California looks like it will soon empower its DMV to regulate autonomous vehicles. I’m wondering… is this bill passing a bigger deal than Nevada and Florida legalising driverless vehicles? It feels like this will result in a bigger shift in the positive perception of autonomous technology and more momentum for other states to do the same thing.

So a question to our US readers: Is California a bellwether state in regards to the rest of American (and the world) taking up this technology?

We should probably make a category for Sebastian Thrun given how much we talk about him.

Sebastian Thrun was the head of the Google Self-Driving Car Program until he resigned to take up a post with Udacity, an online education provider.

I personally couldn’t believe his decision – to walk away from something that is pretty much guaranteed to change the planet to go to yet another online education gimmick just didn’t make sense to me.

Mark Guzdial, from the Georgia Institute of Tech had the opportunity to talk to Sebastian Thrun and confirmed what is fairly apparent:

I asked Sebastian, “Which do you think will have a bigger impact on society, Udacity on education, or your driverless car?” He said, “Udacity’s impact on education.” I bet the Driverless car. I’ve seen too many people with big, even wonderful ideas to change everything in education, but they ran headlong into the schoolification of everything.

Udacity faces so many problems compared to the Self-Driving Car and they are all to do with incentives. There’s a huge amount of inertia in education – it’s probably the slowest evolving major industry that I know of. Udacity is free, which is nice, and high quality, which is also nice, but lacks in prestige and the ability to get students to complete their courses. The lack of a stick for people who don’t complete the courses means that many have no real reason to complete them.

I fear that Thrun has made a mistake here. Self Driving Cars are absolutely full to the brim with great incentives, such as the desire not to get left behind by competition which is forcing even reluctant car-makers to examine the question closely. Safety, convenience, cost, environmental factors… all the right incentives are in place.

In recent months, the news in Australia has been filled with hard luck stories from physical retailers small and large all bemoaning the current state of retail. There’s a simply awesome article stuck behind the pay wall of this website talking about the rise of online retail.

Between reduced spending and competition from the internet, it’s tough times. This is not just a problem faced by Australians – internet spending is eating up retailers world wide.

Websites like Zappos –  who have exploded on the basis of free shipping shipping both ways – are growing and expanding.

There are three big disadvantages suffered by online retail at the moment.

The first disadvantage is the time delay – purchasers must wait at least a while for their product. If they need something urgently – say, in the next 20 minutes – they are in trouble.

The second is the shipping cost suffered by one member of the transaction. The free shipping back and forth sounds great to consumers but we know that all this does is eat into the margins of those retailers, thereby leading to higher costs.

The third is the lack of touchability of their products.

Driverless cars can – and will – solve all three problems, in combination with warehouse automation. We’ll get to the point where you order a product and it will not be touched by a human being.

Want to try on a pair of pants at 10pm at night at your home? NOW? Done! Desperately need mint choc chip icecream – at 5am? Done!

This sort of thing is really going to tear retail a new asshole. Those retailers that don’t add any value – such as an amazing customer service experience – are going to be directly in the firing line. People still want to leave home and have fun so the mix of businesses in retail precincts is going to keep moving towards service based small businesses such as cafés and massage shops.

The proportion of service businesses to retail in shopping centres is growing at a rapid rate because people still want to leave their homes and have fun. If someone can get it done without leaving the house, your business is dead.

From Next Big Future. An IEEE paper predicts that if cars were equipped with Vehicle to Vehicle communications as well as external sensors then highways could increase their capacity by 273%. I.e. that vehicles with these technologies can travel faster but closer together.

The article also notes that modelling done by the California PATH program suggests that platooning can increase highway utilisation by up to 400% depending on the platoon length, speed and inter vehicle distance. Edit: Admittedly though I can’t find the 400% figure in the PATH presentation.

In yet another instance of technology mimicking nature, today comes news out of the United Kingdom that scientists are teaching robots the animal response to threats:

STARTLE, developed by Mike Hook and colleagues at Roke Manor Research of Romsey in Hampshire, UK, employs an artificial neural network to look out for abnormal or inconsistent data. Once it has been taught what is out of the ordinary, it can recognise dangers in the environment.

For instance, from data fed by a robotic vehicle’s on-board sensors, STARTLE could notice a pothole and pass a warning to the vehicle’s control system to focus more computing resources on that part of the road.

“If it sees something anomalous then investigative processing is cued; this allows us to use computationally expensive algorithms only when needed for assessing possible threats, rather than responding equally to everything,” says Hook.

This design mimics the amygdala, which provides a rapid response to threats. The amygdala helps small animals to deal with complex, fast-changing surroundings, allowing them to ignore most sensory stimuli. “The key is that it’s for spotting anomalous conditions,” says Hook, “not routine ones.”

While we have seen it intimated that Google has developed similar systems, developments such as these are nonetheless positive.

One key objection to driverless cars relates to how they deal with foreign scenarios. This kind of technology will help assuage those fears.

HT: Chris Law

Our Event Calendar has been updated.

Currently our only listed event is “Self Driving Cars, Neighborhood Electrics and Future Auto Mobility” on the 18th of September in California, USA.

If you have any events you would like us to list please shoot us an email.

One of the biggest objections to driverless cars is the idea that hackers will be able to break into them and cause crashes.

Asides from the obvious riposte – what motivation would drive enough people to make this a real ongoing issue? – it is the sort of thing that people are scared of, so the fear needs to be dealt with.

Apparently auto-makers aren’t really up to snuff when it comes to protecting against hacks:

It’s scary business. Security experts say that automakers have so far failed to adequately protect these systems, leaving them vulnerable to hacks by attackers looking to steal cars, eavesdrop on conversations, or even harm passengers by causing vehicles to crash.

“You can definitely kill people,” said John Bumgarner, chief technology officer of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit organization that helps companies analyze the potential for targeted computer attacks on their networks and products.

Bruce Snell, a McAfee executive who oversees his company’s research on car security at the Beaverton, Oregon garage, said automakers are fairly concerned about the potential cyber attacks because of the frightening repercussions.

“If your laptop crashes you’ll have a bad day, but if your car crashes that could be life threatening,” he said. “I don’t think people need to panic now. But the future is really scary.”

 

This paragraph is scary:

For instance, they came up with a combination attack dubbed “Self Destruct”. It starts when a 60-second timer pops up on a car’s digital dashboard and starts counting down. When it reaches zero the virus can simultaneously shut off the car’s lights, lock its doors, kill the engine and release or slam on the brakes.

One motivated person is enough to cause these issues. That being said, the flaws have been known for years in many current cars yet car hacking incidents seem to be incredibly rare.

For me, the most obvious protection against these types of attacks is to have the car completely disconnected from any particular inputs, most especially such as V2V which is going to be incredibly vulnerable unless the system is designed by some of the world’s best computer security experts.

The above attack was launchable through the cd player. Why would you have a cd player and the brakes using the same computer system?? This seems like madness. I would have the entertainment and car control systems completely separated.

It’s impossible to completely blind the car to all inputs, however. If you want to tell the car where you want to go, you’re going to have to put that information in somehow.

An interesting challenge for Google and friends. Google, it should be noted, has had a fantastic history in terms of their own data security. They are obviously stacked with experts in this and their technological base should give them a huge advance on other OEMs in this area.

Thanks Paul Godsmark for sending this in.

Watch this incredible video. It has Shelley, the autonomous vehicle from the Stanford program (not to be confused with the Stanford car that ended up at Google), tearing up a race track. In collaboration with VW, they have been working on an Audi TT which seems a lot lighter on equipment – it doesn’t even have a LIDAR.

It’s quite incredible to watch. Currently it’s still a few seconds off the track record but there is no mention of whether the record is held by a superior car, as opposed to a superior driver.

Stanford’s article takes it away:

Other than some decals and a few extra antennas, there’s nothing outwardly remarkable about the white Audi TTS zipping around the track at Thunderhill Raceway, north of Sacramento, Calif. Its tires squeal as it zigs through chicanes. Its engine growls as it tops 120 mph on the straights. The car gets around the 3-mile course in less than 2-1/2 minutes, a time that rivals those posted by professional drivers.

HT Paul Godsmark and Gabriel S

There is a discussion piece over at the Huffington Post on the various policy and legal challenges facing autonomous vehicles becoming legal in the US. As an aside the author of the blog post wrote ’Aging America and Transportation: Personal Choices and Public Policy‘ (basically a book on mobility and transport for the Baby Boomer generation).

While the article is comprehensive it mostly goes over the same issues dedicated readers of this site know well. The author raises one interesting point though:

New infrastructure: Who will blink first: the government or vehicle manufacturers? If the slow move toward determining who pays, builds, and manages an electric vehicle or natural gas vehicle infrastructure is any indication of the speed with which public and private institutions can reach consensus, imagine how long it may take to adapt today’s driver-centered system to tomorrow’s autonomous system? How will a highway system in transition, shared between robots and humans, be operated? (What would the road signs look like for a road accommodating passenger cars, commercial traffic, bicycles, and robots?) Who will manage it? Will the existing, primarily private, infrastructure of vehicle fueling and maintenance be converted or see another set of providers emerge?

I think though the regulatory bodies in the US (as I noted in my previous post) seem to be hard at work ironing out how driverless technology will work. In terms of getting legislation passed Nevada and Florida have already enacted autonomous vehicle laws and California looks set to follow. In other words driverless technology has been legalised in multiple jurisdictions well before it is even commercially available and provides a template for other states and countries to follow. While there may be reasons to be pessimistic, there are far more reasons to be optimistic!

Edit: Thanks to Paul Godsmark for the link to this article.

The US Department of Transport is launching a year long trial involving 2,800 vehicles to study data uploaded via dedicated short range communications (DSRC):

The deployment includes approximately 2,800 cars, trucks and buses, 300 of which are getting aftermarket safety devices to beam data like position, velocity, and acceleration to and from neighboring vehicles and infrastructure ten times every second. Another 64 will be “fully integrated,” with safety systems installed during production, while the remainder will have simple transmission-only devices.

The data is transmitted using a high-speed, low-latency medium called dedicated short-range communications or DSRC. The specification is similar to Wi-Fi, but transmissions happen on the licensed 5.9GHz band rather than on Wi-Fi’s unlicensed 2.4GHz frequencies, using the 75MHz of spectrum the FCC specifically set aside for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications.

I suspect though most cars will probably end up having some form of WiFi, probably internally to connect to smartphones etc. It would seem that the near future newly manufactured cars will have some sort of DSRC communication. It will be interesting to see whether it will become mandatory for older cars to have this technology installed.