Nividia Versus Mobileye - and They Are Not Alone

Nvidia is confident. It has a buddy in Tesla owner Elon Musk, it has truck stuff going on with PACCAR, a major truck manufacturer, and Wall Street is enamored.

More than apples

They do more than grow apples, launch ships, and grow computer companies out there in the other Washington - Washington State that is. Now they are happy as clams in their expectation that truck manufacturer PACCAR's partnership with Nvidia will bring lots of driverless truck manufacturing to the Evergreen State. Others, probably in states with more professional truck drivers, are concerned about the loss of trucker jobs and jobs in the industries that serve those drivers. Waffle House? Flying J? Where will they be without the middle class disposable income of truck drivers?

Cheap can be good

Forget expensive LIDAR and sensors, this Dr. Jianxiong Xiao, a computer vision professor at Princeton,is using $50 cameras from Best Buy, a US chain store that sells TVs, laptops and batteries. It's not a high-tech mecca. The company is AutoX and an article describes the non-Mobileye approach to driverless.

Yes, the video of the self-driving AutoX car is here.

Let's face it, there are reports each day about up and comers in the software engineering, cameras, and LIDAR corners of the driverless supply chain. There are still plenty of start ups willing to push their ideas and compete with the big guys in this still fluid market.

And from somewhere in the Mediterranean ...

Mobileye has money now that Intel has purchased the company. The question is whether Mobileye can maneuver past Nvidia with its over $15 billion infusion of cash from Intel. Gee, no one talks millions anymore. However, I am not the only one doubting Intel's strategy. Is Intel grasping to have a presence in a market it is unfamiliar with? Did it overpay and go the wrong route as far as artificial intelligence? 

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.

In-Depth Learning and Seeing - Asia and Israel

From Japan, China, and somewhere nearby the Mediterranean 

Toshiba has partnered with Denso Corporation to provide artificial intelligence (AI) capability for partial and fully autonomous vehicles. The Deep Neural Network-Intellectual Property (DNN-IP) - or DNN to its friends - that Denso has developed:

is an algorithm modeled after the neural networks of the human brain and is expected to perform recognition processing as accurately, or better, than the human brain. This algorithm will allow the system to identify different road traffic situations and a variety of obstacles and road markings. 

Due to the rapid progress in DNN technology, Denso Corp. and Toshiba Corp. plan to make the technology flexibly extendable to various network configurations, Denso adds. Additionally, the companies will design the technology to have the ability to be implemented on in-vehicle processors that are smaller, consume less power, and feature other optimizations, Denso said.

Please excuse the long quote; honestly, I do not understand the under-the-hood tech speak and I do not want to get it wrong.

A new eye for depth perception

An Israeli start up, Oryx Vision, is developing hardware to replace LIDAR. Oryx Vision recently received a $17 million boost in venture capital funding. Called Oryx, this new technology supposedly has much better depth perception than LIDAR. An Oryx Vision representative described the contrast between LIDAR and Oryx as the difference between a description of a person and live streaming a person's image. Oryx Vision claims that the speed of driverless vehicles will be able to increase because of the much-improved depth perception. The translation for my non-tech mind was that the low 25 mph speed of the Google cars is due to LIDAR's limitations.

[Editor's note: I wonder whatever happened to that optimistic Israeli radio station that declared many times a day: From somewhere in the Mediterranean, this is the voice of peace. The Internet is truly magical because one incredibly quick search turned up the whole story. As Einstein said, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is miracle. The other is as though everything is." End of unrelated note.]

Hello pedestrians! Bring the popcorn!

LeEco has built a demonstration driverless car - sans price tag. Not only would you be able to watch a movie in it, but if you are outside the vehicle it signals to pedestrians whether the car is in autonomous mode. Think Wizard of Oz: the car changes color when it changes modes from driverless to human-operated and back again. The steering wheel also folds in when the driver hands over control and, presumably, rests back to watch a movie. (Read the linked article after all of the stuff about its delay getting to its destination.) LeEco is a Chinese company.

Musk showing attitude

News is coming fast and furious from Tesla, which is now putting self-driving hardware into ALL of its vehicles. No movie screen, but hey, most people only look at their phones anyway. Elon Musk is also charging the media with distorting the excellent safety record of driverless vehicles, thus making people unsafe by displaying a journalistic preference for unsafe, human-operated cars.

Musk is remaining somewhat defiant about Tesla's liability when crashes occur during its partially-driverless mode. Instead of following Volvo's lead in assuming strict - or complete - liability, Musk puts the onus on the driver to prove a design flaw. He compares the liability situation to elevator mishaps. Clearly Musk has not been to PR school. But for all of Musk's defiance, he has stepped back the availability of Tesla's partially-driverless software after several crashes in different countries. [Nice reporting from Bloomberg in that article.]

Another Day, A New Crew of AI Startups

I do indeed feel like Lucy and Ethel on the chocolate wrapping factory assembly line. The news is speeding up with driverless in terms of old and new players. Bright minds see dollar, yen, euro and other signs on the horizon and they are forming startups to capitalize on and realize the driverless reality.

Unlike Lucy and Ethel, I don't have a factory uniform where I can stuff all those candies that are coming too fast to wrap. It is one of the top five I Love Lucy episodes (not that I am at all an expert here).

Actual news - knowledgable maps

Reports are all around about the startup funding and partnerships of Civil Maps. The company has raised over $6 million. Its mapping service combines AI with 3D location-based mapping. Civil Maps is hiring and located in Berkeley, California. Capital is coming from Ford, a Yahoo founder, and venture capital firms. 

Civil Maps has one approach to minimizing the potentially incredible amounts of data that LIDAR produces as a driverless vehicle rides down the road with lots of stuff to see, interpret, or ignore. 

Across the pond

Oxbotica, a startup out of Oxford University, looks like it has adopted the Comma.AI model of creating a driverless tech package that can be used on existing, conventional vehicles. Better than Comma.AI, however, Oxbotica can work beyond highways - vehicle-only environments - and on regular streets where there are people and other moving stuff. Basically, Oxbotica has the capability to "learn" from its human driver. As long as the human driver is good and experienced, that's a positive.

The company says "Oxbotica is the nominated provider of the autonomous control system for two of the UK’s three Driverless Car Challenges taking place over the next few years in Milton Keynes, Coventry, Greenwich and Bristol." This information is available on the Oxbotica website.  

There's four in the bed and the little one said - roll over, roll over

So there's Comma.AI, Cruise Automation, Civil Maps, nuTononomy, ... 

Seems like a nice bubble for these AI start ups. Get rich quick with a good AI or other high-tech addition to driverless technology. The car companies, especially, are investing in these competitors. By investing, these companies are essentially seeding their own fields and racing around the bend to get to the driverless starting gate.

Cities Feet First? And Buy Driverless from Comma.ai in December, January?

Beverly Hills is jumping on the bandwagon - before there is one - to bring driverless transit shuttles to the pretty, enormously wealthy, city, really an enclave of Los Angeles. 

With its tall trees and pretty, oh-so-expensive houses, can't you see zipping around in a driverless shuttle while sipping a latte? (I take mine with actual dairy cream, but in Beverly Hills, you are probably talking a soy or almond latte crowd.)

Canada was first - but quietly

Toronto is already a year and a half into a two-year planning exercise to get ready for the driverless future and envision what it will look like. But where Beverly Hills differs is its proclamation to bring on the future now.

The Beverly Hills city council voted unanimously in favor of the transit shuttle. 

Maybe the city should contact George Hotz at Comma.ai, which just received more than $3 million in venture capital. Hotz, an arrogant and brilliant former hacker, whom Tesla tried to hire, is vowing that by the end of the year - that's 2016 - he will be selling a self-driving kit or $1000 or less. 

So for $999 (and the jitsu knife for free?), Hotz will sell the camera, sensors, and software. Unlike the piece-by-piece, rule-by-rule approach to driverless technology improvement, Hotz is "teaching" the vehicle. The software learns and accumulates knowledge. 

Here's yesterday's Bloomberg news interview with Hotz. 

Nocturnal, too?

I don't know whether Hotz's car is ready for night-time driving, but Ford is letting it be known that it's driverless cars can "see" at night. In fact, they don't need lights because of the LIDAR technology. Here's the best video news coverage I have seen. Velodyne is the manufacturer of the in-the-dark technology.

And in a land far away, ...

A 2000 mile driverless journey has already started with its first mile in China. The car will drive on highways and, I think, in city traffic in several cities, including Beijing. The wording of the article is somewhat unclear when it comes to urban streets. The company is not Baidu, but Chang'an Automobile. This is a state-owned, no-frills, company.

Since I'm reporting on ambitious plans today, I'll add that Chang'an plans to begin selling driverless cars in 2018. Okay that's my interpretation of the words "put into commercial use." Maybe they are thinking more in terms of taxi pods. Not sure.

US Technology on British Roads Due to British Policies

Oh yes, British enthusiasm and policies are inviting for driverless trials. Google is in talks; pods are scooting around Milton Keynes, a highway driverless pilot is scheduled for 2017, and those not-quite-driverless, but connected truck convoys are going to start showing up on British highways. They're ahead of Munich, Japan, and even China - though China doesn't always advertise its plans and testing.

Anyway, this article from the Telegraph is part journalism/part promotion, but it is crammed with information about various self-driving pilots and the policies in the UK. I have to check out the text of UK laws and regulations. Too busy at the moment.

Lots of trucks all together - no need for bathroom breaks

The European connected-vehicle convoy last week went off so swimmingly that more are in the works. Now it is time, evidently, for the EU bureaucrats to coordinate and make this type of freight transportation possible on an expected-in-the-near-future routine basis.

American ingenuity and technology

We might not be ahead in terms of regulation and laws, but there's still exciting technology advances in the US. Ford is promoting its testing of driverless-in-the-dark LIDAR tests. Looking good. Oh, it's too dark to see.

Don't get me started about how US regulators and lawmakers, with some exceptions, seem more freaked out than welcoming. California legislators are waking up and are not happy with the super conservative (with a small "c") CalTrans draft driverless regulations. The state lawmakers don't want to kiss Google goodbye; nor do they want to relinquish their lead in this field.