Popping Up Like Weeds from the Sidewalk

[Image from Cision PR Newswire.]

Gov. Hickenlooper of Colorado declared Monday, Dec. 4th to be Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Day. No word on store sales for that holiday. Part of Hickenlooper's C-and-AV Day photo op was to showcase Colorado's upcoming AV pilot project.

The declaration of the special day was a way for the pro-AV governor - whose administration paved the way for the driverless truck beer delivery PR stunt - to continue to highlight AV partners and Colorado's enthusiasm.

According to the press release, in very press-release-y language:

"Panasonic, a global leader in smart cities and smart automotive technology solutions, welcomed Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, Denver offices, where he proclaimed December 4 as "Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Day" to reinforce initiatives like Panasonic's connected vehicle partnership with CDOT's RoadX Program, as well as acknowledge EasyMile, a leader in autonomous technology, for their North American headquarters grand opening co-located within the Panasonic building."

Best of luck to Lauren Isaac of EasyMile as she awaits the birth of her baby. By the time that baby is a teenager, he or she will never need a driver's license. My own kids told me about six years ago that their generation would be the last for that.

Other EasyMile news is that the company is graduating, or rather expanding, from cute AV shuttles to real buses, AVs, of course. EasyMile is partnering with the French government and "IVECO, Sector, Transpolis, ISAE-SUPAERO, Ifsttar, Inria, and Michelin" to produce the AV buses. The buses will be large enough to transport 100+ passengers. (A warning to all of you traveling with more than one small child: Whether or not a bus has a driver, get on at a stop where you can sit together and where you do not have to stand holding a child of 30 pounds or one wearing a snow suit. AVs will not solve every transportation conundrum.)

Watch this nice video of the EasyMile AV shuttle at Bishop Ranch office park in California, being piloted in a partnership with the Contra Costa Transportation Authority.

In the state where everyone believes every visitor wants to move there

Look at the cute Colorado license plate for the EasyMile AV shuttle. It will be spring 2018 before regular passengers can get on board to ride the first-mile/last-mile route near Denver's 61st and Peña Station. Political and business partners came out to shine anyway for the early dog and pony show on Monday.

Perfect would be taking that shuttle from the commuter bus stop near Louisville, CO (near Boulder) to the Moxie Bread Company hipster bakery and coffee place. It's a Denver transit bus, so why not?

[Off topic: Moxie bialys are nowhere near the real thing, but their whole grain, naturally-leavened bread is excellent. In the bialy/bagel realm, I remain true to my pre-hipster Brooklyn roots.]

Pilots popping up everywhere

Nissan will be starting a pilot in Japan for app-based AV ridehailing. Will start with only two Nissan Leaf electric vehicles. The pilot will begin in March 2018.

Lyft riders in Boston's Seaport neighborhood may be experiencing AV ridehailing trips due to a pilot program and a partnership between Lyft and nuTonomy.  Delphi owns nuTonomy, which has experience in Singapore with AV pilots.

Previous posts about nuTonomy activity in Singapore: AV ridehailing in 2018; Singapore is a driverless sandbox; plus more posts about AV activity in Singapore.

Will vans be cool again?

The company first known for its cool vans is trying to climb back to regain that reputation. Volkswagon has developed an AV van called MOIA that will be launched as the vehicle for a ridehailing service. "The van-pooling MOIA service will launch in Hamburg in 2018 with 200 vans, letting passengers enter a departure point and destination in an app. "We've set ourselves the goal of taking more than a million cars off the roads in Europe and the USA by 2025," said MOIA CEO Ole Harms."

[Image from Endgadet.]

FYI: No flower power on these sleek, corporate-looking VW vans.

Fiskers has also developed an AV shuttle called Orbit and its shape varies from the cute boxy design of other companies. No word on when this van-like shuttle vehicle will appear on roads or where it will launch.

School bus without driver

[Image from Teague.]

So, I hope parents are aware that school bus drivers do not actually supervise children who ride the bus. I mostly walked my kids to school up to high school, but I overheard plenty of kid conversations about school bus rides.

The AV school bus design, named Hannah,  crafted by the Teague design firm is cute. The affluent-and-white world portrayed in the photographs suggests a crime-free, suburban paradise. In the real world, perhaps parent volunteers would be needed up to high school, especially in the prime cliquey years of fourth grade through middle school.

World Beyond US Going Fast for Driverless

Forget schlepping packages home

Norway now has driverless grocery deliver. Actually no human travel required because it is an online supermarket that is offering this service. This is a pilot project; regulatory changes will be needed to go beyond a pilot phase. The Norwegians are not setting their hopes only on the convenience of driverless grocery delivery, but on similar services for delivering restaurant food and picking up reycling. A guy is actually quoted as saying this will halve his family's food bill; does no one cook anymore?

In Brooklyn, there is driverless delivery, but that is with bikes and carts.

Driverless 2.0

South Korea will be testing what it calls second-generation driverless starting in early 2017. The vehicle is designed to operate on city streets as well as on other public roads. The pilot comes out of testing at a university in Seoul. 

Another piece of news that can be grouped under the heading of second-generation driverless is the advance of cheap LIDAR that has been developed in Germany. This new LIDAR package has no moving parts and costs less than $50. Test kits will be available in 2017 and production is supposed to start in 2018. The range of the LIDAR sensors is over 600 feet, so that approximately nine to 11 seconds of highway driving will be within the range of its "eyesight."

While in the US ...

While technology in the US is advancing thanks to innovation in Silicon Valley, Boston, Michigan, and elsewhere, the state of regulation and a legal framework for driverless is another matter. At this point, the situation is state versus state, and state versus federal government. The Washington Post reports that the NHTSA Administrator (for the Obama Administration), Mark Rosekind, has been criticizing California because its proposed driverless regulations would create the kind of fractured map of different state regulations that could severely hamper a national approach to regulation of driverless operations. 

The proposed framework in California includes mandatory reporting of driverless vehicle information requested in the proposed national guidelines. It seems to be the mandatory part that most bothers the NHTSA Administrator because the proposed NHTSA automated driving guidelines would be, if left unchanged, voluntary. Plus, being national in scope, one would not have to wonder if license for driverless operation will cease at a state border.

Our free press is also reporting everywhere on Intel's quest for companies to release data, which Intel products can store - for a price, of course - all in the interest of promoting faster driverless technology.

No Break From Driverless Developments

A few days off to enjoy real-life family and events. A little less attention paid to driverless while immersed in much home baking of holiday and rye breads for friends and family. (Everyone needs a source of good bread, but truly here's nothing like homemade. Not that I am the best baker, but a fresh homemade bread has amazing taste and is pure comfort food. Plus, naturally leavened bread is far healthier than breads made with commercial yeast. Rant over.)

The result? I fell woefully behind - for just a few days - on driverless news. Really, driverless news should not come out if I am not paying attention.

Acquisitions and money flowing

German-based Infineon acquires Innoluce BV, a Dutch producer of miniature, and potentially a very cheap, lidar technology. Infineon us a chip manufacturer. Here's a Business Insider article about the acquisition, which also explains well the differences in production costs.

A French driverless shuttle startup, Navya, is receiving a funding boost from, among others, Keolis, a large international transportation and transit company. The boost is to the tune of $34 million, with a $224 million valuation that demonstrates the current groupthink about Navya.

MIT-spawned Optimus Ride is also receiving an infusion of about $5 million. No specifics on the emerging technology that Optimus is incubating, but there is deep autonomous vehicle experience on the staff of the Boston startup.

Technology advance

The University of California at Riverside (UC Riverside) has created a new type of navigation technology. The technology does not rely on GPS, which does not work well in certain settings (such as mountain valleys), and instead relies on existing signals, such as cellular networks and wifi.

Finally on the street

After announcements and plans, finally, finally, driverless cars have appeared on the streets of Milton Keynes, a city in England. They are slow - at 5 mph - and cute and there. Australia, site of the current ITS World Congress conference, has hosted an actual driverless car on its roads as well. Bosch is the producer of the driverless system used on that car.

Different Places, Different Driverless Laws Proposed

Yes, I will be writing about the NHTSA guidelines VERY soon. But first I have to finish reading the long, long document and I have a whole job and life outside of my obsession with driverless transportation

The design is at fault

The German transport minister is proposing - for semi-autonomous cars a/k/a Tesla - that manufacturers NOT drivers be liable when the driver fails to pay attention, say texting a grocery list instead of watching the road. The implicit argument goes that this situation is completely foreseeable given the monotonous nature of watching the road when the self-driving/autopilot technology is almost completely reliable. 

The German proposal would also place completely driverless operation of vehicles on equal footing with conventional human driving. Driverless would be allowed; just follow applicable laws and regulations.

Other big news in the last few days was the green light a Michigan House panel gave to the driverless bill. If the Michigan Senate's unanimous approval is any indication, the bill is destined for passage. Go here for highlights of the bill.

Hey, driverless; get over here

I'm imagining the hail of a driverless taxi-transit vehicle in my hometown of Brooklyn. Except wait, an idea being floated is not for what I consider the real Brooklyn, but rather for transformed and gentrified neighborhoods (translation: expensive) along the L train. L service will be suspended for quite a while, starting in 2019, and a Daily News opinion piece suggests an expansive driverless pilot program. So the suggestion is to transform the dreaded L-pocalyse into the L-AutonomousMobilility opportunity.

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.

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.

Taxipods, Transit, and Testing Facilities, Oh My

Plenty of publicly available transportation pilot and permanent driverless projects are in the works. These can be somewhat neatly divided into taxipod and small or mini-bus transit. This post represents just a sample from recent news reports, but if you read this blog or other driverless news sources, you know there are pilots and plans in the works in England, Japan, Singapore, and the US. That is just off the top of my head; I'm sure there are others. That's what the index to the blog archives is for.

Before the news, one cute video from Sweden that imagines a perhaps overly optimistic driverless future in a generic city with Lego people and ice cream cone and cardboard architecture, with sweet parks to replace parking lots.

Taxi and tandoori

Construction should begin in India on a taxi-pod project in Gurgaon. This project appears similar to the Morgantown, West Virginia personal rapid transit (PRT) project built in the 1970s in the US. That's basically why I have not written about it before. The similarity with the Morgantown PRT being that the pods will operate on a fixed guideway rather than as automotive vehicles on roads. There is still an unresolved issue of which agency will be responsible for auditing the safety (and performance?) of the project. The project will start out with a 13-km pilot phase and the intent is to scale up to a full 70-km project.

Careem - not Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Okay, my basketball knowledge is not exactly current, but when I hear Kareem mentioned, the former basketball star is the one who comes to mind. That might be about to change because a Dubai driverless project with Careem is in the works. Careem, which is currently a ride hailing app (Uber-like) in the Middle East and Pakistan, plans to operate a driverless taxi-pod option in the future.

The taxi-pods will be able to function solo or attach to other pods. Careem's partner, US-based Next Future Transportation, makes driverless pods.

Careem is also partnering with Next Future Transportation to raise money for the project. The leadership of Dubai has been proclaiming its enthusiasm for driverless transportation for a while.

Euro buses sans drivers

Europe is a pretty transit-friendly place, but it's still nice to see transit again and again as a ground floor participant in driverless transportation. 

Mercedes Benz has created a driverless bus that has successfully been tested on an actual road in the Netherlands. It's called Future Bus. Now Mercedes is telling the world. There is a boring video, but it is very short. (It feels like the start to a horror movie with its cool, impersonal surroundings and muzak.) In the video, there is a driver and a driver's seat, but there's no hands on the wheel. The goal is to begin operations with the buses by 2020.

Testing facilities - everyone wants one

Two testing facilities being discussed this week: the Smart Cities winner of Columbus, Ohio, and the long-planned Willow Run near Detroit, Michigan. 

The Columbus testing site is a track at a now-empty, unused stadium. Driverless transportation is just one facet of the winning Smart Cities project. The Columbus project focuses on using transportation to help neighborhoods with struggling, low income residents. If you've visited Columbus, you know this is a huge issue.

Willow Run gets closer

Not sure why Willow Run is taking so much time for the land to be purchased and whatever needs to be built at Willow Run, which is intended to be a driverless testing facility. This is former GM land - location of a GM WWII bomber facility - for which the state of Michigan is helping to fund the acquisition and infrastructure for. Also Michigan gets enough snow to adequately test driverless technology to be able to navigate real winters.

But Willow Run is old news. It's the purchase agreement that just got signed.

Here's the news in a nutshell.

The Michigan Economic Development Corp. and the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response Trust on Monday announced a $1.2 million purchase agreement for the acquisition of 311 acres at Willow Run in Washtenaw County’s Ypsilanti Township. 

Trucking companies investing and salivating

If you are the owner of a large trucking company, I can only imagine your glee when considering the benefits of driverless hauling. No maximum limits on driver time, no rest stop shower and eating time, no obesity and other health problems to get bad PR about. Of course, there are details, but this is a huge opportunity. Daimler, one such company, is investing heavily in connected and autonomous systems (CV and AV). One of its buses just completed a complex, but quick AV test. CargoX is a freight broker working on a tech platform for AV and CV. It is now expanding internationally with the help of funding from Goldman Sachs. Click here for the trucking article.

By the way, the Columbus Smart Cities program will include testing of truck platooning and driverless non-lead trucks near the airport. Platooning is a connected vehicle approach for trucks so they can travel quite close together (I'm thinking of brio train magnets). The webpage linked to has an incredibly bad video that demonstrates an awesome and seamless platooning experience.

Legal stuff

China has cold feet - for now - as far as allowing driverless vehicle testing on its roads. The country has ambitious plans, projects underway, and companies heavily invested in driverless. But until further notice, Chinese roads are off limits. However, players in China are actively working out the details of regulations that will allow driverless operations on public roads.

Tesla crash news continued

Here is a link to the letter to Tesla from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). The letter requests all sorts of information about the fatal crash in May and about all Tesla autopilot cars. No question that the NHTSA feels public pressure to investigate fully. There's competition with sibling agency NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), which is also investigating. Also NHTSA has no history of a close relationship with Tesla, in contrast to its coziness with the traditional automakers. 

Like to Live in a Driverless Town? Integration of Transport

Remember in economics class when you learned about vertical and horizontal integration? Before the first fleet of self-driving vehicles hits our app list or the road, before the first convoy of driverless trucks delivers watermelons, cat food, and clothes you really don't need, integration, both horizontal and vertical, is starting to happen.

We are in the fascinating embryonic stage when all is possible and the realities of life in a self-driving world are not yet fixed.

A Florida developer and a town are planning big, a sustainable, walkable town with driverless transit.

A German railway is planning a multi-modal future that ferries train passengers to its driverless cars. Sounds very 19th century and luxurious. I would like those driverless taxis to allow for roll-on of luggage and instead of lifting heavy bags into trunks of cars. My request.

Monday - Already More Car Company Driverless Plans

General Motors (GM) is investing in the Bolt EV, which sports the cheapest battery cost yet per mile or kilometer. However, GM appears to be shifting gears somewhat from its step-by-slow-step to driverless with its testing of autonomous Chevy Volts at the campus of the Warren Technical Center in Michigan. GM employees will soon be able to book rides.

Book a ride now for 2020 Olympics

Japan is planning to surge ahead, at least according to a bold statement by Robot Taxi, that driverless cars will be scooting around in time for the 2020 Olympics to be held in Tokyo. Japan is also intent on using driverless to provide transportation to older people and people with disabilities.

Here's a heartwarming video via Mashable.

Meanwhile, in Germany ...

Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, is testing the driverless Mercedes truck on public roads. Not too long before FedEx, UPS, and even the US Postal Service will be disappointing dogs everywhere when there are no drivers and the drones come to the front door with packages.

Two Steps Closer to Driverless Transit

Santa Clara University's three-month driverless shuttle pilot - an intra-campus transit system, from my perspective - will look at which model works best for satisfying travel demand, the choices being (1) the conventional fixed-route transit model, or (2) a demand-response, you-call/we-pick-up model. However, it will be a while before any data is produced because university students will not be allowed to ride the golf-cart vehicles for at least the first month. Something about safety; I'm sure the parents appreciate that.

Driverless bus in China

Yutong Bus, a Chinese transit vehicle manufacturer, has successfully tested a driverless bus. The manufacturer exports to 120 different countries and sells over 60,000 buses a year. This was just one successful drive, but it is nice to see a vehicle manufacturer aiming to bring driverless technology to the transit market.

Google monthly report

Nice tidbits and tea leaves in the Google monthly report on its driverless comings, goings, and progress. Google is emphasizing the safety of its vehicles in California and Texas traffic, doing well by pedestrians, not crashing into deer (or visa versa), and continuing to rack up driverless miles - over two million and counting, according to Google. Next up will be pod cars in Austin (just the old models are there now) and figuring out the venue riders will want use to enter destination information. Smartphones are a likely choice. A question I've not seen Google mention is whether it will produce shared-ride or transit driverless vehicles. Those pods are cute, in a smurf kind of way, but do we really want to exchange current congestion for a sea of adorable pods and endless parking lots with identical G-cars?

Speaking of pods, two-seater, driverless prototype cars will soon be on the road in a city in Germany. The birthplace of Frederick Engels (Karl Marx's pal), Wuppertal, now a down-on-its-heels former rust belt manufacturing center, will host the mini-cars on a test track on a stretch of city street that offers a diversity of driving challenges, including the presence of pedestrians.

Laser focus - cheaper and lighter

As with most innovations, the prototypes and early models are expensive. Now, the expensive technology that Google is using as the eyes of its driverless pods, called LIDAR (a mix of light and radar), is being manipulated, if you will (let's be clear: this technology is beyond me and I rely on others to explain it), by other companies and universities.

The University of California at Berkeley has come up with - or worked hard to develop - a cheaper, lighter version of LIDAR technology and hardware. Seems that this team has gotten the cost reduced from about $80k to $10. And they are aiming even lower.

And on the long route

Toyota continues to bank on a slow road to driverless and a long phase of partially autonomous vehicles. The company is putting its money where its mouth is - $50 million of it - by funding MIT and Stanford as joint research centers. An impressive robotics guy, Gill Pratt, has been hired to oversee the effort.

Autonomous farms, trucks and so much more

Driverless tractors and produce pickers are happening. One tech-obsessed farmer discusses his investment in human-less farm equipment. Even the abysmally low wages paid to migrant farmworkers amount to a big expense for agribusinesses large and small. This article is mostly about technology applied to strawberry picking that can track the fruit's development, mimic how a human harvests the fruit, and package it on the spot.

That might make a vacation at an organic farm much less charming. 

Trucking without truckers

The trucking industry has the same issue as the farms in terms of the high cost of drivers. Mercedes-Benz already has a driverless truck prototype. This will take driverless commercial vehicles from the warehouse to the roads. The article also discusses small machines that will autonomously traverse sidewalks to deliver packages to our doors without a human involved at all. 

So many snarky comments possible with that news. I hope those little machines are not equipped with cameras and that they are designed for easy navigation with pedestrians.

Michigan wants to lead

The University of Michigan is taking the advent of driverless vehicles, and robotics generally, very seriously, with a center for autonomous technology to be located right by the autonomous vehicle testing grounds.