According to motovision.de a recent panel by German automotive research company Puls asked about 1000 German drivers about their attitude towards self-driving cars. About a fifth (22%) of the respondents had a positive attitude towards these cars, 10% were undecided. However, 44% were skeptical and 24% were hostile towards autonomous cars.
Chinese company to commercialize driverless cars?
CarNewsChina reported yesterday based on article in China Daily that a cooperation between China’s First Auto Works ( a commercial car manufacturer) and the National University of Defense may lead to the introduction of commercial driverless cars in China. There is no more specific information about this effort, but China has been accelerating its research in this area.
It would make much sense for this country to invest early into driverless technology. Driverless cars have many benefits: besides fewer accidents and lower mobility costs because of car-sharing, they also use road networks more efficiently and thus could greatly reduce the enormous investment needs for building up the traffic infrastructure in this large country.
European robot trials showcase autonomous technology
Every year robot trials are conducted in Europe (‘European Land Robot Trials’). The event alternates from year to year between military (M-ELROB) and civilian scenarios (C-ELROB). This years military-oriented event took place Thun, Switzerland from Sept 24 to 28.
14 teams participated performing a variety of autonomous and partiallly autonomous tasks including intelligent surveying and reconaissance, follow-the leader, transport and mine detection.
A German autonomous car prototype based on a Volkswagen Touareg developed by the Universität der Bundeswehr in Munich participated in some of the trials.The MuCAR-3 – shown below has participated in several previous ELROB trials with great success. This time, however, the prototype did not perform quite as well and did not take home any prizes. One reason for slower than usual progress in the past year may have been changes within the research team. It will be interesting to see what the team, which focuses on all-terrain navigation and driving, will be able to showcase next year.
Thrun to talk at Duke University on 10/04 about ‘Technologies for a mobile society”
Sebastion Thrun, head of Google’s research efforts will give a talk today at Duke University. This is part of the Provost’s lecture series on information futures.
Topic: Technologies for a mobile society
Location: Westbrook 0016, Time: 5 PM, October 4, 2012.
If you have a chance to attend we would love to hear from you!
Sergey Brin on driverless car future
Californias driverless car law was signed by Governor Brown at Googles headquarters last week. During the ceremony, Sergey Brin talked about Google’s driverless car efforts.
Some highlights:
– Brin expects driverless cars to be available to the public in not more than 6 years
– Driverless cars to become available for testing to a larger subset of Google employees within one year
– Safety continues to be the core issue. Google is looking at all issues including hardware failures, tires blowing out, electronics failures, etc.
– Three pronged approach to testing: a) actual driving on the road, b) lab testing, c) testing on closed circuits
– Google working on improving the sensor arrangements (It would be interesting to know whether they have found ways to reduce the dependence on the extremely expensive LIDAR)
– Google does not intend to manufacture vehicles
– Google intends to work with partners in commercializing the technology
– Driverless cars will greatly reduce the waste of land for parking spaces because driverless cars can drop someone of and then transport another passenger (reading between the lines, this was the only hint about the business model which Google may follow. Fewer parking lots also means fewer privately owned cars and an increasing share of trips using driverless taxi service (think: ‘Google mobile’ (Brin did not use this term!)).
– Nobody else is as far ahead as Google in this field.
Below is a video of the signing event:
Google cooperates with German rails for travel planning
Do you think of Google as a mobility service provider? While it does not yet offer its own transportation services, it is establishing itself as the leading provider of travel planning services. The cooperation with Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s leading rail network, which was just announced last week, is only one of many examples which show that Google relentlessly expands its travel-related services. By establishing interfaces to many established transportation services – including mass transit systems, trains and airlines – it raises the barrier to entry for potential competitors and the value of its competitive position.
Google’s autonomous vehicles fit nicely into this scenario. Once they are ready to be released to the public, Google can become a full-service mobility provider: It then has the technology and all information to pick its customers up anywhere and bring them to their destination in the most time- and cost-effective way. It will be able to anticipate transportation demand, to react to delays of trains and flights and to optimize the placement of its vehicles. Its intelligent fleet will change the economics of transportation and significantly lower the costs of personal mobility.
Taken together, Google maps, its travel planing services and its autonomous vehicle technology, provide a strong foundation for becoming one of the key players in transportation in the next decade. Google is preparing itself to capture a much larger share of the transportation industry’s revenue than the great auto makers anticipate today.
California to become the engine of the driverless revolution
We don’t know whether the Champagne corks will be flying at Google when California’s Gov. Jerry Brown signs the bill to legalize autonomous cars which was almost unanimously approved by the legislature on Wednesday. But Google’s intense lobbying efforts which started in Nevada have paid off: Now the internet giant is a big step closer to introduce autonomous cars on its home turf.
California is almost perfect for the introduction of autonomous cars. It is large and diverse enough to allow testing in almost all environments. There are regions with almost optimal weather conditions such as Southern California (snow being very unlikely except in the mountains). This is where Google could launch their first commercial trials for car-sharing, taxi or truck/logistics services.
The second great asset of California is its hotbed of innovation and technology in Silicon Valley which Google is part of and which it profits from. But driverless technology could give another boost to the valley and lead to many new products and services based on autonomous technology. When driverless technology becomes the next big thing, Silicon Valley will be at the center.
Driverless cars are a golden opportunity for the ‘Golden State’. The legislature was right to ignore the objections from the auto industry (which is worried about their business model).
Thrun sounds cautious note on self-driving cars
We just came across an interesting interview by Sebastian Thrun, head of Google X and mastermind behind Google’s Driverless Car. In the interview conducted by Charlie Rose in late April he talks about Google’s project Glass, Udacity and driverless cars. He sounds a cautious note on the safety of autonomous cars. While the technology is already quite safe, he is still concerned about its capability of driving millions and millions of miles without error. He suggests that current driverless cars have not quite reached the perfomance level of an attentive human driver. In another interview with WIRED he also discusses the problem hinting, that the right combination between human and computer intelligence may need to be found to ensure maximum safety.
Are we right to conclude that Google’s driverless car team is finding it difficult to reach the intended safety level for their cars? From a statistical perspective it is very hard to prove that an autonomous vehicle can perform flawlessly for millions of miles. Just driving a few million miles in test mode is not enough.
So far Google has always emphasized that their driverless cars drive on known routes for which detailed navigation and localization data is available. Relying on stored information about a route, however, can be a major source of error. Therefore Google must also be working hard to run their cars without prerecorded mapping data. It would be interesting to know their progress in this area.
An additional approach for verifying the safety of their cars would be to develop a full-fledged simulator built around a physics engine which would be connected to the sensor and actuator interfaces of Google’s driverless car (for an early sketch of this approach, see our Innovation Brief (2010)). The driverless car control unit would receive sensor inputs generated by the simulator. These sensor inputs would be updated according to the simulated movement of the car depending on the signals received by the actuators. Building such a simulator would be a major challenge because of the large amount of sensor data which it would need to generate. But Google’s team has already collected much of the real-world data needed to populate the simulator.
The advantage of the simulator would be that the driverless car could be subjected to much more rigorous testing and that it would be much easier to detect and precisely test borderline situations. Invalid or problematic sensor data could be sent to the control unit, slippery surfaces, fog, rain and snow could be simulated by the physics engine. Unexpected behavior by vehicles, cyclists etc. could also be simulated and tested.
Truck driver shortage could become severe handicap (EU report)
A report on the situation of EU road transport warns that a shortage of truck drivers could become a severe problem if the economic situation in the EU improves. The report commissioned by the EU (published in June) proposes several measures including:
– Improve the truck driver’s image and career prospects
– Improve quality of work
– Reduce the entry barriers (license fees)
– Implement coach relays to ensure more drivers can stay home overnight
The report discusses several innovations that might be relevant to the profession but does not even mention autonomous vehicle technology. This is surprising because self-driving trucks would be an excellent starting point for autonomous vehicles as they would lead to high productivity increases (about 30 percent of total truck operating costs are driver wages). Risk could be minimized by operating on highways only – hauling long distance freight between select distribution centers. Human drivers could then distribute the freight locally.
The report should be seen as further evidence to encourage the introduction of driverless technology in transporation because it shows that few people consider trucking as their dream job (many of jobless Europeans are not willing to enter this profession) and because it reduces the worry about technology-induced job losses.
Wall Street Journal considers driverless future
An opinion piece in the WSJ on July 17 criticized investment in the proposed bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It then advocated preparing the road infrastructure for the advent of driverless cars: The number of lanes should be increased because driverless cars can cope with narrower lanes. Trucks should be limited to one or two wider lanes (ideally separate from car lanes). Traffic flow control systems would have to be installed to optimize traffic flow – both on the highway and in the city where stop lights often increase congestion.
The author points out interesting issues but fails to recognize the decentralized nature of the driverless revolution. These cars do not require modifications to the existing infrastructure. They will drive where a human can drive. But their behavior and economics differ. They will naturally improve the flow of traffic. Driverless cars increase the peak capacity of the existing infrastructure because they can safely keep shorter distances to other cars. Even a small percentage of driverless cars mixed into regular traffic can reduce congestion by adopting an optimal speed or by simply keeping side-by-side with another (automated?) car in two-lane pile-ups effectively preventing other cars from lane-hopping. The cost-structure of driverless car sharing and the need for demand management by mobility providers are also important factors that will reduce peak loads on the traffic infrastructure.
There is no need for driverless road infrastructure investment. Governments would be well advised, however, to invest directly into advancing driverless technology. Fewer traffic accidents would save hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Better road utilization exhibited by driverless cars will also greatly lower the costs for building and maintaining the road infrastructure.