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.

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

A variety of pieces for you this weekend:

A Reuters article giving an overview of autonomous vehicles. Article predicts driverless cars “in our lifetime”.

Meanwhile there is an anti-self driving car piece over at caranddriver.com, see Part 1 and Part 2.

It appears there may be another firm working on driverless technology this article notes that French car parts maker Valeo has joined the race with a driverless Volvo.

Also IEEE Spectrum has a short interview up with one of Volkswagon’s R&D bosses on safety, electronics, road trains and mapping in autonomous vehicles.

Happy reading!

The main reason we are excited about autonomous vehicles is that the massive reductions in fatalities they will bring about. Another reason to be excited is the potential of driverless cars to use far less fuel than driven cars. We think because most self driving cars will 1) be single passenger vehicles that will have less mass and require less fuel 2) self driving vehicles will be inherently safer and require less heavy safety features, further lightening the mass of the vehicle and its fuel consumption. 3) Autonomous vehicles may never have to slow down and stop at traffic lights, wasting energy in braking. In this line of thinking a recent article at published at e360.yale.edu made much the same point.

 Obviously, far fewer crashes means fewer fatalities and fewer traffic jams, but it also could mean a big change in car design and fuel consumption.

As originally pointed out by climate and energy scientist Amory Lovins, only about one percent of the energy in a gallon of gasoline goes to moving the driver forward. About 75 percent of the energy leaves the tailpipe as heat and almost all the rest is needed to move a 4,000-pound car. But the bulk of that 4,000 pounds is only there to keep the driver and passengers safe in the relatively unlikely event of a major crash. If that risk was reduced dramatically, 4,000 pounds might come down closer to 750 to 1,000 pounds.

Other technology, known as dedicated short range communications (DSRC), enables a car to tell an intersection that it is approaching. A computer system at the intersection would then be able to coordinate all the approaching cars — assuming they were self-driving cars — and funnel them through the crossroads without stopping. The reduction in crashes could be dramatic.

Of course, a massive reduction in fuel consumption means a lot less money is being paid to countries like Saudi Arabia that produce oil. This will cause a lot of political pain and a lot of political fallout as noted in Foreign Policy a couple of months ago.

The other potential improvement for fuel consumption that I didn’t see explicitly mentioned in the e360 article was the idea of platooning or road trains as being developed by Volvo in Europe. We did some rough back of the envelope calculations that if road trains were ubiquitous they could reduce fuel consumption in the US ~813,000 barrels of oil per day. When you think of combining road trains with super light, efficient vehicles that never have to stop at traffic lights, the fuel savings are immense.

Thanks to Paul Godsmark for putting these up on our Facebook page and apologies for not posting them sooner, both Mat and I have been swamped at work.

From the annals of  ”how is it possible that someone only JUST thought of this” comes a fascinating article today from Autopia.

The idea is simple – if a car has a collision, it will then slam on the brakes to avoid it hitting a tree or oncoming car. (What if the brakes make you stop right in the path of an oncoming car? Whoops).

The system has been developed by our good friends over at Continental, who are working on a semi-autonomous system as we speak.

In hopes of preventing these secondary crashes, Continental, a German tire, braking, and stability control developer, has created Post Crash Braking Technology that slows the car automatically after an impact.

PCBT, part of the company’s full ContiGuard safety system, detects a crash from the car’s airbag sensors. It then electronically applies the brakes automatically to slow the car to a stop if the driver can’t operate the pedals due to disorientation or unconsciousness from the impact. The system uses stability control data to keep the vehicle from skidding or locking the brakes.

Autopia has another great article out today which is about a Kinect-style system for the car. Soon, we hope, we will be able to run our car using gestures rather than staring at complicated entertainment systems trying to figure the bloody thing out:

Automotive tech supplier Harman apparently has plans to beat Microsoft to the punch and has gone a step further with a system that recognizes facial and hand gestures. The company’s European division has unveiled a concept vehicle with a system that interprets nods, winks and hand movements to execute in-car commands. “It’s all about reducing distractions in the car,” Hans Roth, director of technology at Harman, said at a recent media event.

Just a quick one:

The federal Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) says that accident rates were 14% lower in cars fitted with Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) – what Ford calls City Stop.

It said warning systems that alerted the driver to an obstacle but did not brake the car showed less improvement. We are not surprised about that – such systems tell you via a light and a noise that something is wrong, but you then have to take a fraction of a second to figure out what the message is all about. If you have not already noticed the obstacle, it is probably then too late.

The successful introduction of each new autonomous technology will only increase the confidence of legislators and consumers as to the viability of these advances.

We discussed the other day the idea that driverless assist technology may actually lead to further distraction in the car.

Autopia has another article up today with a similar theme. Tests of lane keeping assist technology have not shown a reduction in insurance claims:

“What wasn’t expected in the study were findings that lane departure warning systems, which alert the driver when they begin to veer outside their lane, increased the PDL claims, although the IIHS would only say “the increases were not statistically significant [and] the results suggest these particular systems aren’t reducing overall crashes.”

 

The IIHS points out that the two vehicles it tested with the lane departure warning system – one Buick and another Mercedes-Benz – faired the worst in the study, with the Volvo tester doing slightly better, although that system also came bundled with the auto-braking feature and fatigue warning system, which could negate some of the issues.”

…

“It may be that drivers are getting too many false alarms, which could make them tune out the warnings or turn them off completely. Of course, that doesn’t explain why the systems seem to increase claim rates, but we need to gather more data to see if that’s truly happening.”

Thanks Gabriel S

A common objection to Driverless Cars is the idea that the vehicle will have enormous difficulty seeing and steering through inclement weather.

How about headlights that can look straight through the rain? Surely that will help!

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out how to thwart the weather when you’re behind the wheel by looking straight through the rain drops or snow that create that white-out effect when headlights meet heavy precipitation at night. By detecting and tracking individual rain droplets or snow as they fall through a car’s headlight beams, they’ve created a system that can “dis-illuminate” them by adjusting the headlight beams to only shine around them rather than on them.

The system works out to roughly 4 metres in front of the headlights, the range in which heavy snow or rain reflecting headlights can obscure a driver’s vision. A digital projector illuminates incoming raindrops for a few milliseconds, long enough for a camera mounted on the side of the projector to capture their positions and trajectories. Software then calculates exactly where those raindrops are headed and sends a signal to the headlights, which adjust so that the light rays that would hit that raindrop are switched off.

Courtesy Gabriel S

If you have a spare five minutes I recommend you read an opinion piece over at usridernews.com.

To summarise the piece the author makes the case that driverless cars will make riding inherently safe for motorcycle riders. On the other hand, the author sees a point in the future where ‘self directed’ vehicles as they put it are outlawed:

Google watchers and those with inside knowledge of the technology believe auto-pilot vehicles will first be deployed as delivery vehicles, taxis, and buses.  How quickly the technology transitions from utility vehicles to personal vehicles is anybody’s guess at this point, but the sad truth is that once a tipping point is reached, say 75% of vehicles are running on auto-drive, the push to rid the highways of “dangerous self driving vehicles” will begin in earnest.   In the NPR report, the author even alludes to a “future ban” on human operated vehicles.

When that happens, so will your ability to pick a destination on a map, load up the motorcycle and head out across this great country with your only worries being rain, bugs and that distracted driver who turns left in front of you.

I want to make a few quick points:

1. Agreement - I think  the usridernews.com article is essentially correct, riding a motorcycle will become safter, but eventually, riding it yourself will become illegal on public roads.
2. Gyroscoopes - All hope isn’t lost – the LIT motors C1 which we have reported on recently is effectively a motorcycle with a gyroscope. Granted it doesn’t look as exciting as riding a regular motorcycle but surely some innovative engineer can not only put those safety features in regular motorcycles making lawmakers less likely to ban them?
3. Speed - Driverless technology will probably be incorporated into motorcycles, and because they will be safer, they will be able to go a lot faster particularly on highways. In fact I think 20 years from now most journeys will be in two wheeled single passenger vehicles.
4. Renting - One of the great things about driverless vehicles is that we probably won’t own them ourselves. If you feel like it, for a few extra dollars you can rent that 500cc bike instead  of being stuck with Dad’s old 125cc that struggles to make it up the hill. (For the record my Dad had a very cool, occasionally operational, Kawasaki Ninja 900).
5. Turn off the auto-pilot - Even though 15-20 years from now every vehicle will be driverless, there will still be racetracks, deserts and national parks for riders to feel the thrill of riding a bike.

In a nutshell; don’t give up on riding that bike just yet!

The Economist’s latest print edition is focusing on robots and how they relate to humans. In particular they have published a broad overview of autonomous vehicles including driverless cars.

Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants? Should a robot involved in disaster recovery tell people the truth about what is happening if that risks causing a panic? Such questions have led to the emergence of the field of “machine ethics”, which aims to give machines the ability to make such choices appropriately—in other words, to tell right from wrong.

The Economist also has a short video discussion on the acceptance of robots in general society:

The very acceptance of [Driverless Cars] is at stack here… otherwise they could end up in a situation as with GM foods there is such a backlash that there are large parts of the world where there are potentially beneficial technologies can’t be introduced.

I think the GM debate has many parallels with driverless cars. There is a huge potential to make a lot of money as well as social good. On the other hand there are potential harms, a variety of ethical issues and of course a minefield of potential liability.