The robocar news continues to increase in pace.

Three big automaker announcements -- and not about V2V even though the ITS World Congress is going on this week.

Nissan is showing a modified Leaf able to do "valet" park in a controlled parking lot. The leaf downloads a map of the lot, and then, according to Nissan engineers, is able to determine its position in the lot with 4 cameras, then hunt for a spot and go into it. We've seen valet park demonstrations before, but calculating position entirely with cameras is somewhat new, mainly because of the issues with how lighting conditions vary. In an indoor parking garage it's a different story, and camera based localization under the constant lighting should be quite doable.

I haven't bothered quickly reporting on the robocar story every other media outlet covered, the signing by Jerry Brown of California's law to enable robocars. For those with the keenest interest, the video of the signing ceremony has a short talk by Sergey Brin on some of his visions for the car where he declares that the tech will be available for ordinary people within 5 years.

A follow-up thought about yesterday's shuttle fly-by and panorama. I was musing, might this be perhaps the most photographed single thing in human history to date?

Today marked the last trip through the air for the space shuttle, as the Endeavour was carried to LA to be installed in a museum. The trip included fly-overs of the Golden Gate bridge and many other landmarks in SF and LA, and also a low pass over Nasa Ames at Moffett Field, where I work at Singularity University. A special ceremony was done on the tarmac, and I went to get a panoramic photo.

Tomorrow (Wed Sep 19) I will give a robocars talk at Dorkbot SF in San Francisco. Dorkbot is a regular gathering of "People doing strange things with electricity" and there will be two other sessions.

A round-up of just some of the recent robocar news:

For years I have posed the following question at parties and salons:

By the 25th century, who will be the household names of the 20th century?

My top contender, Armstrong, has died today. I pick him because the best known name of the 15th century is probably Columbus, also known as the first explorer to a major location -- even though he probably wasn't the actual first.

MythTV

I'm watching the Olympics, and my primary tool as always is MythTV. Once you do this, it seems hard to imagine watching them almost any other way. Certainly not real time with the commercials, and not even with other DVR systems. MythTV offers a really wide variety of fast forward speeds and programmable seeks. This includes the ability to watch at up to 2x speed with the audio still present (pitch adjusted to be natural) and a smooth 3x speed which is actually pretty good for watching a lot of sports. In addition you can quickly access 5x, 10x, 30x, 60x, 120x and 180x for moving along, as well as jumps back and forth by some fixed amount you set (like 2 minutes or 10 minutes) and random access to any minute. Finally it offers a forward skip (which I set to 20 seconds) and a backwards skip (I set it to 8 seconds.)

MythTV even lets you customize these numbers so you use different nubmers for the Olympics compared to other recordings. For example the jumps are normally +/- 10 minutes and plus 30 seconds for commercial skip, but Myth has automatic commercial skip.

A nice mode allows you to go to smooth 3x speed with closed captions, though it does not feature the very nice ability I've seen elsewhere of turning on CC when the sound is off (by mute or FF) and turning it off when sound returns. I would like a single button to put me into 3xFF + CC and take me out of it.

Anyway, this is all very complex but well worth learning because once you learn it you can consume your sports much, much faster than in other ways, and that means you can see more of the sports that interest you, and less of the sports, commercials and heart-warming stories of triumph over adversity that you don't. With more than 24 hours a day of coverage it is essential you have tools to help you do this.

I have a number of improvements I would like to see in MythTV like a smooth 5x or 10x FF (pre-computed in advance) and the above macro for CC/FF swap. In addition, since the captions tend to lag by 2-3 seconds it would be cool to have a time-sync for the CC. Of course the network, doing such a long tape delay, should do that for you, putting the CC into the text accurately and at the moment the words are said. You could write software to do that even with human typed captions, since the speech-recognition software can easily figure out what words match once it has both the audio and the words. Nice product idea for somebody.

Watching on the web

This time, various networks have put up extensive web offerings, and indeed on NBC this is the only way to watch many events live, or at all. Web offerings are good, though not quite at the quality of over-the-air HDTV, and quality matters here. But the web offerings have some failings

A month ago I hosted Vernor Vinge for a Bay Area trip. This included my interview with Vinge at Google on his career and also a special talk that evening at Singularity University. In the 1980s, Vinge coined the term "the singularity" even though Ray Kurzweil has become the more public face of the concept of late.

Any speaker or lecturer is familiar with a modern phenomenon. A large fraction of your audience is using their tablet, phone or laptop doing email or surfing the web rather than paying attention to you. Some of them are taking notes, but it's a minority. And it seems we're not going to stop this, even speakers do it when attending the talks of others.

I'm here in Newport beach at the Transportation Research Board's conference on self-driving vehicles. Today in a pre-session there was discussion of pre-robocar technologies and in particular applications of "managed lanes" and what the might mean for these technologies. Managed lanes are things like HOV/carpool lanes, HOT (carpool+toll), reversible lanes etc. Many people imagine these lanes would be used with pre-robocar technologies like convoys, super-cruise, cooperative ACC, Bus Rapid Transit etc.

An MIT team has been working on a car that is "hard to crash." Called the intelligent co-pilot it is not a self-driving car, but rather a collection of similar systems designed to detect if you are about to hit something and try to avoid it. To some extent, it actually wrests control from the driver.

Vernor Vinge is perhaps the greatest writer of hard SF and computer-related SF today. He has won 5 Hugo awards, including 3 in a row for best novel (nobody has done 4 in a row) and his novels have inspired many real technologies in cyberspace, augmented reality and more.

A study is underway in Japan to build dedicated lanes for self-driving cars.

There have been experiments with dedicated lanes in the past, including a special automated lane back in the 90s in San Diego. The problem is much easier to solve (close to trivial by today's standards) if you have a dedicated lane, but this violates the first rule of robocars in my book -- don't change the infrastructure.

Hats off to the video embedded below, which was prepared for a futuristic transportation expo in my home town of Toronto.

Called the PAT (People and Things) this video outlines the UI and shows a period in the day of a robotic taxi/delivery vehicle as it moves around Toronto picking up people and packages.

An update on Robocar News:

Just returned from an overseas trip to Moscow, I am reminded of the rant I posted earlier about the constant interruptions on the in-flight entertainment system.

Everything I said before remains valid:

There's a lot of excitement about the potential of autonomous drones, be they nimble quadcopters or longer-range fixed wing or hybrid aircraft. A group of students from Singularity University, for example, has a project called MatterNet working to provide transportation infrastructure for light cargo in regions of Africa where roads wash out for half the year.

Closer to home, these drones are not yet legal for commercial use, while government agencies are using them secretly.