Self-operating shuttle bus crashes after Las Vegas launch (All Things Self Driving)

guest · Jul 21, 2019

First injury on Utah's driverless shuttle during unexpected stop
July 19, 2019
https://kutv.com/news/local/first-injury-on-utahs-driverless-shuttle-during-unexpected-stop

The first injury has been reported on Utah’s new driverless shuttle.
Gene Petrie, 76, was thrown from his seat Tuesday when the autonomous shuttle came to a sudden stop.
“Out of the clear blue, it suddenly stopped, and it wasn’t a slow-down stop,” said Charlie Roberts, spokesman for the Utah State Tax Commission, where Petrie works. “It was a sudden stop.”

UDOT is confident the shuttle is safe, even as the agency and the manufacturer work to determine the cause. It’s still a mystery what caused the sudden stop, as no one noticed a person or obstacle that may have tripped a sensor.
The agency has dropped the top speed from 12 miles per hour to 9. The operator is now more frequently reminding people that abrupt stops are possible.
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hawki · Jul 21, 2019

"Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’

Ford and other companies say the industry overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles, which still struggle to anticipate what other drivers and pedestrians will do.

A year ago, Detroit and Silicon Valley had visions of putting thousands of self-driving taxis on the road in 2019, ushering in an age of driverless cars.
Most of those cars have yet to arrive — and it is likely to be years before they do. Several carmakers and technology companies have concluded that making autonomous vehicles is going to be harder, slower and costlier than they thought...

[Car companies] attribute the delay to something as obvious as it is stubborn: human behavior...

Researchers at Argo say the cars they are testing in Pittsburgh and Miami have to navigate unexpected situations every day. Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bicyclist riding the wrong way down a busy street between other vehicles. Another Argo test car came across a street sweeper that suddenly turned a giant circle in an intersection, touching all four corners and crossing lanes of traffic that had the green light...

'You see all kinds of crazy things on the road, and it turns out they’re not all that infrequent, but you have to be able to handle all of them,' Mr. Salesky said. 'With radar and high-resolution cameras and all the computing power we have, we can detect and identify the objects on a street. The hard part is anticipating what they’re going to do next.'..."

(Can not be read in private mode)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/business/self-driving-autonomous-cars.html

guest · Jul 23, 2019

Bosch and Daimler obtain regulatory approval for level 4 self-parking system
July 23, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/23/...ory-approval-for-level-4-self-parking-system/

Cars that can park themselves aren’t anything out of the ordinary, but Bosch and Daimler claim they’ve accomplished something of a world’s first with their system.
The two companies today jointly announce [...] German certification authority TÜV Rheinland, have approved their smartphone-controlled automated valet for use in the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage in Stuttgart.

“Automated valet parking is the world’s first infrastructure-based solution for a fully automated parking service to have been approved by the authorities,” said Dr. Markus Heyn, member of the Robert Bosch board of management.

The autonomous parking valet leans on an intelligent infrastructure supplied by Bosch and Mercedes-Benz, which consists of sensors that monitor driving corridors and their surroundings to guide compatible vehicles to and from assigned spaces.
“This approval from the Baden-Württemberg authorities sets a precedent for obtaining approval in the future for the parking service in parking garages around the world,” said Daimler head of drive technologies Dr. Michael Hafner.
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Press release: World first: Bosch and Daimler obtain approval for driverless parking without human supervision

guest · Jul 23, 2019

Lyft releases open source data set for autonomous vehicle development
July 23, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/23/...-data-set-for-autonomous-vehicle-development/

In an effort to bolster the development of cars capable of driving themselves around without human supervision, Lyft today released an autonomous vehicle data set that the company is calling the largest of its kind. It’s freely available in the existing nuScenes format, which was initially developed by Aptiv.

“With this, we aim to empower the community, stimulate further development, and share our insights into future opportunities from the perspective of an advanced industrial autonomous vehicles program.”

In addition to over 55,000 human-labeled 3D annotated frames of traffic agents, the data set contains bitstreams from seven cameras and up to three lidar sensors, plus a drivable surface map [...]
Samples were collected from a fleet of Ford Fusion autonomous vehicles in a bounded geographic area, Lyft says.
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Lyft: Unlocking Access to Self-Driving Research: The Lyft Level 5 Dataset and Competition

guest · Jul 23, 2019

Police investigate if crashed car was partially self-driving
July 22, 2019
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/police-investigate-tesla-driving-crash-64493723

A woman was arrested after running a red light in a rented Tesla in San Francisco and causing a crash that killed a tourist and left his wife critically injured, authorities said Monday.

Officers were investigating whether the Tesla, which was rented through the peer-to-peer car rental service Get Around, was operating in "Autopilot," a partially self-driving system, when the collision occurred.
Tesla's Autopilot had been activated at the time of two separate fatal crashes in Florida.
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guest · Jul 24, 2019

Cruise will launch robotaxi service in San Francisco, but not this year
Safety and validation, a massive EV charging station and community outreach are the focus
July 24, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/c...axi-service-in-san-francisco-but-not-in-2019/

Cruise is scrapping an ambitious target to launch a commercial robotaxi service before the end of the year, the company’s CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday in a lengthy blog post that revealed new details about its plan to eventually deploy in San Francisco.

“It seemed highly unlikely that Cruise would meet that 2019 and not just because of the technical challenges,”
“From the beginning, the approach at Cruise was to do this safely and to do this at a very large scale,” Ammann told TechCrunch. “There’s a technology race going on here, but there’s also a trust race going on as well. It’s really important that when we do this the first time, that we do it right.”
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guest · Jul 25, 2019

DeepMind is helping Waymo evolve better self-driving AI algorithms
July 25, 2019
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...ymo-evolve-better-self-driving-ai-algorithms/

Waymo’s self-driving cars now have something in common with the brains that guide regular vehicles: their intelligence comes partly from the power of evolution.
Engineers at Waymo, owned by Alphabet, teamed up with researchers at DeepMind, another Alphabet division dedicated to AI, to find a more efficient process to train and fine-tune the company’s self-driving algorithms.

They used a technique called population-based training (PBT), previously developed by DeepMind for honing video-game algorithms.

“At Waymo we train tons of different neural nets, and researchers spend a lot of time figuring out how to best train these neural nets,” says Yu-hsin (Joyce) Chen, a machine-learning infrastructure engineer at Waymo. “We had a need for it and just jumped at the opportunity.”
Chen says her team is now using PBT to improve the development of deep-learning code used to detecting lane markings, vehicles, and pedestrians, and to verify the accuracy of labeled data that is fed to other machine-learning algorithms.
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guest · Jul 25, 2019

Gatik begins using robot vans to haul goods between Walmarts in Arkansas
July 25, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/25/...s-to-haul-goods-between-walmarts-in-arkansas/

Retail giant Walmart today revealed that it’s launched a pilot with Gatik, a two-year-old startup developing an autonomous vehicle stack for B2B short-haul logistics, to ferry customer orders between select store locations in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The collaboration marks the latest in a series of driverless delivery efforts kicked off by Walmart in recent years. In January, the company worked with Udelv to pilot autonomous deliveries in select stores, and in November, Walmart teamed up with Ford and Postmates to test self-driving grocery delivery in the Miami area.
Gatik‘s platform taps level 4 autonomous light commercial vehicles
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Walmart: Walmart Begins Pilot with Autonomous Vehicle Company Gatik

guest · Jul 30, 2019

ComfortDelGro's self-driving shuttles to start picking up passengers at NUS
July 29, 2019
https://www.straitstimes.com/singap...huttles-to-start-picking-up-passengers-at-nus

An autonomous shuttle service which transport giant ComfortDelGro has been testing at the National University of Singapore campus since May will start taking passengers from Tuesday (July 30).

It will be plying a 1.6km route between Heng Mui Keng Terrace and Business Link for one year to determine the commercial viability of such a service.
The service, which is free of charge, will not operate when it rains.
The Straits Times understands most autonomous vehicle sensors are currently impaired by poor weather conditions.

The shuttle can carry up to 12 people, and - like all autonomous buses here - will have a human operator on board to ensure safety.
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guest · Jul 30, 2019

Ford acquires Quantum Signal to bolster autonomous car effort
July 30, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/30/ford-acquires-quantum-signal-to-bolster-autonomous-car-effort/

Ford purchased Quantum Signal for an undisclosed amount, a 20-year-old company behind computer-generated environments (ANVEL) used by militaries to test unmanned remote and autonomous systems.
The carmaker says it’ll make use of Saline, Michigan-based company Quantum’s “extensive experience” in real-time simulation to build out its transportation as a service (TaaS) platform, as well as controls that support functional safety and other vehicle technologies.

“While Quantum Signal has operated in relative obscurity over the past couple of decades, its work has been on our radar at Ford for a while now,” wrote Visintainer in a blog post.
“[Its work] can be repurposed to support Ford’s self-driving vehicles to help improve their ability to analyze the environment around them.”
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ronjor · Jul 30, 2019

J.D. Power Mobility Confidence study finds people wary of EVs, self-driving cars

By Andrew Krok July 30, 2019
Despite all the hullabaloo about electric cars, they're still a very new technology. And, as much as we've heard about self-driving cars, they're still years (if not decades) away from feasibility. As it currently stands, though, it appears consumers aren't terribly excited about either.
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guest · Jul 30, 2019

U.S. Congress seeks to jump start stalled self-driving car bill
July 30, 2019
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...t-stalled-self-driving-car-bill-idUSKCN1UP2HV

The House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate Commerce Committee sent automakers, safety groups and others interested in the bill a request for input and said they were working on a “bipartisan and bicameral basis to develop a self-driving car bill.”

“Right now various countries are exploring regulations that will shape the future of autonomous vehicles, and the U.S. risks losing its leadership in this life-saving, life-changing technology, so we urge Congress to move forward now, this year,” spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist said.
The letter sought input by Aug. 23 on a variety of issues including federal rules - both current or new - testing, privacy, disability access, cybersecurity, consumer education and crash data.
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guest · Jul 31, 2019

Recogni raises $25 million for power-efficient autonomous car inferencing
July 31, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/31/...r-power-efficient-autonomous-car-inferencing/

While the AI models that guide the cars’ decision-making have powerful servers at their disposal for training, inferencing — the stage at which the algorithms make predictions — must be performed offline to ensure redundancy.
But even fully trained models require powerful (and power-hungry) in-car PCs for real-time processing, a paradigm Anand and company believe is unsustainable.

Recogni’s integrated module — which comprises three passively cooled image sensors, an external depth sensor, and and a custom inferencing chip — can perform up to 1 peta operations per second while consuming about 8 watts of power, thanks to an approach that offloads central processing to multiple points on a vehicle.
Recogni intends to initially target level 2 autonomous vehicles [...] with the goal of eventually enabling level 5 cars (that can do anything a human driver can do).
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ronjor · Aug 1, 2019

Electrify America and Stable Auto are testing robotic EV chargers for self-driving cars

It's like Tesla's automated charging arm, except it's probably not vaporware.
By Andrew Krok August 1, 2019
Electric vehicle charging points are great to see popping up in all corners of the globe, but when it comes to future autonomous vehicles, they're sort of incompatible. After all, who will be there to plug the vehicle into the charger? Electrify America is working on a solution.
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guest · Aug 1, 2019

Tesla hit with another lawsuit over a fatal Autopilot crash
The family of Jeremy Beren Banner, who died in March, is suing for wrongful death
August 1, 2019
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/1/20750715/tesla-autopilot-crash-lawsuit-wrongful-death

The family of Jeremy Beren Banner is suing for wrongful death, while asking for damages of more than $15,000. A lawyer for the family announced the lawsuit on Thursday, though it has apparently not yet been filed with the Palm Beach County Clerk.
Banner was killed while driving along a Florida highway at 68 miles per hour on March 1st of this year. His Tesla Model 3 collided with a tractor-trailer that was crossing his path, which tore the roof off of the car. The vehicle ultimately came to a stop about 1,600 feet away from the site of the impact.

The NTSB’s full investigation is likely to take as long as another year to be completed. A lawyer for Banner’s family said in a press conference Thursday that Tesla has video of the accident from the car’s onboard cameras, but it’s unclear if the family has been given access to that footage.
Tesla also often reminds drivers that they need to supervise Autopilot at all times, though the company still markets and sells an Autopilot package it calls “full self-driving.”
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ronjor · Aug 1, 2019

What is ‘Ultra Cruise’? GM teases mysterious autonomous technology to investors

By Andrew J. Hawkins@andyjayhawk Aug 1, 2019
‘We’re going to continue to add capability’
At first glance, it sounds like Barra is suggesting that Ultra Cruise will be a beefier version of Super Cruise, the highly automated system developed by Cadillac that is really about as close to autonomous driving as anyone can get in a production vehicle today. In what way, though, it’s hard to say. It’s really one of those CEO quotes that have a lot of words, but not a lot of meaning behind them.
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guest · Aug 5, 2019

Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company
August 4, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/04/d...us-driving-unit-is-now-an-indepedent-company/

Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company, the Chinese ride-sharing and transportation giant said today.
Didi’s announcement comes about a month after The Information reported that Didi was in talks with investors including SoftBank, its largest shareholder, to raise money for the unit.

In its announcement, Didi said the new company “will integrate the resources and technological advantages of Didi’s platform, continue to increase investment in R&D of core innovative technologies, and deepen collaboration with upstream and downstream auto industry partners” and also promote self-driving technology to transportation authorities.
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guest · Aug 5, 2019

NEC Demos Flying Car Concept
August 5, 2019
https://www.cdrinfo.com/d7/content/nec-demos-flying-car-concept

NEC Corp. has demonstrated in Japan a large drone with four propellers that’s capable of carrying people, with the machine to hover without any passenger onboard for about a minute.
Japan’s government wants the country to become a leader in flying cars after missing out on advancements in technology such as electric cars and ride-hailing services. The country’s technological roadmap calls for shipping goods by flying cars by around 2023 and letting people ride in flying cars in cities by the 2030s.

Venture capitalists in Japan set up a specialized fund, known as the Drone Fund, devoted to investing in autonomous aircraft in general and flying-car businesses in particular.
Besides Japan, Dubai, Singapore, and New Zealand have expressed similar intentions to develop flying vehicles. Google co-founder Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk Corp. is also working on a flying car, as is Uber Technologies Inc.
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Minimalist · Aug 5, 2019

Connected Cars Could be a Threat to National Security, Group Claims

The cyber threat to connected cars (cars with a connection to the internet) is known and accepted. Now Los Angeles-based Consumer Watchdog (CW) has elevated that threat to one of national security in a new report titled, "Kill Switch: Why Connected Cars Can be Killing Machines and How to Turn Them Off."
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https://www.securityweek.com/connected-cars-could-be-threat-national-security-group-claims

ronjor · Aug 6, 2019

Self-Driving Trucks Are Ready to Do Business in Texas

Aarian Marshall 08.06.19
Tuesday, Kodiak is announcing its elsewhere: Dallas, where the startup has opened an eight-employee office, from which it will oversee its first commercial route. Someone—it won’t say who yet—is paying Kodiak to carry its goods between Dallas and Houston, more than 400 miles roundtrip.
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guest · Aug 6, 2019

Optimus Ride’s Brooklyn self-driving shuttles begin picking up passengers this week
August 6, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/06/o...uttles-begin-picking-up-passengers-this-week/

Self-driving startup Optimus Ride will become the first to operate a commercial self-driving service in the state of New York – in Brooklyn. But don’t expect these things to be contending with pedestrians, bike riders, taxis and cars on New York’s busiest roads; instead, they’ll be offering shuttle services within Brooklyn Navy Yards, a 300-acre private commercial development.

The Optimus Ride autonomous vehicles, which have six seats across three rows for passengers, and which also always have both a safety driver and another Optimus staff observer on board, at least for now, will offer service seven days a week, for free, running a service loop that will cover the entire complex.
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guest · Aug 6, 2019

Amazon’s Scout robots roll out in Southern California
August 6, 2019
https://venturebeat.com/2019/08/06/amazons-scout-robots-roll-out-in-southern-california/

It won’t be long before Scout, Amazon’s autonomous delivery robot, starts roaming the streets and sidewalks of neighborhoods across the country. Amazon announced that its driverless rovers will begin ferrying packages to select customers’ doorsteps in portions of Irvine, California this week.
Initially, a “small number” of Scout devices will transport packages Monday through Friday during daylight hours, according to Amazon.

For the uninitiated, Scout is a watertight, six-wheeled, cooler-sized drone that was developed, built, assembled, and programmed in-house by Amazon engineers.
Amazon says Scout rovers have already completed “thousands” of deliveries to customers while navigating obstacles like trashcans, skateboards, and lawn chairs.
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JRViejo · Aug 6, 2019

"They're all going to dump lidar," Musk said about self-driving rivals in April.
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Elon Musk: “Anyone relying on lidar is doomed.” Experts: Maybe not by Timothy B. Lee

guest · Aug 6, 2019

BMW’s Autonomous “Extended Traffic Jam Assistant” Needs Supervision
August 6, 2019
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that...ended-traffic-jam-assistant-needs-supervision

As the new flagship of the BMW SUV lineup, the X7 [...]
it’s also replete with the hardware that has vehicles on the road toward full autonomy. That includes a front-mounted, laser-based Lidar sensor that creates 3D images of the vehicle’s surroundings, and an optical camera (peering from the instrument panel) to ensure that the human pilot is awake and paying attention—two key features that are still AWOL on every Tesla model.

“Our studies show that people get most tired in stop-and-go traffic, where it takes the most brain power,” to stay focused on the driving task, says Oleg Satanovsky, BMW product and technology spokesman.
The BMW governed itself accordingly, controlling its own acceleration, braking, and steering during hands-free intervals of roughly 30 to 50 seconds. But my Assistant was also regularly flummoxed by various roadway situations.

At one point—and as with “Level 2” units I’ve tested from Volvo, Audi, Acura and others—the X7 missed an upcoming curve entirely (despite being marked by a clearly painted yellow line) and headed straight for the concrete median barrier. Had I not been ready to seize control, the result would most certainly have been a collision.
Ultimately, the system just didn’t promote enough confidence for me to fully trust it with hands-off operation.
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guest · Aug 7, 2019

Tesla is in trouble over NHTSA safety claims, stocks down
August 7, 2019
https://www.neowin.net/news/tesla-is-in-trouble-over-nhtsa-safety-claims-blog-post-stocks-down

Tesla has been keen to highlight the safety aspects of its Model 3 to make it more appealing to customers. However, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) ended up sending Elon Musk a cease-and-desist letter over a blog post which extolled the car’s perfect 5-star safety rating.

Newly published documents reveal that the NHTSA wrote a letter to Tesla on October 17, 2018, claiming that its blog post contained misleading statements.The NHTSA also said that it would be referring the matter to the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection to investigate further. Tesla responded by October 31 countering the NHTSA’s claims and ultimately signed off saying that it saw no reason to take the blog post down.
[...] to say that Tesla’s midsize sedan has a lower probability of injury than an SUV is incorrect.Therefore, saying the Model 3 is safer than other vehicles could mislead the public. Such comparisons are against the guidelines set out by NHTSA.
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