First – did you know DCHQ now operates only through Facebook and Twitter?

https://www.facebook.com/driverlesscarhq

https://twitter.com/driverlesscarhq

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Yesterday I paid the domain renewal for Driverless Car HQ, which means it’s now one year since we first started discussing self-driving cars.

Paying the renewal caused me to reflect on the last year and the ridiculous progress made just in the last 12 months.

12 months ago…..

- Google was the only genuine declared player

- Testing hadn’t been approved in any jurisdiction

- Very few articles were ever published on the topic and it wasn’t even close to being mainstream knowledge. We seriously were scratching around trying to find even remotely related topics to talk about given that the news had very little for us.

- Only the bravest predicted that self driving vehicles would arrive by 2020.

Now…

- Nearly all major manufacturers have publicly announced some kind of project – GM, Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, the list goes on. Not only that, but Continental (the German tire-maker) was the second company to receive approval for testing in Nevada, and the Chinese government also appears to have some fairly advanced technology.

-Testing has been approved in Florida, California and Nevada, the latter having implemented self-driving vehicle number plates under a sanctioned testing system. The response from legislators and bureaucrats has been incredible, but also assisted by Google’s highly competent lobbying efforts. The enthusiasm shown by bureaucrats – most publicly the Nevada DMV (this video here is 100 minutes but is fascinating watching), whose leadership actively smoothed the path for successful passage through the local legislature.

- Articles abound on the net, with discussion taking place on blogs, fora and news websites around the globe. Where we used to link to anything remotely related to driverless cars, we now have to be quite selective in determining what is worth posting in our feeds and what is not.

- Many manufacturers – most notably GM, Nissan, Audi and Mercedes – have declared that we will see an autonomous vehicle by 2020. That’s only 7 years away – yikes!!. Sergey Brin goes one better – he  believes this technology will be commercialized within 5 years.

The momentum is unstoppable and the excitement is palpable, most especially after CES. There can now be no doubt that other manufacturers who have not yet shown their hand (Honda, Subaru and Mazda) are also working on the technology in some way.

Just read what Professor Thomas Weber of Mercedes had to say:

““It’s very important [to be first]. We are in a position [to be first].”

Wow.

Thanks for what has been an amazing last 12 months. Shouts go to Gabriel and Paul who have contributed so much since the start, to my fellow co-moderators and to Anthony who has been with me from the very first moment.

Mat.

(Re-posting because previous post disappeared).

For all those who wish to continue following Driverless Car HQ, please do so through our Facebook or Twitter accounts as we will continue posting links there for those interested.

https://www.facebook.com/driverlesscarhq

https://twitter.com/driverlesscarhq

At Driverless Car HQ we have always tried to link to websites we love, giving credit where it’s due in as many cases as possible.

Today I want to share with you five websites I really like that are related in some way to driverless cars.

1. Marginal Revolution.

Tyler Cowen operates a super awesome site which covers broad topics but mostly confined to public policy and technology. Most often he and his co-writers often just uncover awesome content, like this ridiculously fascinating post about Uruguay (which got me carried away reading other articles for 10 minutes), this one that shows women perceive inflation to be higher than men, and regular assorted links posts. In my opinion this is one of the best blogs on the internet (and this is not biased by the fact that Cowen linked to us twice).

2. Ideas 4 Brad. Brad Templeton is an experienced technology veteran who founded the world’s first online business. He pioneered online discussion about robocars well before anyone else was speaking about it. Now a consultant to Google’s self-driving car program, he blogs regularly including this recent post about driverless cars. He can come across as a bit cranky but once you get past this, you can enjoy some really high quality thinking, such as this post about Nate Silver’s election predictions.

3. Next Big Future. Amazing technology blog for anyone who wants to follow the forefront of new technology. They keep us updated on things like Google Fiber, which is everywhere, and less talked about stuff such as recent stem cell research about growing cells in sponges. Most of the stuff they report on will probably turn out to be vaporware but this site does more than any other to stay positive about the future.

4. Motorscore.com. A bit more relevant to cars, this site is like a Rotten Tomatoes for cars but what’s most cool is that they have compiled the different car reviews into mini guides for specific types of models. To be specific, check out this list of AWD cars or this one that looks at 7 passenger cars. It doesn’t work in all cases – this Small SUVs guide is slightly awkward – but overall the site is highly useful.

5. Bryant Walker Smith is a law lecturer at Stanford University. He’s probably the leading authority in the United States on the topic of autonomous vehicle law and blogs occasionally. He needs to blog a bit more, but here’s his most recent paper which concludes that autonomous vehicles are already legal in the United States. Nice.

Bonus Site: Autopia.

What do you think? What are your favourites?

A little while ago I posted a discussion on the topic of driverless trucks getting robbed in more lawless areas or countries.

Incredibly, someone is already looking at this problem and taking the idea of ‘defensive driving’ a bit more literally than most – his name is David Mascarenas and he’s from the Los Alamos National Lab.

One of Mascarenas’s projects makes robots less predictable and reduces their vulnerability to ambush. If you know a driverless delivery truck always goes down the same deserted street at 6:14 am, you can get there first. Mascarenas addressed this using a technique known as info-gap decision theory. This allows the robot to weigh the risk of any particular route with the possible benefits. This would apply equally to a robot submarine looking at the best way to gather oceanography data while avoiding fishing nets, or a pizza-carrying droid finding the shortest way through city streets. Crucially, the process is unpredictable: The machine will not always take the same route twice, and would-be ambushers can’t anticipate where it will be.

He also designed robots to behave in such a way that makes them less vulnerable to being hijacked while moving. Follow the link to check it out.

Thanks Chris L for sending the article in.

From the annals of “bizarre concerns Driverless Cars” comes this absolute doozy from TopSpeed.com.

They’re saying that Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) – once in a lifetime events that are major solar flares – will cause satellites to stop working, meaning that driverless cars will drive off the road or into other cars:

If a CME-caused geomagnetic storm should take place and knock out GPS satellites, imagine the massive traffic it would cause, at best. Even worse, it could result in major accidents, should these cars veer off of the road and out of control. That’s a scary possibility that this recent solar flare close call should bring to the forefront. The engineers must devise a backup plan that overrides the GPS part of autonomous driving, should the signal be lost.

I wanted to leave a comment saying that driverless cars don’t depend on GPS – like so many assume – but you need to register to comment.

I’m really not sure to make of this one. Bright Side Of News.com has come out of nowhere two weeks ago to post an ‘exclusive’ showing the “Driverless Car System” which – according to their sources – Google will submit to the NTSB for certification by November 2012. The article flew completely under the radar and was not picked up by any other sources (besides this Czech website) until Paul Godsmark sent the story in to us.

Here’s a picture of the prototype of the system, called KARR, from the article:

Credit http://www.brightsideofnews.com – “The final product is quite different.”

 We also learned that the Driverless car system will utilize the CAN and MOST150 Ethernet protocols to communicate with a sensor array and the rest of the Class A, Class B and Class C subsystems.

Google will submit the boxes for NTSB and FIA/TUV certification in October or November timeframe, after which we can expect roughly 3-5 year design period before the first driverless cars reach the market. The companies closest to deploy the Driverless Car System (DCS) are Volkswagen Audi Group and Toyota. As a side note, the DCS is planned to be assembled in the United States. Current systems however, are manufactured in Far East.

 

Read the full article here.

The article quotes no sources. What do you think of it? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Also, my mini startup has just sent a new site live into soft launch: Medisato.com - it’s a health symptoms database.

My other mini startup, Motorscore.com, is kicking ass at the moment.

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.

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

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.