pittsburgh, not to go on a tour of Carnegie Mellon or Pitt (University of Pittsburgh) with your high schooler, but to take a ride in downtown Pittsburgh in an Uber driverless taxibot - well, with a driver, steering wheel, and brakes. 

It's like the Google car, but not as cute. But Uber has now officially won at least a preliminary foot race in the competition to bring about the driverless revolution by being the first to charge fares for taxi-like, ride hailing, services in the US in exchange for a ride in a vehicle that is not being operated by a human being.

I am considering the trip. But I am considering flying to a country I have no curiosity to visit just to ride on a driverless vehicle. Wait, Uber will only be offering the driverless perk to an undisclosed number of existing customers. C'est la vie. The linked article also has a description of the Uber-Volvo deal. Here's one more article with background on the Uber-Volvo partnership (nothing new). 

Uber joins the game of acquisition musical chairs

Uber is also acquiring a self-driving truck start up that is a Google-spin-off; maybe traitor is a better word. The company was started by two ex-Google-car engineers. Called Otto, the company was initially promising partially autonomous trucks. Otto's full name, by the way, is Ottomotto. 
Uber plans to open a 180,000-square-foot facility in Palo Alto, Calif., to house Otto, which will operate as a stand-alone company focused specifically on upending the long-distance trucking industry. Otto engineers will also work out of offices in San Francisco and Pittsburgh.
Forget surface transportation, take the pilot-less Jetson helicopter 

Airbus is working on a transportation option that it hopes will make the Uber driverless service look like the Model T - pilot-less helicopters. Do not hold your breath. There is no projected date for this service. 
A key goal of the project is alleviating traffic congestion expected to accompany the growing populations of the world's cities. But like the self-driving cars currently undergoing testing, one of the major obstacles to the launch of the self-flying taxi is the lack of a reliable sense-and-avoid technology that allows airborne vehicles to avoid crashing into buildings.  
"That's one of the bigger challenges we aim to resolve as early as possible," Lyasoff says.
 No kidding. I am glad that a company that has not worked out such a significant kink is hesitating before placing a product on the market. 

Articles are referencing the Jetsons' flying contraption, which required a pilot, but not his or her full attention. Enjoy the 1960s' white-washed and sexist introduction to the famous cartoon show.



Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Shared Use: Get on the Driverless Bus or Taxi

Update on shared use driverless

From my Aug. 17 post, which was mostly about state-level activities in Pennsylvania and Arizona to attract driverless testing. It's not just testing anymore.
Uber will be the first, passing Google, Ford, GM, and others in the rear mirror - to bring driverless shared-use service to the public - only in Pittsburgh.
There will be drivers in the car, a la the drivers in the Google cars, but with paying passengers.
Quote from Bloomberg article: Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. 
There will be drivers in the car, a la the drivers in the Google cars, but with paying passengers.
New bus in Europe



Driverless testing in Europe has been and continues to be transit friendly. A German-made driverless bus is being tested in Amsterdam. The autonomous system is called CityPilot; it is produced by Daimler.

Forget testing; call the taxibot

Ford is being bold with an announcement that it will have a driverless ride hailing operation in 2021 with vehicles that lack steering wheels and brakes. Ford is putting its money where its mouth is in terms of investment in small companies that will get the company further ahead in terms of LIDAR technology and machine vision technology. One of those is SAIPS, an Israeli company that is involved in AI and technology to help people who are visually impaired.

Like Google, Ford eschews the idea of partially self-driving vehicle development on the way to completely autonomous operations. It considers fully driverless to be safer than a partial system in which the driver is expected to be bored, but aware at all times.

Beyond Michigan - States Vying for Driverless Testing

A few US states, though behind the curve, are trying in their own auto-centered ways to catch up to the 21st century. Arizona and Pennsylvania are attempting to become more testing-friendly to driverless vehicle companies. 

William Pitt would be proud

Pennsylvania is planning for testing on actual roads, with the help of the corporate representation of Uber on its Autonomous Vehicles Testing Policy Task Force, which has been meeting recently, according to reports in the press. Despite reports that GM is represented on the committee, the June 2016 PennDOT press release about the committee does not indicate that is so. In fact, Uber is the only company represented. There are also task force members from AAA and the trucking and insurance industries. 

Article from govtech.com
Article from The Morning Call

Pennsylvania is contemplating driver-free - no driver required in the vehicle - testing. The state is concerned that Carnegie Mellon, especially, maintains a good position in the driverless race. Uber, Carnegie Mellon, and Pittsburgh are heavily invested and represented on the task force.

Get a driverless Uber in September - that's 2016

Uber will be the first, passing Google, Ford, GM, and others in the rear mirror - to bring driverless shared-use service to the public - only in Pittsburgh.
Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. 
There will be drivers in the car, a la the drivers in the Google cars, but with paying passengers.

Arizona on the road

Arizona is not exactly known as a progressive state and it is quite auto centered. Try walking in Phoenix or staying the weekend downtown car-free, let alone anywhere else in the state.

But Arizona's governor is bullish on driverless testing. An oversight committee of state officials met this week to discuss the encouragement of encouraging more driverless testing in the state. 

Google is expanding testing to Chandler, AZ. It has been mapping the streets and it held an open house with residents last week. 

GM is also testing in Arizona, in Scottsdale. AZDOT, the state's department of transportation, seems very relaxed about this, with statements that nothing prevents driverless marketing in the state

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Toyota Goes Yellow and Blue; Google Into Ride Hailing

Toyota is investing in the University of Michigan (sorry Buckeyes) to the tune of $22 million for artificial intelligence research that will go into driverless vehicles and many other types of products. The Japanese company is also interested in robotics products that enable older adults to remain independent and to assist people with disabilities. 

In a move that I perceive as related to autonomous vehicles, but is not technically so, Google has partnered with Israeli company Gett, a ride hailing, app-based, business similar to Uber. (Now I can't help but mention that according to Jewish law a gett is a document related to divorce that a husband must give to the wife - but without any reciprocal requirement - if she is to be free of the marriage.) 

Cozy linkage

The Jerusalem Post reports that 
In the deal, Google will offer information and a link to Gett in its popular Maps app when users search for directions, including an estimated fare and travel time. The feature, which previously went live in the UK and as of Wednesday is available in Israel and Russia, lets users seamlessly jump from Maps to Gett to order their cabs, or directs them to the app store to download the app. Google has offered the same feature with Uber for some time ...
The Gett deal is just one of a number of similar deals between Google and ride hailing companies around the globe. The deals demonstrate that Google perceives the ride hailing market as significant. Or perhaps Google is hedging its bets because no one can be sure of the business models for future transportation. 

These deals put Google into the space that RideScout formerly inhabited, though that app company did not operate on a global scale. In the musical chairs game of transportation app businesses, Moovel, which is owned by Daimler, purchased RideScout in April 2016.

From the warehouse to the street?

For those who doubt that driverless vehicles are another few decades away or that they will not play nicely with walking humans (otherwise known as pedestrians), this excellent article about the use of self-driving forklifts being employed in factories might give pause. The article does a good job of explaining the technology and operations.

Data convinced union leaders to allow these (or not to oppose them). Experience demonstrates that the autonomous forklifts are safer than human-driven ones and that there have been no collisions with walking human factory workers. Oh and they save the factories lots of money as well. 

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

One More NHTSA Comment

This late comment to NHTSA is an interesting one because it is not from someone with an axe to grind; this is an ordinary citizen, albeit an engineer. Unlike many ordinary people, who are able to ignore the 30,000+ plus deaths on US roads each year (until, G-d forbid, a crash affects them in a personal way), the person who submitted the comment has stated a central truth of the quest for driverless vehicles: they will be a whole lot safer than human-operated vehicles.

The commentator emphasizes the huge number of deaths and injuries and their causes: drunk driving, driving while drowsy, driving while using cell phones (including texting), driving while eating or drinking, and driving with road rage. He cites personal experience as a former firefighter who responded to accident scenes. He even regrets his own statistically unwise decision as a graduate student to drive many hours back home instead of taking a safer mode - which would be any other mode - of transportation. And then he offers the comparative statistics, which are alarming in just how much more lethal driving is than any other mode.

I write this with my heart in my mouth because this weekend I will be in a car on one of those long-distance, high-speed, congested road trips for approximately 10 hours and I know this commentator's data is unimpeachable.

Even Shakespeare would admit that engineers are not lawyers

Although Shakespeare had no affection for lawyers, I do believe even he might be startled by the impractical system of laws and technology that the commentator proposes. I disagree with the whole package.

The commentator suggests that we allow each state to have its own laws regulating driverless vehicle operations. He is not bothered by the specter of inconsistency that keeps car company lawyers awake at night. Oh no, because he proposes that the solution lies both in allowing each state to find its own comfort level with driverless vehicles and with having technology in place that alerts drivers when a state line is approaching. For example, one might be allowed to nap in the car and be completely driverless in state A, then get beeped one mile from the state border of state B, which bans self-driving vehicles altogether.

I believe the suggestion is completely unworkable. 

Get-me-to-the-hospital programming

The commentator does make an interesting suggestion that vehicles should be programmed to head to the nearest emergency room when told to do so or according to customized settings that allow for input about specific medical conditions. Not everyone, after all, is conscious when in need of an emergency room. 

I am glad to see a concerned citizen providing input. This is democracy in action; this is the marketplace of ideas; this is an individual taking the time to share his thoughts with a government agency about an important matter. 

And what will NHTSA do?

NHTSA is saying it will be another few months before it makes any proclamations, but with a Presidential election so near and technology in the driverless field advancing from week to week, it is really anyone's guess when an official statement or proposed guidelines or regulations will be forthcoming.

Can't Resist Cute

This Best Mile video does a nice job of explaining the convenience and behind-the-scenes rationales of driverless public transport. You will find yourself in a world where publicly-available transit is best. And the video is cute, which kept me watching.


Olli and Watson: a beautiful friendship and restaurant recommendations

ZDNet came out with a wonderful article about the role of Watson in Local Motors' Olli shuttle vehicle. Watson is a now-mature creation of IBM (International Business Machines) that started life with a win over humans on the game show Jeopardy. It went on to ace the MCATs (medical equivalent of the SATs in the US) and have a flourishing career in industry. Learned and up to date, Watson is helping out Olli, its autonomous vehicle pal from Local Motors, to humanize the machine/person interactions in driverless shuttles.

So Watson will greet passengers, answer questions about restaurants in the area, and help with directions. Watson has also been trained to understand a diversity of accents and to calm down cranky passengers. It will call an off-site supervisor if anger management is necessary. 

Add sensors and voila ...

Plus, all this self-driving stuff is super easy because college students are taking average cars and turning them into driverless ones. This is at an Arizona program, but soon it could be someone's garage. Perhaps a slight exaggeration.

Monday, August 8, 2016

Urmson and MIT Move On

Chris Ursom has left Google and he either does not know or has decided not to announce where he is going. Others have left, but Urmson has been the public face of the Google car project in the media and before government agencies. He had seemed to completely identify with the project. I can't imagine he will abandon the driverless world or that no other AV player will hire him.

Forget Google, drive your own

Test out your own driverless contraption now without being part of a tech company or auto company team. A driverless test track opens to normal people, but only on limited days in a roaming series of continent-hopping events. Applications seem to be necessary; you can't just show up. And there's a fee. So far, the events, well into 2017, will take place in the UK and in Europe. I feel that post-Brexit we can be honest and say the UK and Europe are different continents.


Kendall Square challenges Silicon Valley

A partnership between MIT and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency for innovation within the Department of Defense (the Pentagon for labeling purposes on this blog) is bearing fruit with the creation of a lidar chip that is super tiny and super thin and - best yet - possibly super cheap at $10, assuming mass production in the future. The chip is undergoing further adaptions to increase its power and accuracy.  

Honestly, I do not understand the technical details, but I do comprehend that this technology could make driverless technology safer and cheaper, therefore closer to being possible for mass production and use.

Israeli startup also goes for less expensive LIDAR

Not as cheap as the $10 goal, but Innoviz, an Israeli startup with millions in funding (okay, not unusual, but it's $9 million) also sees the holy grail of budget-happy LIDAR, though with an unspecified under-$100 price tag. This from the same Geektime article linked above. ccc
Innoviz is building LiDAR sensing systems, which are often used by satellites to measure distance and terrain. What Innoviz and some other companies are betting on is not only the growth of the autonomous vehicle market, but the inevitable reliance of such systems on LiDAR. Their main product, High Definition Solid State LiDAR (HD-SSL), won’t debut until December. They are claiming it will have a wider field of view than the current standard, “higher resolution in both axis and long range sensing,” and be cheaper at a cost coming in under $100.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Pennsylvania Legislation

There is pending driverless legislation in both the Pennsylvania state House and Senate, HB 2203 and SB 1268. These are very similar, but not identical, bills.

The "operator" must be in a position to "control" the vehicle, even in autonomous mode. This is permitted to be done by remote control, though, according to the House Bill, the operator must be within 1000 miles of the vehicle. The bills require an operator and operation is conceived of as being on a test road.  

Okay, I have to chime in here that this stupid 1000-mile limit reminds me of people who hire babysitters only to tell the sitter that he or she has no actual authority to do anything without permission. If the baby or the vehicle is more than a block away, it might as well be a million miles away. Whoever or whatever technology is in charge will be making the decision in case of emergency or split-second choices.

Wait, it gets better ...

This is babysitting-technology legislation. There is no provision in either bill for completely autonomous vehicles. The operator - even 1000 miles away - must be attentive at all times. I'm hoping that attentiveness is something more than Tesla drivers are exhibiting. And the vehicle must be capable of non-autonomous control and disengagement of the driverless system. 

My translation: The vehicles imagined will not be required to have brakes or steering wheels because the operator may manually take over from a remote location. A driver does not have to be in the vehicle. But, basically, no one can be asleep at the wheel.

Like drivers ed, but without the driver

Remember how Dad, well most fathers (not my city dad, who told me to hire a driving school), start you out in a parking lot, building up to low-traffic streets and then, gradually, letting you drive on actual busy thoroughfares? This is pretty much what Pennsylvania lawmakers have in mind, without the parking lot as the required first step. 

The relevant language being:
Establish requirements that an autonomous vehicle must meet before operation , including minimum safety standards for autonomous vehicles and their operation and the minimum number of hours an autonomous vehicle must meet on a test road with low average daily traffic as determined by the department before the autonomous vehicle is introduced on a test road with high average daily traffic as determined by the department. [Emphasis added.]
Plus, there is a whole lot being left to the state's Department of Transportation, PennDOT, with the potential to make Pennsylvania either friendly or anathema to driverless vehicle players. This includes unspecified:
  • Standards for being a tester of a self-driving vehicle,
  • Standards for being an operator of a self-driving vehicle,
  • Standards for permission for a self-driving vehicle to be operated on Pennsylvania roads, and
  • Other restrictions, such as operating only within specified areas and in certain weather conditions.
No surprise that the legislation also comes with California-style requirements for reporting every incident, even those incidents one would not bother to tell Mom and Dad about.

Michigan and Ontario Agree to Talk

Does it count as an agreement when you only list stuff to discuss in the future and you don't actually consent or have a meeting of the minds about anything? Maybe yes, at least according to the state of Michigan, home of Detroit, and the Canadian province of Ontario (that's where Toronto and Windsor are). They are both, evidently, anxious about losing future vehicle manufacturing jobs and profits to other places. So instead of their usual competition, they are going Socialist (did I say that?) and attempting to work together to as governments to keep jobs, profits, and whatever else they consider to be fruits of their leadership in this economic sector. 

Republican-led Michigan is putting money into the auto sector, specifically into testing sites for driverless and connected vehicles. Now why Republican, free-market, (but it's okay to poison the water of poor people in Flint) Gov. Rick Snyder - and his Republican-majority legislature - are doing their best to influence the private sector is both obvious and hypocritical; but that's the sausage making of politics.

Actual cross-border agreement to ...

What Michigan and Ontario actually agreed to do in their newly signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), according to Gov. Snyder's press release, was to:
[C]reate a working group to explore opportunities for increased collaboration that enhance the competitiveness of both jurisdictions. Potential focus areas include:
  • Technology advancement, including connected cars, autonomous vehicles, lightweight materials and alternative fuels
  • Increased supply chain integration and technology transfer through business-to-business partnerships
  • Best practices in industry strategy, regulatory and policy approaches, and workforce skills development. 
For some unknown reason or through oversight, the agreement itself was not linked to the press release.

Money, money

The Governor and the Ontario Premier made nice, nice about how they are both leaders in the world of automobile manufacturing and technology and how their respective jurisdictions are already close friends, what with the billions and billions worth of trade flowing across their common border. No fence requested here.

Crain's remarked on the synchronous timing of the MOU and auto labor talks.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Nvidia Nugget Worth Quoting

Quote from National Law Review article entitled Connected and Autonomous Vehicles – Full Speed Ahead or Tapping the Brakes?, by Steven Hilfinger. Hilfinger's article recounts who spoke and what was spoken about at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR)’s annual Management Briefing Seminarswhich opened a couple of days ago in, where else?, Michigan.
Danny Shapiro of NVIDIA closed out the panel with an optimistic and dizzying discussion of the developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the ability to use software to “train the vehicle in the cloud and bring it into the car,” which is the holy grail vs. the bulky GPU’s that fill the trunks of many autonomous test vehicles today. He noted that VC funds have recently plowed as much as $5 billion into various AI platforms, many of whom intend to operate in the automotive space. 
Yes, that one nugget was worth a post.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Back to the Mall

This is one mall I want to visit. It's in Japan, in a suburb, and it looks completely boring - EXCEPT it has a driverless shuttle. Here's the video link. Truth be told, the video is also boring.

But it would be fun to take the cute shuttle from transit to the mall and back again. Maybe get a bad crepe because that is what malls are for.

One report says the bus is due to start service for regular people next month. Another says the service is now through Aug. 11. In any case, this is a test in anticipation of a permanent service.

Monday, August 1, 2016

Singapore - A Driverless Sandbox

Singapore's LTA (Land Transport Authority = Department of Transportation) is partnering with Delphi and nuTonomy on an MOD (Mobility on Demand) program that will provide first-and-last-mile services. Nice moxie for a small island nation. 

nuTonomy just issued a press release today that the company has:
... entered into a new partnership with Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) to begin trials of an autonomous mobility-on-demand transportation service. The partnership will expand and accelerate the company’s development efforts in Singapore as it progresses towards the launch of a commercial autonomous vehicle (AV) service in 2018. 
Back in early April, 2016, news broke that Cambridge, MA-based nuTonomy had succeeded in being selected by Singapore to do a driverless taxi-pod pilot project. 

Delphi loving Singapore

For some reason, the Delphi Automotive news is all over, whereas the nuTonomy information is not catching as much buzz. Delphi will be providing the self-driving Audi cars. Here's another article with more details. 

This article makes matters much more clear in terms of the different Singapore projects and what Delphi and nuTonomy are doing.

And a testing facility

Perhaps in a bid to get beyond low-speed shuttles and taxipods, Singapore is also opening a small driverless testing facility. In its ambitious quest, the country is also working on being a forerunner in driverless regulation, though another island nation is the first with that.

Driverless Deliveries

Driverless Deliveries

I'm a native New Yorker, so it seems right that urban dwellers expect everything delivered, even groceries. (I don't want to give up on picking out my own produce, though, and in the city you can have it both ways.) Japan will be experimenting with driverless grocery delivery in the spring of 2017. The deliveries will be in a particular zone and in well-marked, cute vans. -


Crappy food and drink by drone

Why anyone would want any food or drink made at or manufactured by a 7-Eleven is beyond me, but I'm not their niche market. If you do like a bad donut, hot dog, or slurpy, soon perhaps you will be able to continue happily on the path to obesity by sitting on the couch and letting a drone deliver your treats. Oh wait, these are still carefully planned and one-off deliveries. Not available yet from your local, lottery-ticket-and-slurpy-selling 7 -Eleven. Sorry, the proper spelling for the mushy drink is slurpee.

17 Million from Michigan for Willow Run

Not that the state of Michigan is favoring any particular industry or manufacturer, but GM is planning on the Willow Run testing facility to push along its driverless cars to reality and real roads. The $17 million is in addition to a $5.7 million loan fund. The Willow Run facility to be called the American Mobility Center, in case anyone is interested in finding out more.

AI for Audi

As George Hotz goes, so goes the rest of the driverless pack? First it was Nvidia, then GM, and now Audi. The German manufacturer is seeing the light that when self-driving cars are sharing the roadway with human drivers, they have to be able to drive in a way that makes sense to those with human eyes. So, like Cruise Automation and Comma.ai and Nvidia, Audi will be going the AI-pseudo-human route as well. At this point, everyone is getting in on the game that driverless vehicles can't just be following a set of rules, but they must be able to both pay unceasing attention and have the capacity to make good decisions. 

If you want to read more about Tesla crash

Detailed article on Tesla crash
SmartDrivingCar.com newsletter - Alain Kornhauser has done a nice job of covering the crash, the seeming failure of the automatic braking system and the truck driver's proceeding through the turn with a speeding car barreling down the highway.