First: I will be speaking on robocars tomorrow, Tuesday Nov 9, at 6:30 pm for the meeting of the Jewish High Tech Community in Silicon Valley. The talk is at 6:30pm at the conference center of Fenwick and West at Castro & California in Mountain View. The public is welcome to attend, there is a $10 fee for non-members. This will be similar to my talk at Stanford 2 weeks ago, and a bit more extensive than the one in New York early in October, which Forbes said was the audience favorite at the event.

Volvo has built a brand around safe cars, and last year committed that nobody would die in a newer Volvo by 2020. They plan to do much of this with better passenger safety systems, akin to the work they have done on airbags and crumple zones. However, they also intend to use a lot of computerized technologies to make it happen. Other teams are pushing to expand the goal inside Volvo to also stop people from being killed by Volvos. To that end, next year's Volvo S60 will come with a "Pedestrian Avoidance System" which uses a camera and machine vision to identify pedestrians and calculate if the vehicle is about to hit one. If it sees a potential pedestrian collision it will beep and alert the driver. If the driver does nothing, the car will brake.

Here is a video of the S60 in action:

It's impressive, though pure machine vision suffers problems as lighting changes, which is one reason most work recently has been on LIDAR. It's also interesting to see if they will be able to avoid making it too conservative. If the warning goes off all the time, even for a pedestrian who will (to the human eye) clearly slide by the side of the car at places like a crosswalk, drivers may learn to ignore the alarm, or get very annoyed and shut the whole system off it it brakes for them when they know an impact is not imminent. I'm hoping to learn more about Volvo's efforts in the future. No other company has put as much effort into building a brand around safety, so we can expect Volvo, which has slipped in this status of late, to work very hard to maintain it and adapt robocar technologies to safer human driving and fully autonomous driving as well.

Dense triple parking

I have written of a simple algorithm to allow dense Valet style parking of robocars, such as triple parking on the roadsides. In this algorithm, one gap is left in the outer lanes, and the Robocars are able to move together, as an entire row segment, to "move the gap" as quickly as a single car can move. That way, if a car needs to get out from an inner lane, it can signal, and if the gap is currently ahead of it, for example, all the cars from the one next to it to the gap can move forward one space (at the same time) to put the gap next to the vehicle that needs to leave. This can happen in all the other rows and is easy, quiet and efficient for electric cars. It does not even need radio communication, as robocars will sense a car moving behind them or ahead of them, and immediately move in reaction. This request will move up the chain of cars to the gap. Of course, if one car does not move, the car behind it will only move a very short distance before refusing to go further, which would stop the whole effort (or in the case of an error, cause a very slow impact if the car behind keeps coming) and signal a need for human attention.

It seems like this should be possible even without many gaps, as long as there is enough spare space to allow a vehicle to wiggle out of its space. If there is just one gap, and a bit of wiggle room in the other rows, any car can still get out, just a bit more slowly. This is probably better done with a protocol for communication to assure it works quickly.

In this case, a gap on the outside lane (where there must be at least one) can be temporarily moved to the inside, and then back out. Consider 3 lanes of cars, with a gap in the outer late (lane #3) and a car in lane #1 (the curb lane) wanting out. First the lane #3 cars would adjust to move the gap to the right place, a bit forward of our target car. Next, a car from lane #2 would move into this gap, leaving a gap in lane #2 into which our target car can move. This leaves a gap in lane #3 which can be filled by a car from lane #2 which is willing to move in, ideally right next to our target car. Likewise a car from lane #3 can now move into that gap, and the resulting gap in the outer lane #3 can be moved to allow exit by our target car.

This requires a great deal more car moving, though again with electric cars this may not be too expensive. If the cars can turn all their wheels, they can move horizontally as some concept cars can already do. Even without that, a robotic car can wiggle out without much room, and of course the gap would not be placed exactly in place with the target car, but probably slightly forward to allow transfer with fewer wiggles. The result is a whole valet lot with just one blank space needed to get any car reasonably quickly. Of course, this would only be done when the lot needed to be totally full. For any partially full lot, gaps would be left to minimize the car moves needed to get any car out. However, if space is at a premium -- so much so as to justify the extra moving -- it can be done.