Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Southwest recently announced a very different approach to providing in-flight entertainment. Partnering with dish network they will offer live TV and on-demand programming over the in-plane WIFI to people's personal devices. Sadly, for now, it's just Apple devices. I will presume they will extend this to other platforms, including laptops, soon, and they should consider also allowing you to rent a tablet one-way if you don't have your own.

A nice result for Vislab of Parma, Italy. They have completed a trial run on public roads using their mostly vision-based driving system. You can see a report on the Vislab site for full details. The run included urban, rural and highway streets. While the press release tries to make a big point that they did this with a vacant driver's seat, the video shows a safety driver in that seat at all times, so it's not clear how the test was done.

Had my second RAID failure last week. In the end, things were OK but the reality is that many RAID implementations are much more fragile than they should be. Write failures on a drive caused the system to hang. Hard reset caused the RAID to be marked dirty, which mean it would not boot until falsely marked clean (and a few other hoops,) leaving it with some minor filesystem damage that was reparable. Still, I believe that a proper RAID-like system should have as its maxim that the user is never worse off because they built a RAID than if they had not done so.

This week I attended the Transportation Research Board Workshop on Automated Road Vehicles which has an academic focus but still has lots of industry-related topics. TRB's main goal is to figure out what various academics should be researching or getting grants for, but this has become the "other" conference on robocars. Here are my notes from it.

Bryant Walker Smith told of an interesting court case in Ontario, where a truck driver sued over the speed limiter put in his truck and the court ruled that the enforced speed limiter was a violation of fundamental rights of choice. One wonders if a similar ruling would occur in the USA. I have an article pending on what the speed limit should be for robocars with some interesting math.

Cliff Nass expressed skepticism over the ability to have easy handover from self-driving to human driving. This transfer is a "valence transfer" and if the person is watching a movie in a tense scene that makes her sad or angry, she will begin driving with that emotional state. More than one legal scholar felt that quickly passing control to a human in an urgent situation would not absolve the system of any liability under the law, and it could be a dangerous thing. Nass is still optimistic -- he notes that in spite of often expressed fears, no whole field has been destroyed because it caused a single fatality.

There were reports on efforts in Europe and Japan. In both cases, government involvement is quite high, with large budgets. On the other hand, this seems to have led in most cases to more impractical research that suggests vehicles are 1-2 decades away.

Volkswagen described a couple of interesting projects. One was the eT! -- a small van that would follow a postman around as he did his rounds. The van had the mail, and the postman did not drive it but rather had it follow him so he could go and get new stacks of mail to deliver. I want one of those in the airport to have my luggage follow me around.

VW has plans for a "traffic jam pilot" which is more than the traffic jam assist products we've seen. This product would truly self-drive at low speeds in highway traffic jams, allowing the user to not pay attention to the road, and thus get work done. In this case, the car would give 10 seconds warning that the driver must take control again. VW eventually wants to have a full vehicle which gives you a 10 minute warning but that's some distance away.

The Vislab team from Parma, Italy, which you may remember did the intermittently autonomous drive from Italy to Shanghai a couple of years ago is back with a new vehicle, dubbed BRAiVE which tomorrow begins testing on real urban streets.

BART, one of the SF Bay Area's transit systems, is on strike today, and people are scrambling for alternatives. The various new car-based transportation companies like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar are all trying to bump their service to help with the demand, but in the future I think there will be a much bigger opportunity for these companies.

Yahoo announced that in a few days they will shut down the altavista web site. This has prompted a few posts on the history of internet search, to which I will add an anecdote.

I always feel strange when I see blog and social network posts about the death of a pet or even a relative. I know the author but didn't know anything about the pet other than that the author cared.

The AUVSI summit on "driverless" cars last week contained 2 days of nothing but robocars, and I reported on issues regarding Google and policy in part 1.

As noted, NHTSA released their proposal for how they want to regulate such vehicles. In it, they defined levels 0 through 4. Level 2 is what I (and GM) have been calling "super cruise" -- a car which can do limited self driving but requires constant human supervision. Level 3 is a car which can drive without constant attention, but might need to call upon a human driver (non-urgently) to handle certain streets and situations. Level 4 is the fully automatic robocar.

Level 2 issues

Level 2 is coming this year in traffic jams in the Mercedes S and the BMW 5, and soon after from Audi and Volvo. GM had announced super cruise for the 2015 Cadillac line but has pulled back and delayed that to later in the decade. Nonetheless the presentation from GM's Jeremy Salinger brought home many of the issues with this level.

GM has done a number of user studies in their super cruise cars on the test track. And they learned that the test subjects very quickly did all sorts of dangerous things, definitely not paying attention to the road. They were not told what they couldn't do, but subjects immediately began texting, fiddling around in the back and even reading (!) while the experimenters looked on with a bit of fear. No big surprise, as people even text today without automatic steering, but the experimental results were still striking.

Because of that GM is planning what they call "countermeasures" to make sure this doesn't happen. They did not want to say what countermeasures they liked, but in the past, we have seen proposals such as:

• You must touch the wheel every few seconds or it disengages
• A camera looks at your eyes and head and alerts or disengages if you look away from the road for too long
• A task for your hands like touching a button every so often

The problem is these countermeasures can also get annoying, reducing the value of the system. It may be the lack of ability to design a good countermeasure is what has delayed GM's release of the product. There is a policy argument coming up about whether level 2 might be more dangerous than the harder levels 3 and above, because there is more to go wrong with the human driver and the switches between human and machine driving. (Level 4 has no such switches, level 3 has switches with lots of warning.)

On the plus side, studies on existing accidents show that accident-avoidance systems, even just forward collision avoidance, have an easy potential for huge benefits. Already we're seeing a 15% reduction in accidents in some studies just from FCA, but studies show that in 33% of accidents, the brakes were never applied at all, and only in just 1% of accidents were the brakes applied with full force! As such, systems which press the brakes and press them hard when they detect the imminent accident may not avoid the accident entirely, but they will highly reduce the severity of a lot of accidents.

I was sadly informed this morning by Ann Lowson that transportation pioneer Martin Lowson has fallen to a stroke this weekend.

Martin had an amazing career but it was more amazing that he was still actively engaged at age 75. We shared a panel last month in Phoenix at the people-mover conference and continued our vigourous debate on the merits of cars like his on closed guideways compared to robocars.

This week I attended AUVSI's "Driverless Car Summit" in Detroit. This year's event, the third, featured a bigger crowd and a decent program, and will generate more than one post.

I would hardly call it a theme, but two speakers expressed fairly negative comments about Google's efforts, raising some interesting subjects. (As an important disclaimer, the Google car team is a consulting client of mine, but I am not their spokesman and the views here do not represent Google's views.)

The keynote address came from Bryan Reimer of MIT, and generated the most press coverage and debate, though the recent NHTSA guidelines also created a stir.

Reimer's main concern: Google is testing on public streets instead of a test track. As such it is taking the risk of a fatal accident, from which the blowback could be so large it stifles the field for many years. Car companies historically have done extensive test track work before going out on real streets. I viewed Reimer's call as one for near perfection before there is public deployment.

There is a U-shaped curve of risk here. Indeed, a vendor who takes too many risks may cause an accident that generates enough backlash to slow down the field, and thus delay not just their own efforts, but an important life-saving technology. On the other hand, a quest for perfection attempts what seems today to be impossible, and as such also delays deployment for many years, while carnage continues on the roads.

As such there is a "Goldilocks" point in the middle, with the right amount of risk to maximize the widescale deployment of robocars that drive more safely than people. And there can be legitimate argument about where that is.

Reimer also expressed concern that as automation increases, human skill decreases, and so you actually start needing more explicit training, not less. He is as such concerned with the efforts to make what NHTSA calls "level 2" systems (hands off, but eyes on the road) as well as "level 3" systems (eyes off the road but you may be called upon to drive in certain situations.) He fears that it could be dangerous to hand driving off to people who now don't do it very often, and that stories from aviation bear this out. This is a valid point, and in a later post I will discuss the risks of the level-2 "super cruise" systems.

Maarten Sierhuis, who is running Nissan's new research lab (where I will be giving a talk on the future of robocars this Thursday, by the way) issued immediate disagreement on the question of test tracks. His background at NASA has taught him that you "fly where you train and train where you fly" -- there is no substitute for real world testing if you want to build a safe product. One must suspect Google agrees -- it's not as if they couldn't afford a test track. The various automakers are also all doing public road testing, though not as much as Google. Jan Becker of Bosch reported their vehicle had only done "thousands" of public miles. (Google reported a 500,000 mile count earlier this year.)

Heinz Mattern, research and development manager for Valeo (which is a leading maker of self-parking systems) went even further, starting off his talk by declaring that "Google is the enemy." When asked about this, he did not want to go much further but asked, "why aren't they here? (at the conference)" There was one Google team employee at the conference, but not speaking, and I'm not am employee or rep. It was pointed out that Chris Urmson, chief engineer of the Google team, had spoken at the prior conferences.

I'm off for AUVSI's "Driverless Car Summit" in Detroit. I attended and wrote about last year's summit, which, in spite of being put on by a group that comes out of the military unmanned vehicle space, was very much about the civilian technology. (As I've said before, I have a dislike for the term "driverless car" and in fact at the summit last year, the audience expressed the same dislike but could not figure out what the best replacement term was.)

There have been a wide variety of announcements of late giving the impression that somebody has "solved the problem" of making a robocar affordable, usually with camera systems. It's widely reported how the Velodyne LIDAR used by all the advanced robocar projects (including Google, Toyota and many academic labs) costs $75,000 (or about $30,000 in a smaller model) and since that's more than the cost of the car, it is implied that is a dead-end approach.

Today the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA) released their plan on regulation of automated vehicles, a 14 page document on various elements of the technology and how it might be regulated.

I have owned a laptop for decades, and I've always gone for the "small and light" laptop class because as a desktop user, my laptop is only for travel, and ease of carrying is thus very important. Of course once I get there I have envied the larger screens and better keyboards and other features of the bigger laptops people carry, but generally been happy with the decision.

Others have gone for "desktop replacement" laptops which are powerful, big and heavy. Those folks don't have a desktop, at most they plug their laptop into an external monitor and other peripherals at home. The laptop is a bitch to carry but of course all files come with it.

Today, the tablet is changing that equation. I now find that when I am going into a situation where I want a minimal device that's easy to carry, the tablet is the answer, and even better the tablet and bluetooth keyboard. I even carry a keyboard that's a fair bit larger than the tablet, but still very light compared to a laptop. When I am in a meeting, or sitting attending an event, I am not going to do the things I need the laptop for. Well, not as much, anyway. On the airplane, the tablet is usually quite satisfactory -- in fact better when in coach, though technically the keyboard is not allowed on a plane. (My tablet can plug in a USB keyboard if needed.)

**If my laptop is now going to be used in a more stationary way, primarily in hotel rooms and remote work situations, perhaps now a larger one with a bigger screen and keyboard makes sense. ** In fact, the name laptop becomes a misnomer. With the tablet your prime choice when in a place with no table, you would almost never put the computer on your lap.

Planes are a particular problem. It's not safe to check LCD screens in your luggage, so any laptop screen has to come aboard with you, and this is a pain if the computer is heavy.

With the tablet dealing with the "I want small and light" situations, what is the right laptop answer?

One obvious solution are the "convertible tablet" computers being offered by various vendors. These are laptops where the screen is a tablet and it can be removed. These tend to be Windows devices, and somewhat expensive, but the approximate direction is correct.

Another option would be to break the laptop up into 3 or more components:

• The tablet, running your favourite tablet OS
• A keyboard, of your choice, which can be carried easily with the tablet for typing-based applications. Able to hold the laptop and connect to it in a permitted way on the plane. Touchpad or connection for mouse.
• A "block," whose form factor is now quite variable, with the other stuff.

It seems that Better place has gone to... a better place to put it ironically. I'm not greatly surprised, I expressed my skepticism last year.

But I do believe in the idea of the self-driving electric taxi as the best answer for our future urban transportation. So how do you make it happen?

Two interesting pieces today.

First is a report on the Volkswagen XL1 the car that gets 100km per litre, or 260mg.

As you read the description, you would be likely to ask, who would buy a car like this, which takes so long to get to highway speed and skimps on anything that would add weight?

I am pleased to report that a documentary on the first software developers, the 6 women who were hired to program the ENIAC -- the first electronic computer -- has after many years received a funding grant sufficient to produce it.

There are a growing number of apps designed to help people find parking, and even reserve and pay for parking in advance. Some know the state of lots. These apps are good for the user but also can produce a public good by reducing the number of people circling looking for parking. Studies suggest in certain circumstances a large fraction of the cars on the road are doing that.

This weekend, I attended the Maker Faire. I've been to almost every Make Faire, including the first, and now it's grown to be far too successful -- you can hardly walk down the aisles at the busy times. They need more space and a way to put more of it outside so thin out the crowds. Still, it is one of those places that makes you feel very clearly you are in the 21st century.

Early on Maker Faire realized it had a parking problem. The lot at the fairgrounds fills up now even before the event opens, and they manage various satellite lots and run shuttle buses to them.

This year they tried something interesting, a twitter feed with parking updates. They tweeted when lots filled up or re-opened, and suggested where to go. They took some limited feedback about lack of shuttles. I think that it by and large worked and reduced traffic around the event.

However, my judgment is that they were not entirely honest in their tweets. This year, and in prior years, they strongly encouraged people to go to one of the most remote lots, regularly telling people it was the fastest route to the event. This was not true. I don't want to ascribe any particular malice here, but there is a suspicion that there is a temptation to make reports in the interest of the event rather than the user. This does have positives, in that cars diverted from near the event reduce traffic which makes the shuttle buses run much faster, but if you give wrong information (deliberately or by accident) this means people stop trusting it and you get the traffic back as more people ignore it.

For example, we stopped at a remote lot, and saw a very long shuttle line. We drove on to a closer lot (also reported as having spaces, but not reported as clearly a better choice) to find lots of spaces, no shuttle line, frequent shuttles and also a walk that was only slightly longer than the shuttle trip.

Studies have shown that if you leave USB sticks on the ground outside an office building, 60% of them will get picked up and plugged into a computer in the building. If you put the company logo on the sticks, closer to 90% of them will get picked up and plugged in.