Month: December 2016

In the beginning, there is Wikipedia.

Autonomous car

An autonomous car (driverless car,^[1] self-driving car,^[2] robotic car^[3]) is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input.^[4]

Autonomous cars can detect surroundings using a variety of techniques such as radar, lidar, GPS, odometry, and computer vision. Advanced control systems interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage.^[5][6] Autonomous cars have control systems that are capable of analyzing sensory data to distinguish between different cars on the road, which is very useful in planning a path to the desired destination.^[7]

Some demonstrative systems, precursory to autonomous cars, date back to the 1920s and 30s. The first self-sufficient (and therefore, truly autonomous) cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University‘s Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich‘s Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working prototype autonomous vehicles.

Among the potential benefits of automated cars is a significant reduction of traffic accidents, and the resulting deaths and injuries, and related costs, including lower insurance costs; major increases in roadway capacity, with the potential to more than quadruple capacity, resulting in significantly less traffic congestion; enhance mobility for the elderly, people with disabilities, and low-income citizens; relieve travelers from driving and navigation chores, freeing commuting hours with more time for leisure or work; less fuel consumption, producing less air pollution and a lower carbon footprint from road travel; significantly reduced parking space needs in cities, freeing space for other public and private uses; and facilitating or improving existing and new business models of mobility as a service, including carsharing, e-hailing, ride hailing services, real-time ridesharing, and other services of the sharing economy, all contributing to reduce car ownership.

Among the main obstacles and disadvantages due to a widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles, in addition to the technological challenges, are disputes concerning liability; the time period needed to turn an existing stock of vehicles from non-autonomous to autonomous; resistance by individuals to forfeit control of their cars; customer concern about the safety of driverless cars; implementation of legal framework and establishment of government regulations for self-driving cars; risk of loss of privacy and security concerns, such as hackers or terrorism; concerns about the resulting loss of driving-related jobs in the road transport industry; and risk of increased suburbanization as driving becomes faster and less onerous without proper public policies in place to avoid more urban sprawl.

++++

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car

++++

http://jatinjain-innovativeideas.blogspot.com/2013/07/making-sense-out-of-driverless-cars.html

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Making sense out of Driverless Cars

Sitting in the passenger seat as your driver lifts his arms away from the wheel and gleefully says “look, no hands” should be an unsettling experience. But this feeling will soon get superfluous after the advent of the driverless-car technology.

An autonomous car, also known as a robotic car, or informally as driverless or self-driving, is an autonomous vehicle capable of fulfilling the human transportation capabilities of a traditional car. As an autonomous vehicle, it is capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human input. Robotic cars exist mainly as prototypes and demonstration systems, but are likely to become more widespread in the near future.

Driverless vehicles sense their surroundings with such techniques as radar, GPS, and computer vision. Advanced control systems interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage. Some driverless vehicles update their maps based on sensory input, allowing the vehicles to keep track of their position even when conditions change or when they enter uncharted environments.

Analysts say these cars are coming no matter what, with the earliest estimates placing commercially-available robot cars within the next five to ten years pending regulatory approval. The technology is there, it’s just a matter of getting the legislation, driver and insurance companies onboard.

Self-driving cars are one of today’s hottest technology trends. Google revealed that it was developing self-driving cars in 2010, and since then, these vehicles have logged hundreds of thousands of miles with few accidents and received approval from Nevada to test is cars on the state’s roads. Car makers such as Tesla, Audi, and Toyota have since started developing driverless solutions of their own, and GPS-maker Garmin revealed its new heads-up display (HUD) gadget today that projects key navigation information on your car’s windshield — a safer alternative to looking down at your Smartphone while driving.

While human error is responsible for 80% of auto accidents, with humans getting into at least one fender bender every 100,000 miles, according to IEEE estimates, Google claims its car logged 300,000 miles without incident.

The cars are expected to become far more widely adopted than the fuel-efficient hybrids and electric vehicles made by the likes of Tesla (TSLA) on the road today. Their focus on safety is expected to be a major selling point for consumers, insurers and the government.

As automakers focus on developing and testing driverless cars, the technologies will slowly start to be adapted into modern-day vehicles, representing a gradual yet inevitable shift.

Toyota, for example, partnered with Tesla and is expected to unveil vehicle-to-vehicle communication in its 2014 Lexus models when cruise control is activated, an early version of a technology expected to become a cornerstone of autonomous cars.

That kind of communication and instantaneous reaction time could feasibly allow a freeway of autonomous cars driving at 70 miles per hour just five feet from each other. It’s a scary thought, and one that will likely take drivers a long time to get used to, but it could serve to significantly reduce traffic and make transportation all the more safer.

Current Driverless Car Technologies

 1.)    Anti-lock brakes – One of the driverless systems that you may not have realized was driverless is anti-lock brakes. Sounds surprising, doesn’t it? After all, anti-lock brakes need the driver in order to work. Still, they represent one end of the driverless continuum because anti-lock brakes perform a function that drivers used to have to do themselves. When a car is braking hard and doesn’t have anti-lock brakes, the wheels can lock up, sending the car into an out-of-control skid. In a car without anti-lock brakes, the driver has to pump the brake pedal to keep the wheels from locking up. With anti-lock brakes, the system does the pumping for the driver — and does it better than the driver. The system can read the wheels and knows when they are about to lock and react faster and with a more appropriate response than a driver could.

2.)    Traction – Another type of driverless system is traction or stability control. These systems are so transparent that usually only professional drivers recognize when they’ve taken control. Like anti-lock brakes, traction and stability control react better than a driver ever could. Unlike anti-lock brakes, these systems are very complicated and use multiple systems within the car to keep the driver from losing control.

3.)    Cruise control – Cruise control is another common driverless system that’s available in most cars. Cruise control keeps the car at a constant speed, set by the driver, without the driver constantly having to press the gas pedal. Cruise control isn’t completely driverless, however, because the driver must watch constantly for slower moving cars in his or her path.

Adaptive cruise control takes care of that. Though it’s currently available on only a few cars, it’s very simple. Using radar sensors on the front of the car, adaptive cruise control can tell when an object is in front of it and, if the object is moving, how fast it’s moving. When cruise control is set, adaptive cruise control will maintain a constant speed, but will also maintain a set distance between it and the car in front of it.

Biggest Barriers to the Driverless Car Technologies

è  The biggest hurdle is garnering widespread regulatory support, not to mention getting insurers on board and collecting support from the masses. It

could take many years.

è  Perhaps the second largest setback is the prohibitively expensive cost of these cars. It is estimated to cost about $250,000 to build each of them due to the expensive nature of the advanced technologies used.

è  The concept of self-driving cars may be all the rage in technology circles, but the organization that represents big U.S. auto makers says a new poll due out later this week indicates many U.S. consumers are wary about sharing the road with robot vehicless that could be hacked by mischief car makers.

è  Other miscellaneous technical problems to overcome.

What people think about Driverless Cars

Cisco’s survey found that 57% of the respondents, who came from 10 countries, said they’d ride in a car controlled entirely by robotic systems. Brazilians gave the most enthusiastic endorsement, with 96% of those surveyed saying they’d trust self-driving cars. Indian consumers were next at 86%. Among Chinese respondents, 70% said they would trust a driverless car. Sixty percent of the Americans surveyed said they would be comfortable in a self-piloting vehicle. The nations with the most scepticism toward autonomous cars: Auto powers Germany (37%) and Japan (28%).

According to designers and manufacturers, an increase in the use of autonomous cars would make possible such benefits as:

• Fewer traffic collisions, due to an autonomous system’s increased reliability and faster reaction time compared to human drivers.
• Increased roadway capacity and reduced traffic congestion (due to reduced need for safety gaps), and the ability to better manage traffic flow.
• Relief of vehicle occupants from driving and navigation chores.
• Higher speed limit for autonomous cars.
• Removal of constraints on occupants’ state – in an autonomous car, it would not matter if the occupants were under age, over age, blind, distracted, intoxicated, or otherwise impaired.
• Alleviation of parking scarcity, as cars could drop off passengers, park far away where space is not scarce, and return as needed to pick up passengers.
• Elimination of redundant passengers – humans are not required to take the car anywhere, as the robotic car can drive independently to wherever it is required. This would be especially relevant to trucks, taxis and car-sharing services.
• Reduction of space required for vehicle parking.
• Reduction in the need for traffic police and vehicle insurance.
• Reduction of physical road signage – autonomous cars could receive necessary communication electronically (although physical signs may still be required for any human drivers).
• Improved fuel efficiency.
• Reduced air pollution as a result of less emissions and traffic congestion.

The Google driverless car is a project by Google that involves developing technology for autonomous cars. The project is currently being led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. Thrun’s team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense.The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges.

The U.S. state of Nevada passed a law on June 29, 2011 permitting the operation of autonomous cars in Nevada. Google had been lobbying for robotic car laws. The Nevada law went into effect on March 1, 2012, and the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles issued the first license for an autonomous car in May 2012. The license was issued to a Toyota Prius modified with Google’s experimental driverless technology. As of April 2012, Florida became the second state to allow the testing of autonomous cars on public roads. California became the third state to legalize the use of self-driven cars for testing purposes as of September 2012[update] when Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law at Google HQ in Mountain View.

Google first revealed in 2010 that it had been working on self-driving cars. This fits in with its work on mapping and software and might give users extra time to surf the web, boosting Google’s profits. Last year the company released a video of a blind man sitting in the driver’s seat of one of these (albeit with a passenger as backup), being taken to buy takeaway tacos and collect his dry cleaning. Sergey Brin, one of the internet company’s founders, expects its autonomous driving system to be ready for the market in five years. That may be optimistic, but by the 2020s some cars that drive themselves most or all of the time could well be in volume production. This will have big consequences.

The idea of self-driving cars as a means of reducing accidents and congestion has been around for a long time. One of the most popular exhibits at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was “Futurama”, a depiction of a city with cars remotely controlled by radio. In the 1980s and 1990s the European Commission sponsored a programme of research on automated driving, Prometheus. In the mid-2000s the Pentagon’s research agency, DARPA, launched its Grand Challenges, offering prizes to driverless cars that did best at navigating a tricky course. In the first of these, in 2004, none of the robot cars completed the course. In the third, held in 2007, six cars made it. The winning team’s technical director was Mr Urmson. Its main advantage over its rivals was that it had mapped the course in fine detail, something that his current employers are busy doing for the rest of the planet.

But even before such prototypes have proved themselves, the technology is already arriving in instalments as carmakers introduce sophisticated “assisted driving” features as options, even on mass-market models. European buyers of the Ford Focus, a mid-sized car, can now leave it to drive itself and maintain a safe distance in steady traffic. The car can measure a parking space and steer itself into it. It reads road signs and admonishes the driver if he breaks the speed limit. Such gadgetry also increasingly makes decisions on the driver’s behalf and overrules him in an emergency, for instance, braking to avoid a crash.

Other technologies are beginning to make this easier. First, the mechanical links between the controls and the working parts are progressively being replaced by electronic ones. Second, cars now have a rudimentary version of “black box” data recorders to collect information on the moments just before an accident. Insurers have already begun to offer discounts to motorists who agree to have more sophisticated ones that monitor their driving all the time.

Basil Enan, the boss of CoverHound, an online insurance broker, says that as well as giving discounts to drivers who install black boxes, insurers are offering lower premiums on cars with assisted-driving features because they reduce accidents. He thinks that in future “manual driving” will increasingly be penalised: “The more miles you’re logging on autopilot, the less you’re going to pay.” This will give motorists an incentive to use the assisted-driving features on their cars. Carmakers, for their part, will have an incentive to keep adding more to maintain high scores in the widely publicised safety tests that help them sell their models.

Safety-enhancing gadgets on cars tend to start out as optional extras, then get incorporated into “best practice” standards promoted by independent bodies like Euro NCAP, and eventually are made compulsory. Ubiquitous black boxes in road vehicles will provide a mass of data likely to demonstrate the effectiveness of automated-driving features, which will prompt calls to make them obligatory.

Conclusion: Autonomous driver systems are still in the early stages of development and too expensive for the mainstream market, and the race to be the first for mass consumption is heating up.

Posted by Jatin Jain at 8:14 PM

++++

VARIOUS

https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-and-uber-86f4f98902a1#.zecmk5zdy

++++

Linear notes

1.

2.

After spending over ten years writing a book ["How's the book coming, Joel" ringing in my ears], I thanked everyone. The Acknowledgements are the best part of the book.

Here are the first two paragraphs. The rest await your pleasure.

For a certain kind of help that cannot be expressed, I thank my wife Diana and our daughter Joanna Marie.

For their friendship and assistance through all the drafts and for listening to me talk for hours on end about the Sugar Act of 1948 (as amended), rice fields in Arkansas, commodity futures trading, and whatever agriculture policy madness afflicted me without notice at 8:45 on a Saturday night when we were simply going out for a pizza, I thank David F. Phillips and Andrew Jay Schwartzman.

++++

++++

Acknowledgements

For a certain kind of help that cannot be expressed, I thank my wife Diana and our daughter Joanna Marie.

For their friendship and assistance through all the drafts and for listening to me talk for hours on end about the Sugar Act of 1948 (as amended), rice fields in Arkansas, commodity futures trading, and whatever agriculture policy madness afflicted me without notice at 8:45 on a Saturday night when we were simply going out for a pizza, I thank David F. Phillips and Andrew Jay Schwartzman.

For patiently contributing to my agriculture education year in and year out, I thank William Gahr and all Gahr’s employees at the Food Group of the General Accounting Office who without warning were called upon to explain parity or modularization of food containers or soil erosion or whatever subject on which I needed educating, and I thank Philip Moery, who taught me about the bottom line in agriculture—both financially and politically.

For creating this book, I thank Robin Mayers, who read and argued with me about every word; the late Marie Rodell, my agent, who before she died was pleased to see me settled down and working on this project, who couldn’t quite believe that she’d ever have a client call her from Stuttgart, Arkansas (“Rice and duck calling capital of the world”), and who counseled me to keep my opinions of pesticides to myself when farmers were kind enough to let me see their farms, and whose concern about pesticides led her to support and make possible a wider audience for Rachel Carson; my agent Frances Collin, of the Marie Rodell-Frances Collin Literary Agency, for her belief in this book; Daniel Moses, of Sierra Club Books, whose quiet perseverance coaxed me to let go of this book (even though it will never really be ready because of a new development which might mean…. ); and my copy editor Mary Lou Van Deventer who made my prose less difficult to read and whose persistent questioning about why I did not write more about ecology and less about how nifty the commodities market is made me reexamine my motiviation for writing this book.

The remainder of my thanks I cannot adequately categorize; so I thank: The District of Columbia public library system, especially the Martin Luther King Memorial Library and the West End, Southeast, and Northeast branches; the Library of Congress, the congressional research service, the reference librarians at the Library of Congress, especially those who staff the telephones and the main floor reading room, all those anonymous gophers who brought down books of statistics when I’m sure they wished for more exciting searches; the USDA libraries, both the reading room downtown and the National Agriculture Library in Beltsville, Maryland; the scores of experts on agriculture at USDA who through the years put aside their other duties to tell me how many bushels of corn were in carryover, how many migrants did agricultural work in six given counties in California in the month of March, and other statistical questions, including questions on elementary mathematics; all the mathematics teachers I ever had, especially those who taught me the little I had the good sense to retain; the United States Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and its offspring Health and Human Services; the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, State, Transportation, and Energy and the Office of the Special Trade Representative, the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the White House press office under the administrations of Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan; the Congress of the United States and especially the House and Senate Agriculture committees; the House and Senate periodical press galleries; Howard Bray of the Fund for Investigative Journalism for his continual encouragement and the Fund for its support; The New Republic, The New York Times, Skeptic, et al. for publishing and republishing my articles on agricultural policy; Patric Mullen for buying me Bloody Marys, introducing me to members of Congress, and for his friendship; the Media Access Project; Linda Lazarus; The Washington Post library and Dan Morgan, Jody Allen, and Michael Barone; the National Journal library and especially Robert J. Samuelson; Michael P. Andrews; my mother Miriam P. Schmerler; my father Isadore; my grandmother Celia Pell; my sister Sarah Schmerler; Alvin and Theresa Demick and Arts Magazine; Craig Berrington; Jack Brock; the Migrant Legal Action Program; Cesar Chavez, Earl Butz, Hubert H. Humphrey, Dick Clark, William Proxmire, Thomas Foley, David Bowen, and others who granted me interviews; Paul Boertlein; Werner Brandt; former Under Secretary of Labor Robert J. Brown for his encouragement and friendship; David Brody; Ben Simpson of Capitol Hill Gulf; Central Delivery Service; Morris M. Cohen; National Public Radio; Miriam Daniel-Wolff; Susan Dankoff Menick; Michael and Robin Demick; Norman and Phyllis Demick; Julie Dillingham and her family; Theodore F. Brophy; Helen Ericson and the Journal of Commerce; Marcia, Barnet, Jonah, and Lee Eskin; my lawyer Susan Chaires; Colin Frank; Richard Gilmore; Jack Halpert; the Japan Uni Agency and especially Tatsuko Nagasawa and Yoshio Taketomi; Robert Leahy; Norma Lewin; Lee Avery Rosenhouse; Gary
Lucken; Barbara Machtiger; Lynn McReynolds; Jonathan Miller of Communications Daily; Linda B.R. Mills; Lisa, Sophy, and Phillipa Moery; David Mont; Donald, Michele, Katherine, and Peter Moore; Eunice, Janice, and Kevin Alexander; Curtis T. White and Andrea Engler; Howard Simister and Judith Soderholm; the gang on E Street; the Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Cooperative; David Moyer of Paul Stafford Associates; Agnes Mravcak; Lynne Murphy; David Schneiderman; Wendy Moonan; the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials; the Office of Technology Assessment and its Food Group; the National Press Club; Andrew L. Rothman; Dorothy Row; Cathy Kouts of Sierra Club Books; Edward Sacks; Amiel Segal, among other things for saving my life; Donald Hutter; Paul Bresnick; Eileen Shanahan; Ida Solkoff; Benjamin and Lil Solkoff; Leon and Gerda Zolko; Rona, Joe, and Allison Spiegel; Stationers Inc. of Richmond, Virginia, for making the reporters notebooks I carry everywhere; Diana McLellan, “The Ear”; David Sanford; Deborah Matz; Rita Jenrette; the Legal Services Corporation; Roger Rosenblatt; Martin Peretz; Eliot Marshall; Robert J. Myers; Michael Kinsley; Philip Terzian; the late John Osborne; Leslie B. Seagrave; Gwen Somers; Joan Tapper; Raphael Sagalyn; Paul S. Weisberg, for worrying about this book as if it were his; Jack Raher; Jack Limpert of The Washingtonian; Walter Shapiro; Donald Dunnington; Zookie Bass Solkoff; Betty, Jeff, and Elizabeth Laxague; the farmers in California, Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Vermont, Massachusetts, and other states who took me around their operations and answered lots of questions; the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the New York Coffee & Sugar Exchange, and other futures and cash markets for giving me permission to see the action on the floor (even when I sometimes got in the way); the People’s Republic of China; the staff of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress; the late Frank Norris; Calvin Beale, USDA’s population guru; the U.S. Sugar Corporation; The Palm Beach Post; the government of Jamaica; the United Farm Workers Union; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Chauffeurs Warehousemen & Helpers; former Secretaries of Agriculture Clifford Hardin and Bob Bergland; the Continental Grain Company; Cook Industries; the Bunge Corporation; William Robbins; Worldwatch Institute; Commodity News Service; Michael Jacobson and the Center for Science in the Public Interest; the United Nations; Business Week; the staff at CARE; The Wall Street Journal; the brokers at Conti Commodity Services, at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, et al.; the Des Moines Register, especially its Washington bureau chief James Risser; former Rep. Fred Richmond; Marc Grossman; the library of The Los Angeles Times; The Yuma [Arizona] Daily Sun; the National Farmers Union; Riceland Foods; the National Association of Wheat Growers; the American Farm Bureau Federation; the National Grange; the National Farmers Organization; Rural America Inc.; Rodale Press; Secretary of Agriculture John Block; Senator Bob Dole; the American Agriculture Movement; the American Bankers Association; former Sen. Herman Talmadge; former Rep. W.R. Poage; Sen. Edward Kennedy; Congressional Quarterly, especially Elizabeth Wehr, its first-rate agriculture reporter, and Hank Donnelly; Catherine Nicholson; Allison Masson; Yukiko Mori; Peter Hannaford; Michael Chinworth; Jun Fushimi, and the many others who through choice or misadventure remain anoymous.