Autonomous Vehicles News & Discussions

[Yuli Ban]

U.S. regulators on Thursday issued final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to meet crash standards.

Automakers and tech companies have faced significant hurdles to deploying automated driving system (ADS) vehicles without human controls because of safety standards written decades ago that assume people are in control.

Last month, General Motors Co (GM.N) and its self-driving technology unit Cruise petitioned the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for permission to build and deploy a self-driving vehicle without human controls like steering wheels or brake pedals.

The rules revise regulations that assume vehicles "will always have a driver's seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or just one front outboard passenger seating position."

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

John Deere is becoming one of the world's most important AI companies
"When I asked Heraud if the “fully-automated farm of the future” was something that would arrive within the next decade or two, he replied: It’ll be here before the end of the decade."

John Deere has been in business for nearly 200 years. For those in the agriculture industry, the company that makes green tractors is as well-known as Santa Claus, McDonald’s, or John Wayne.

Heck, even city folk who’ve never seen a tractor that wasn’t on a television screen know John Deere. The company’s so popular even celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and George Clooney have been known to rock a Deere hat.

What most outsiders don’t know is that John Deere’s not so much a farming vehicle manufacturer these days as it is an agricultural technology company. And, judging by how things are going in 2022, we’re predicting it’ll be a full-on artificial intelligence company within the next 15 years.

[caltrek]

Turkey’s Karsan Is Building the Fully Electric Buses Customers Want, Today
by Kyle Field
April 27, 2022

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/26/tu ... ant-today/

Extract:

(Clean Technica) Located an hour outside of Istanbul in Bursa, Karsan has been building passenger vehicles and buses since it was founded in 1966. Their core business is the design and manufacturing of a full range of buses. Karsan also does intermittent contract manufacturing of passenger vehicles in a flexible factory arrangement that lets its business surge and contract as the business shifts over time...

Autonomous Transit

Shortly after building its first electric e-ATAK full-sized transit bus, Karsan brought on California-based Adastec and BMWi as partners to build a fully autonomous transit bus. Transit buses typically run static routes, from the depot along a predetermined set of stops and back, making them perhaps the ideal use case for a fully electric, autonomous vehicle. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to drastically improve the safety of vehicles while drastically lowering the cost of operation.

Karsan’s Autonomous e-ATAK is a fully electric, level 4 autonomous vehicle, capable of navigating on city streets as a full-sized vehicle, at full speed. The company made history as Europe’s first self driving bus with passengers when the first customer vehicle went into operation earlier this year in Stavanger, Norway. If early pilots of the technology are successful — and all signs point to that being the case — vehicles like the autonomous e-ATAK could unlock a future of low cost, zero emission transit with far fewer accidents. That is a potential game changer for cities in Europe and around the world.

I was shocked to learn that Karsan’s Adastec-powered autonomous vehicles only require about 1 month of localization, including mapping of the route, learning local signs, language, etc before being put into service. It’s an extremely rapid process for a technology that can drastically reduce the cost of operations for transit authorities. Using pre-mapped roads, Lidar, and cameras may seem strange when coming from the world of passenger vehicles, but because they run on fixed routes, this is an ideal implementation for transit vehicles.

[Yuli Ban]

Mercedes Drive Pilot Level 3 Autonomous Tech Officially On Sale In Germany

The two flagship models from Mercedes-Benz, the S-Class and the all-electric EQS, will soon be able to be ordered with conditional self-driving tech in Germany. Starting from May 17, the so-called Drive Pilot system will be offered as an extra-cost option for the two sedans, allowing the driver to hand the entire control of the machine over to the system under certain conditions.

The Stuttgart-based automaker became the first in the industry to receive international approval for Level 3 autonomous tech in December last year. Releasing the system on the market now becomes the next logical step and Mercedes will ask €5,000 for Drive Pilot on the S-Class and €7,430 on the EQS, respectively around $5,260 and $7,813 at the current exchange rates. These figures include both the required hardware and software and for now, no further subscriptions are needed
It’s important to note that Level 3 doesn’t mean a fully autonomous vehicle. The system used by Mercedes allows the driver to hand all driving tasks to the tech in heavy traffic or on suitable motorways in Germany with speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour. Under these conditions, the driver can fully disengage from driving with the system controlling the speed and distance, as well as guiding the vehicle within its lane. More importantly, the system also reacts to unexpected traffic situations and avoids dangerous maneuvers.

[caltrek]

Does The Tesla “Full Self Driving” Approach Have A “See-Saw Problem”?
by Zachary Shahan
May 15, 2022

Introduction:

(Clean Technica) Tesla fans are now well aware of Tesla’s approach to “full self driving,” but I’ll provide a super quick summary here just to make sure all readers are on the same page. Basically, at the moment, Tesla drivers in North America who bought the “Full Self Driving” package and passed a Safety Score test have a beta version of door-to-door Tesla Autopilot/Full Self Driving activated in their cars. If I put a destination in my Tesla Model 3’s navigation as I’m leaving the driveway, my car will drive there on its own — in theory. It’s not close to perfect, and drivers must vigilantly monitor the car as it drives in order to intervene whenever necessary, but it now has broad capability to drive “anywhere.” When we drive around with Full Self Driving (FSD) on, if there’s a problem (either a disengagement or if the driver taps a little video icon to send a video clip of recent driving to Tesla HQ), members of the Tesla Autopilot team looks at the clip. If needed, they re-drive the scenario in a simulation program and respond to the issue in the correct way in order to teach the Tesla software how to handle that situation.

I got access to FSD Beta several months ago (early October 2021). When I got it, I was quite surprised at how bad it was in my area. I was surprised since 1) I had seen a lot of hype about how good it was (including from Elon Musk and other people I generally trust when it comes to Tesla matters) and 2) I live in a really easy area for driving (a Florida suburb). When I started using FSD Beta, I was just not expecting to see that it had significant problems with basic driving tasks in a driving environment that’s about as easy as it gets. Nonetheless, I retained some hope that it would learn from its mistakes and from the feedback I was sending to Tesla HQ. Surely, it couldn’t be hard to correct some glaring problems and each update would be better and better.

I have seen some improvements since then. However, updates have also brought new problems! I didn’t expect that…

Read more here:https://cleantechnica.com/2022/05/15/do ... w-problem/

[caltrek]

Carnegie Mellon Roboticists Go Off Road to Compile Data That Could Train Self-Driving ATVs
May 25, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University took an all-terrain vehicle on wild rides through tall grass, loose gravel and mud to gather data about how the ATV interacted with a challenging, off-road environment.

They drove the heavily instrumented ATV aggressively at speeds up to 30 miles an hour. They slid through turns, took it up and down hills, and even got it stuck in the mud — all while gathering data such as video, the speed of each wheel and the amount of suspension shock travel from seven types of sensors.

The resulting dataset, called TartanDrive, includes about 200,000 of these real-world interactions. The researchers believe the data is the largest real-world, multimodal, off-road driving dataset, both in terms of the number of interactions and types of sensors. The five hours of data could be useful for training a self-driving vehicle to navigate off road.

"Unlike autonomous street driving, off-road driving is more challenging because you have to understand the dynamics of the terrain in order to drive safely and to drive faster," said Wenshan Wang, a project scientist in the Robotics Institute (RI).

Previous work on off-road driving has often involved annotated maps, which provide labels such as mud, grass, vegetation or water to help the robot understand the terrain. But that sort of information isn't often available and, even when it is, might not be useful. A map area labeled as "mud," for example, may or may not be drivable. Robots that understand dynamics can reason about the physical world.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/953376

[caltrek]

Cruise Can Finally Charge for Driverless Robotaxi Rides in San Franciscoby
Rebecca Bellan
June 1, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit of General Motors, has finally been given the green light to start charging fares for its driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted Thursday to award Cruise with a driverless deployment permit, the final hurdle the company needed to jump to begin operating its autonomous ride-hail service commercially.

Cruise will be operating its passenger service at a maximum speed of 30 miles per hour between the hours of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. on select streets in San Francisco, adding another one and a half hours to its current service. The company will need additional state regulatory approval to charge members of the public for driverless rides in the rest of the city, according to a Cruise spokesperson. These preconditions come as part of Cruise’s “passenger safety plan” that limits the service to overnight hours and doesn’t include the city’s dense urban core, according to the CPUC’s draft resolution.

“In the coming months, we’ll expand our operating domain, our hours of operation and our ability to charge members of the public for driverless rides until we have fared rides 24/7 across the entire city,” a spokesperson for Cruise told TechCrunch.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/02/crui ... rancisco/

[caltrek]

RAPID Shuttle Service Recognized With Excellence Award
June 3, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) A team from The University of Texas at Arlington’s Parking and Transportation Services (PATS) and Department of Civil Engineering received an award for its work on RAPID (Rideshare, Automation, and Payment Integration Demonstration), the on-demand, self-driving shuttle service.
Funded through a $1.8 million Federal Transit Administration grant, the RAPID project implemented self-driving shuttles for the public in Arlington, including free rides for UTA students from March 2021 to March 2022. Team leaders Greg Hladik, executive director for Auxiliary Services, and Sharareh “Sherri” Kermanshachi, associate professor of civil engineering, worked with the city of Arlington, Via and May Mobility on the program.

The Texas Parking and Transportation Association bestowed its Excellence Award on the UTA team at a conference in San Antonio, where Kermanshachi and Hladik delivered a presentation sharing the lessons learned and findings of successful RAPID implementation. The award recognized the RAPID program for the transportation improvements, efficiencies and high service levels it provided to the UTA community.

“We were happy to offer our students a cutting-edge mobility service that met their needs,” Hladik said. “The program taught us that students will adapt to the services available to them. They embraced this alternative method of transportation wholeheartedly. We continue to look for innovative ways to improve the parking and mobility experience for the UTA community.”

Kermanshachi noted that despite its launch early in the pandemic, the RAPID program still saw significant use. Students were excited to learn more about autonomous vehicles and how the service works.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/954948

[weatheriscool]

Self-Driving and Driver-Assist Technology Linked to Hundreds of Crashes, U.S. Data Shows
Source: New York Times

Over the course of 10 months, nearly 400 car crashes in the United States involved advanced driver-assistance technologies, the federal government’s top auto-safety regulator disclosed Wednesday, in its first-ever release of large-scale data about these burgeoning systems.
In 392 incidents cataloged by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from July 1 of last year through May 15, six people died and five were seriously injured.

Teslas operating with Autopilot, the more ambitious Full Self Driving mode or any of their associated component features were in 273 crashes. The disclosures are part of a sweeping effort by the federal agency to determine the safety of advanced driving systems as they become increasingly commonplace. Beyond the futuristic allure of self-driving cars, scores of car manufacturers have rolled out automated components in recent years, including features that allow you to take your hands off the steering wheel under certain conditions and that help you parallel park.

In Wednesday’s release, NHTSA disclosed that Honda vehicles were involved in 90 incidents and Subarus in 10. Ford Motor, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota, Hyundai and Porsche each reported five or fewer. “These technologies hold great promise to improve safety, but we need to understand how these vehicles are performing in real-world situations,” said Steven Cliff, the agency’s administrator. “This will help our investigators quickly identify potential defect trends that emerge.”

Speaking with reporters ahead of Wednesday’s release, Dr. Cliff also cautioned against drawing conclusions from the data collected so far, noting that it does not take into account factors like the number of cars from each manufacturer that are on the road and equipped with these types of technologies. “The data may raise more questions than they answer,” he said. About 830,000 Tesla cars in the United States are equipped with Autopilot or the company’s other driver-assistance technologies — offering one explanation why Tesla vehicles accounted for nearly 70 percent of the reported crashes.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/busi ... -data.html

It's possible that this tech could be banned.

[caltrek]

Self-Driving and Driver-Assist Technology Linked to Hundreds of Crashes, U.S. Data Shows
Source: New York Times

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/busi ... -data.html

It's possible that this tech could be banned.

Oh yes, at least in some localities. An early sign of that was the U.S. Senate race here in California. A fellow name Dan O'Dowd who in a later ad claimed to be a computer coding specialist, ran a whole lot of television ads hyping the "dangers" of autonomous auto vehicles. As far as his immediate candidacy is concerned, it didn't seem to do him much good as he only received fifty thousand or so votes. Quite pathetic for a statewide election result here in California. Still, it couldn't have done the autonomous car industry much good to have so much negative advertising on television. For some reason, O'Dowd focused with particular intensity upon Tesla. You would have thought that his main primary opponent was Elon Musk instead of Alex Padilla. As you and other readers might recall, Padilla is now going to face off against a Republican in the general election, with O'Dowd now more or less out of the picture.

So, yes, I can see the question of autonomous vehicles continuing to be a political issue. I just have to listen to conversations between my wife and others to hear how negatively the idea is being received by many. Personally, I am both excited and intrigued by the idea, but don't really have strong feelings one way or another. Outright banning seems extreme, but careful study and cautious development and introduction seems prudent. Now is a critical time before Musk and others have such a vested interest that they begin to paralyze legislative bodies with excessive campaign contributions.

[caltrek]

New Technology Helps Self-driving Cars Learn from Own Memories
June 21, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) ITHACA, N.Y. – Researchers at Cornell University have developed a way to help autonomous vehicles create “memories” of previous experiences and use them in future navigation, especially during adverse weather conditions when the car cannot safely rely on its sensors.

Cars using artificial neural networks have no memory of the past and are in a constant state of seeing the world for the first time – no matter how many times they’ve driven down a particular road before.

The researchers have produced three concurrent papers with the goal of overcoming this limitation. Two are being presented at the Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2022), being held June 19-24 in New Orleans.

“The fundamental question is, can we learn from repeated traversals?” said senior author Kilian Weinberger, professor of computer science. “For example, a car may mistake a weirdly shaped tree for a pedestrian the first time its laser scanner perceives it from a distance, but once it is close enough, the object category will become clear. So, the second time you drive past the very same tree, even in fog or snow, you would hope that the car has now learned to recognize it correctly.”

Conclusion:

The researchers hope the approaches could drastically reduce the development cost of autonomous vehicles (which currently still relies heavily on costly human annotated data) and make such vehicles more efficient by learning to navigate the locations in which they are used the most.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/956596

[Xyls]

Tesla lays off about 200 autopilot workers in latest cuts

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/tesla-lays- ... -1.1785179

Tesla Inc. laid off hundreds of workers on its Autopilot team as the electric-vehicle maker shuttered a California facility, according to people familiar with the matter, one of the larger known cuts amid a broad workforce reduction.

Affected employees were notified Tuesday, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Teams at the San Mateo office were tasked with evaluating customer vehicle data related to the Autopilot driver-assistance features and performing so-called data labeling.

[caltrek]

File this next article under oooops.

Cruise Robotaxis Blocked Traffic for Hours on this San Francisco Street
by Rebeccaa Bellamn
June 30, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) More than a half dozen Cruise robotaxis stopped operating and sat in a street in San Francisco late Tuesday night, blocking traffic for a couple of hours until employees arrived and manually moved the autonomous vehicles.

Photos and a description of the Cruise robotaxi blockade were shared to a Reddit post on a subreddit about happenings in the city.

The cars appear to have been stalled at the intersection of Gough and Fulton Streets.

“We had an issue earlier this week that caused some of our vehicles to cluster together,” a Cruise spokesperson said. “While it was resolved and no passengers were impacted, we apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced.”

The vehicles were recovered through a combination of remote assistance and manual retrieval.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/30/crui ... o-street/

[caltrek]

Real Driverless Cars Are Now Legal in China’s Tech Hub Shenzhen
by Rita Liao
July 25, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) There are plenty of autonomous driving vehicles testing on the roads of Shenzhen today: Pony.ai, Baidu, DeepRoute, AutoX, you name it. But these vehicles are not really the unmanned vehicles tech upstarts envision for the future, as they have been required to operate with a safety driver behind the wheel.

A set of provisions introduced by the Shenzhen government is bringing the industry one step closer to a driverless future. The “Silicon Valley of China” that’s home to the likes of Huawei, Tencent, and DJI is historically known for its progressive economic policies, so it’s unsurprising that the city just became the first in China to have laid out comprehensive rules governing smart and connected vehicles.

The regulation, which is set to take effect on August 1, grants permission for autonomous driving vehicles to operate without a human in the driver’s seat — though only within areas designated by the city’s authorities.

The rules also define the thorny issue of liability. When the vehicle is equipped with a driver, the driver will “be handled” by the transportation authorities in case of traffic rule violations and incidents. But if the car is completely driverless, the owner or manager of the self-driving vehicle is subject to handling by the authorities. If the accident is a result of a defect in the connected car, the owner or manager of the car can seek compensation from the manufacturer or vendor.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/25/rea ... henzhen/

[caltrek]

Cruise Starts Mapping Dubai’s Streets in Preparation for 2023 Robotaxi Launch
by Rebecca Bellan
July 24, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) Cruise is making good on its promise to launch an autonomous driving service in Dubai. Just a few weeks after the General Motors-backed AV company officially launched its commercial driverless operations in San Francisco, Cruise has sent two of its autonomous Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles to Dubai to begin mapping the city in preparation for a planned launch in 2023, according to Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA).

Last April, Cruise signed a partnership agreement with the RTA to open a robotaxi service there as part of UAE ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s vision to convert 25% of total transportation trips in Dubai to self-driving trips by 2030. After a “comprehensive, multi-year process to choose the best possible partner,” Cruise was chosen as Dubai’s exclusive robotaxi provider until 2029.

The two Chevy Bolts, which began mapping operations Sunday, will initially be deployed in the Jumeirah area of the city, a residential strip along the beach, and driven by humans with special training. Cruise’s sensor suite includes lidar, radar and cameras to collect data about the car’s surrounding environment which can then be used to create a virtual map for the autonomous driver.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/24/cru ... -launch/

[caltrek]

Hyundai Motor Eyes Acquisition of Korean lidar-free Self-Driving Startup 42dot
by Ivan Mehta
August 1, 2022

Introduction:

(Techcrunch) Hyundai Motor is considering increasing its stake in, or fully acquiring, the South Korea-based lidar-free autonomous mobility platform 42dot, the latest signal of its growing interest in the fast-growing space.

A spokesperson of 42dot told TechCrunch that the startup is in talks with Hyundai Motor, but cautioned that terms including stake size and deal valuation hadn’t materialized yet. Hyundai Motor did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

Hyundai currently owns a 20.4% stake in the three-year-old startup, whereas 42dot’s co-founder and chief executive Chang-Hyeon Song, who interestingly also leads the transportation-as-a-service (TaaS) team at Hyundai Motor, held a 36.19% stake as of December 2021, according to 42dot’s regulatory filing. The rest is owned by venture capital firms and strategic investors, including LG Electronics, SK Telecom, Lotte Rental, CJ Logistics and LIG Nex1.

The ongoing deliberation signals Hyundai Motor’s accelerating efforts to strengthen its autonomous driving technology that is in line with the Korean automaker’s grand plan to invest $79 billion (95.5 trillion WON) through 2030 into autonomous driving software technology and electric vehicle-related businesses. Hyundai Motor, which has said it aims to secure 7% of the global electric vehicle market by 2030, earmarked $9.2 billion (12 trillion WON) for connectivity and autonomous driving software investment.

Conclusion:

Founded in 2019 by former Apple, Microsoft and Naver alum Song, 42dot has developed Akit, a self-driving software and hardware solution, and TAP, an autonomous mobility and logistics platform that offers a number of services across ride-hailing, fleet management, demand-responsive transport, smart logistics and more.

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/01/hyun ... up-42dot/

[wjfox]

Germany: 1 dead, 9 injured after test car veers into traffic

today

BERLIN (AP) — A test car with autonomous steering capability veered into oncoming traffic in Germany, killing one person and seriously injuring nine others, police said Tuesday.

A spokesman for police in the southwestern town of Reutlingen said the electric BMW iX with five people on board, including a young child, swerved out of its lane at a bend in the road, triggering a series of collisions involving four vehicles Monday afternoon.

After brushing an oncoming Citroen, the BMW hit a Mercedes-Benz van head-on, resulting in the death of a 33-year-old passenger in that vehicle.

The 70-year-old driver of the Citroen lost control of her car and crashed into another vehicle with two people on board, pushing it off the road and causing it to burst into flames.

Reutlingen police spokesman Michael Schaal said four rescue helicopters and dozens of firefighters responded to the incident and the injured were taken to several hospitals in the region. They included the 43-year-old driver of the BMW, three adults aged 31, 42 and 47, and a 18-month-old child who were all in the test vehicle.

https://apnews.com/article/technology-g ... 85043ed94a