Brad Ideas - Robocars - Comments

Re: Road Trains

Randy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:13:32 -0800

Brad,

Ahhhhh....It's not a *special* truck. It's *any* truck. Now it makes perfect sense.

And I agree that truck drivers are safer than car drivers, which is hard to convince just about anyone else.

Thanks,
Randy

Road trains

brad — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:55:17 -0800

I have seen various figures for the increase in fuel efficiency from drafting, but would say 30% can be done, possibly more. I have seen others claim less.

I think they are using a truck because it does provide quite a wind shadow, and because trucks are common and driven by professional drivers. Professional drivers do have higher class licences and good safety records, and those records are monitored. They don’t change lanes much either and are satisfied with that. I believe the plan is to get trucks equipped to do this work, so that all a person has to do is get on the highway and look for a suitable truck to follow. They are easy to spot, unlike cars or vans.

The truck is presumably already taking the trip its taking so its mpg are not important.

Hi Brad Yeh the Wired series

Matthew Newton — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:00:42 -0800

Hi Brad

Yeh the Wired series has been awesome.

In terms of the Road Train project.. we blogged about it, I'm personally not enthused. The cost of creating the wind break (including human driver) surely negates most of the benefit

Re: Road Trains

Randy — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:15:08 -0800

They mentioned that it was more environmental for the cars to be in a train, but they didn't say how much better. Do you have a feel for that?

I'm also wondering why the truck would be necessary. Or is this a prototype of the system the are envisioning?

If the truck is required, how does the it's MPG factor in to the efficiency?

Randy

Who is at fault

brad — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:36:23 -0800

Unlike most systems, software systems are deeply instrumented and logged. While there are a number of privacy concerns about this, I actually expect there will be very little to debate about the cause of most robocar accidents. That won’t stop people trying to debate, I agreee. But after a time, with a complete 3-D video of the accident and detailed logs of the computer’s internals, the defendants will know when to fight and not to, and the courts will tire of crazy tangents. But at the start, it’s harder to predict, and punative damages are the issue. But we won’t be debating if it was a bad chip at fault; I suspect we’ll know quite clearly.

Driverless cars

Guycf4 — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:23:36 -0800

Brad
As insightful as ever. I'd like to weigh in here on a couple of specific points:
Cost of liability- we tend to look at the cost of insurance in terms of injuries and repairs. Another significant layer is the cost to defend. This will be particularly messy during the early adoption phase. Today, a claim is against a driver who made a mistake. With these vehicles the range will run from the driver, to the manufacturer, the software engineer, the chip maker, the manufacture of each component, the wireless carrier, and so on. The litigious nature of America may well prevent lives from being saved.
Next, to complicate matters more, the bulk of our liability system is regulated differently across all 50 states.
Finally- let's remember that we that the stats can be put into a story to highlight why working through these issues will happen: imagine consumers spending 4 billion hours a year, waiting to board 747's, knowing in the US, 1 will crash every 4 days. Who would do it? On a global basis, it's a 747 every 24 hours. These debates remind of others like why entertainment material can never be streamed due to piracy- whoops. Or- why genetic scanning won't lead to preventative health care because of cost and privacy...please...really?
In the end, it is us-consumers that will set the pace. If we want to stay connected and entertained, we'll have to let the car drive. Take control and all that fun, extra productivity, social interaction will just shut off. What do you think we will choose? PLEASE send me my robo taxi!

Lifi

Barry Sweezey — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:37:17 -0800

Information can be transmitted through the visible light emitted from the traffic signal with lifi. No need for a radio transmitter.

Thanks Brad. Should make for

Matthew Newton — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:03:37 -0800

Thanks Brad. Should make for an watch.

Green flight & Better Place

brad — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:44:01 -0800

I did attend the Green Flight Challenge day at NASA, so I know about it, and automated flight is interesting but is a different problem. However, you can see my notes on airports, “flying cars” (non-standard meanings of that phrase) and others on this blog. You still need robocars to get to the airports, and of course a new air traffic control system — which was built but not deployed at NASA.

Better Place is a tough problem. Being able to swap batteries sure would be nice, but so much stands in the way. I think that the industry is too young to standardize the battery pack. Right now a lot of the innovation in electric cars is taking place in the battery pack, and I expect this to continue for some time. With Better Place, customers are not buying the battery, and it must fit a standard form factor. The first is just as dangerous to innovation — you want products that are bought by early adopters, one at a time, for high speed innovation. One size does not fit all when it comes to electric car batteries.

And the other hard part is that it’s a lot of work to get the swap stations in so many places that it really delivers the convenience people want — for human driving. For robocars, the swap station model works fine because you can have different swap stations for different battery cases, and they do not have to be super conveniently located, and robots don’t even mind a 15 minute wait for a swap (or they make an appointment for one.)

EN-V Cars or LIT cars are

Matthew Newton — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:52:29 -0800

EN-V Cars or LIT cars are how I envisage most personal transport to happen, given that such a high proportion of day to day journeys are conducted solo.

You wouldn't happen to know of any efforts to standardise battery design or is it too early?

It should be interesting with Better Place to see how taxi companies react as this will be a good early signal of how things will take off in Driverless Car land.

On another topic, do you have any thoughts on the CAFE Foundation Challenge & Pipistrel USA's efforts? (for those reading - http://cafefoundation.org/v2/gfc_main.php).

It seems like this has almost immediate potential for pilot-less development considering that a) auto-pilot technology is already pretty much good enough and b) the quantity of potential hazards is much smaller. It seems like the biggest obstacle would just be a lack of a sufficiently motivated big-money company.

The stuff locker

brad — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:01:00 -0800

If the stuff locker plan is to work, you need some reasonably standardized sizes, not just among the Taxis but with the private cars. One reason private car ownership is made easier by robocars is you no longer need to buy a car that meets all your needs because you can hire one for special needs — cargo hauling, 4WD trip, large group, longer range, your battery is almost out, couple with only 1 car sometimes needs 2, etc. If you no longer need a car to handle all those things you might be happy with a much simpler (and cheaper) 1-2 person car for example. But then you need to transfer stuff easily, so standardized lockers are a win.

I also think BetterPlace is not a great idea for private cars unless you have a lot of them around, but it’s great for robocars and taxis, which don’t mind returning to a depot as long as it’s not too far away to do a battery swap. BetterPlace needs cars to all standardize their battery shape and also for car owners to not own their batteries. However, a taxi fleet can get by with just a few swap stations and it does not need to be compatible with other cars.

Regarding the solutions, I

Matthew Newton — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:32:52 -0800

Regarding the solutions, I did see your "stuff box" idea. This is interesting and will maybe end up being a point of difference for one particular robotaxi operator?

It will be a fun exercise watching them differentiate - luxury, waiting time, cost, features... there will be lots of ways. Maybe one brand will be completely funded by advertising? (Watch an ad at the start of the trip, ride the first 5 minutes for free?).

I think the world will most likely just adopt a New-York attitude to carrying things around.

If you see the article on my blog today, Better Place has just delivered their first cars to Israel. Their battery-swap technology will surely be the most viable solution.

Though not quite my joke

brad — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:29:15 -0800

To be fair, I didn’t write this joke. I think I first heard it from Steven Schladover at UC Berkeley, who hates that people call them autonomous cars (the thinks it should be “automatic”) and is in general a skeptic about robocars on ordinary highways even though he’s worked on things like platooning and cars that follow magnets.

The reason for the word autonomous comes form typical vocabulary in robotics. At first, robots were really just remote controlled. As people built robots able to make movement decisions on their own, not just on how to get from A to B, but doing dynamic things like avoiding moving obstacles etc. this got called autonomous because these small movement decisions are autonomous, even though the overall goals are not. Steven won’t win his fight, but his joke is correct. A fully autonomous vehicle would be one that could do what it wanted to do in spite of instructions. Of course, for now, what it “wants” would be the result of other programming.

NY Times Article

Joel Upchurch — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:14:30 -0800

I notice the NY Times is quoting you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/technology/googles-autonomous-vehicles...

“It won’t truly be an autonomous vehicle,” said Brad Templeton, a software designer and a consultant for the Google project, “until you instruct it to drive to work and it heads to the beach instead.”

Which country first

brad — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:06:01 -0800

Yes, I’ve written a number of times that the liability system may be much more favorable in some countries.

On the other hand, the driving in China does make the problem a lot more difficult to solve. India is even worse. In China the line down the middle of the road is just as suggestion. In India the direction of the lane is just a suggestion.

My hope is that we get one of those rare enlightened moments from the government that got us useful things like the safe harbours of the CDA and DMCA. In fact, a good project in China or Singapore would actually demonstrate that US jurisprudence is creating a risk that the US will be the follower in this important technology though it starts out as the leader, and perhaps action would be taken to correct that.