Driverless cars have really entered the mainstream with a BMW driverless car being used in an April Fool’s article. The best lines of the article:

The new driverless Running Coach feature uses a combination of ConnectedDrive technologies and surround view cameras to enable the car to follow the runner, at a safe distance, while pounding the pavement.

To help with motivation, integrated exterior speakers play encouraging words while the Lock Out Logistics feature makes sure that any distance set is completed without cheating.

My car yelling at me probably wouldn’t make me run faster, a black van tailing me on the other hand….

Recently we reported that German based tyre and electrical supply company Continental had designed a new automated car using 5 lasers as opposed to 3D LIDAR favoured by companies like Google.

We’ve just discovered though that Continental is not alone in innovating in this space. Earlier this month paper (paywalled) by researchers at the National Taiwan University and the Intel Labs at Santa Clara University in California have developed another system. While working on car-to-car networking they also designed a unique sensor system which included:

• 2D-LIDAR
• GPS
• Stereo camera
• Dedicated short range communication (DSRC) radio

The authors claim that this combination, while still expensive is 1/20th the cost of 3D LIDAR in autonomous cars. The authors note that the system isn’t perfect, in particular, the error rate in simulations is higher when cars are isolated. However, when several cars can detect each other and communicate the accuracy of the system increases.

We’re not sure yet whether this work was completely academic or if there are plans to commercialise this technology. We will let you know if there are any further developments in this technology.

What is LIDAR?

Says Wikipedia,

LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging, also LADAR) is an optical remote sensing technology that can measure the distance to, or other properties of a target by illuminating the target with light, often using pulses from a laser.

In simple terms, it’s a radar system using lasers instead of radio waves. The thing on the top of the Google Car (pictured below) is a LIDAR system.

Google doesn’t seem to have lost any steam with their driverless car development.

This video just released demonstrates one of the great humanitarian benefits that the Driverless Car program can provide. There are up to 3 million blind people in the United States and the freedom that such a car would provide them will be immense.

The entire route (including Taco Bell stop) was pre-programmed. The video doesn’t address how Google’s program plans to address impulsive stops like this one.

Watch the initial video below where Google publicly announced their program:

Google is no longer alone in this space, with Continental (one of the world’s leading auto component manufacturers) announcing they are developing a cheaper - if less-sophisticated – autonomous car program of their own.

There’s been a little bit of chatter around the internet in the last few days about a ‘service’ named Tacocopter.

The idea is that drones can deliver tacos to your house but is a ‘private beta’ available to the ‘SF Bay Area Only’.

Sure thing.

According to the law, in late 2015 commercial drone services will be permitted to operate drones in the United States and the Tacocopter has certainly captured the imagination of some big publications.

The idea of drones delivering tacos is going to become a reality much sooner than many would expect. The technology is good enough and if they aren’t carrying humans, not too many people will be all that concerned about safety given the only potential injury will be to a hot pizza.

Marginal Revolution makes the point that drones are going to form significant competition to Driverless Cars and we agree, especially in the area of the final step of delivery – from distribution centers to houses.

The key bonus that drone delivery provides is privacy and security. Rather than delivery to your front door or front yard, those living in houses will be able to receive delivery into their backyard. As for those living in high rise accommodation, well… we can always hope:

Update: The Pirate Bay is developing systems to use drones to host data and broadcast pirate networks. You can’t deny their sense of mission, whatever that that mission actually is. With Tacocopters and Flying Pirate Drones,  imagine what the world will look like when the our best minds engage themselves with this area?

In what is probably the biggest piece of driverless car news since the Google Driverless Car was announced and displayed, a VW Passat has been converted into an automated car that has logged close to 7000 miles.

Looks like it’s not just auto makers working on driver assist technology.

Watch the video here.

Contintental, the famous tyre maker, has just demonstrated driverless assist advances using much cheaper technology than that in Google’s lauded program, albeit in much more limited circumstances. Reports Motortrend:

Continental, the Hanover, Germany-based supplier of electrical technology and tires, says its system is different than the kind of autonomous cars that online search-engine company Google has been testing. Google recently pushed a law through the Nevada legislature to allow legal testing of autonomous cars on public roads.

Conti’s Volkswagen test car has one long-range radar and it has four short-range radar sensors, two in front and two in the rear. Its stereo camera shoots details of the car’s immediate surroundings, telling the sensors to brake for traffic flow or to steer around a potential hazard, using the electronically controllable electric power steering and the brakes.

The company says its technology differs from the kind of technology used in autonomous car testing like Google’s, in that Conti built its car mostly with standard equipment.

They insist that the car is not autonomous, merely automated. Splitting hairs much? With Google having shocked the industry with its progress, “Continental is adamant that its use of the Volkswagen Passat has nothing to do with which automakers might be the first to offer the automated driving technology. Continental says it’s in talks with various unnamed automakers who might buy the technology.”

The Motortrend article also claims that the system is set for commercialisation within 2-3 years. The system is nowhere near as sophisticated as Google’s yet is definitely a step-up on BMW’s lane-keeping technology with better collision avoidance and navigation.

Detroit Free Press, who broke the news, had this:

The sensors detect if the car in front stops, if there is a construction barrier on the right and a delivery truck cutting in from the left. The car stops and does not resume driving until the road clears; the engineers nod their approval and continue to check e-mail and send texts.

Plans for a long highway drive should be equally free of stress and fatigue because once again, the car will do the driving. The driver takes over control only to pass or change lanes.

Technology such as Driverless Cars is really going to test the ability of lawmakers to respond quickly. They’ll have to get used to it as technological change is accelerating. The main barrier stopping the courier industry being wiped out by drones at the moment is legal issues.

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Image : Wired.co.uk

It’s like something out of a movie. The EN-V, a Segway-GM collabaration, is given a top-bottom exposé by Wired.co.uk:

The EN-V is a zero-emission, autonomous car for our driverless urban future. First conceived as part of a collaboration between General Motors and the personal-transportation manufacturer Segway, the EN-V (short for Electric Networked Vehicle) is designed for environments dedicated to networked self-driving vehicles — the cities of 2030, according to GM. The EN-V is packed with sensors and, in theory, is crashproof. It “platoons” with other cars in formation, removing any need for traffic lights, and can be parked at your command via a smartphone app.

Here’s a couple of images of the vehicle being demonstrated:

AP

CNN International brings us an interesting update today on the progress of driverless car developments in Berlin. The article includes an interesting video.

A new vehicle has found its way onto Berlin’s street: a car that does not demand a driver.

Developed by Dr. Raul Rojas and his team at Berlin’s Freie University, this computer-controlled car is equipped with sophisticated lasers, radar, video cameras and a sensitive GPS system.

“What we think is that this can be the car of the future in the sense that you don’t need to drive,” said Rojas. “It would be like a taxi. You don’t even need to own a car, you don’t have to park the car, you don’t need a garage at home.

We keep a close eye on the comments that public officials make about driverless cars.

While many lawmakers are  understandably enthusiastic (Alex Padilla, who introduced the bill into the California Senate to legalise driverless cars, has had well in excess of 50 media reports written about his efforts), bureaucrats have been more reticent.

Hence it’s exciting to see this sort of comment from the head of the Nevada DMV, Bruce Breslow.

“This is going to revolutionize driving. People who are blind will be able to be in a vehicle. People who have Parkinson’s they can’t drive. Some of the elderly who can’t physically drive anymore will be able to drive. Much more safely, it’s a safety system,” says head of Nevada’s DMV Bruce Breslow.

and

“The technology is evolving and evolving and Nevada needs to be on the cutting edge of it,” says Breslow.

The more bureaucrats fall in behind this, the more carmakers will be open to developing this technology as sovereign risk diminishes.

Driverless Cars are at the moment, copping a small beating from the “devils advocate” pundits populating our daily news cycles.

James Poulos from Forbes seeks to address this with a fairly muddled piece that compares the issue to the current healthcare debates.

It’s not just that driver-driven cars capture and express deeply human capabilities and desires, which means that trying to end the market for self-operated vehicles will be at least as futile, costly, and destructive as, say, the drug war. It’s that the people with the most power and the most protection will find a way to make personal exceptions to this prohibition, much like any other. Those on the receiving end of policy will be stuck with the robocar; the canny elite will motor around like the plebes in public, to be sure, but somehow find a way to gratify their urge to get behind the wheel and floor it. The lesson of history and nature is that the onset of systemic corruption defines the frontier where regulatory uniformity extends too far into the intimate details of life.

An article by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post suggests that its very difficult to predict how much Americans will spend on future healthcare because of technological advances like driverless cars reducing the number of people killed or injured. The article itself covers several topics so here’s the bit on driverless cars:

Advances in information processing mean driverless cars are coming, and fast. If you live in the Bay Area, actually, they’re already here. Let’s say — and I don’t know if this is optimistic or pessimistic — that full adoption of driverless cars could cut the number of accidents in half.

In 2010, more than 32,000 Americans were killed in car accidents, more than 2 million were injured, and the resulting medical costs and productivity losses were, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the $100 billion range. Car accidents are theleading cause of death for Americans between the ages of one and 30.

The only thing I would disagree with is that driverless cars would cut the number of accidents in half. I would suggest that a 99% reduction in accidents is more likely (once driverless cars are widespread and all the bugs are worked out). I base this on the current data that prototype cars by Google and others don’t seem to cause accidents, at least not yet.

Apart from that we have previously noted that driverless cars may cause a shortage of  donor organs  as less people dying due to automotive fatalities will reduce the pool or organ donors.