Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

This weekend I went to Pomona, CA for the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge which had robots (mostly humanoid) compete at a variety of disaster response and assistance tasks. This contest, a successor of sorts to the original DARPA Grand Challenge which changed the world by giving us robocars, got a fair bit of press, but a lot of it was around this video showing various robots falling down when doing the course:

What you don't hear in this video are the cries of sympathy from the crowd of thousands watching -- akin to when a figure skater might fall down -- or the cheers as each robot would complete a simple task to get a point. These cheers and sympathies were not just for the human team members, but in an anthropomorphic way for the robots themselves. Most of the public reaction to this video included declarations that one need not be too afraid of our future robot overlords just yet. It's probably better to watch the DARPA official video which has a little audience reaction.

Don't be fooled as well by the lesser-known fact that there was a lot of remote human tele-operation involved in the running of the course.

Check out my Gallery of Photos from the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

What you also don't see in this video is just how very far the robots have come since the first round of trials in December 2013. During those trials the amount of remote human operation was very high, and there weren't a lot of great fall videos because the robots had tethers that would catch them if they fell. (These robots are heavy and many took serious damage when falling, so almost all testing is done with a crane, hoist or tether able to catch the robot during the many falls which do occur.)

We aren't yet anywhere close to having robots that could do tasks like these autonomously, so for now the research is in making robots that can do tasks with more and more autonomy with higher level decisions made by remote humans. The tasks in the contest were:

• Starting in a car, drive it down a simple course with a few turns and park it by a door.
• Get out of the car -- one of the harder tasks as it turns out, and one that demanded a more humanoid form
• Go to a door and open it
• Walk through the door into a room
• In the room, go up to a valve with circular handle and turn it 360 degrees
• Pick up a power drill, and use it to cut a large enough hole in a sheet of drywall
• Perform a surprise task -- in this case throwing a lever on day one, and on day 2 unplugging a power cord and plugging it into another socket
• Either walk over a field of cinder blocks, or roll through a field of light debris
• Climb a set of stairs

The robots have an hour to do this, so they are often extremely slow, and yet to the surprise of most, the audience -- a crowd of thousands and thousands more online -- watched with fascination and cheering. Even when robots would take a step once a minute, or pause at a task for several minutes, or would get into a problem and spend 10 minutes getting fixed by humans as a penalty.

Some headlines (I've been on the road and will have more to say soon.)

Google announces it will put new generation buggies on city streets

Google has done over 2.7 million km of testing with their existing fleet, they announced. Now, they will be putting their small "buggy" vehicle onto real streets in Mountain View. The cars will stick to slower streets and are NEVs that only go 25mph.

Earlier this week I was sent some advance research from the U of Michigan about car sickness rates for car passengers. I found the research of interest, but wish it had covered some questions I think are more important, such as how carsickness is changed by potentially new types of car seating, such as face to face or along the side.

Since 1992 I have had a long association with the Hugo Awards for SF & Fantasy given by the World Science Fiction Society/Convention. In 1993 I published the Hugo and Nebula Anthology which was for some time the largest anthology of current fiction every published, and one of the earliest major e-book projects. While I did it as a commercial venture, in the years to come it became the norm for the award organizers to publish an electronic anthology of willing nominees for free to the voters.

This year, things are highly controversial, because a group of fans/editors/writers calling themselves the "Sad Puppies," had great success with a campaign to dominate the nominations for the awards. They published a slate of recommended nominations and a sufficient number of people sent in nominating ballots with that slate so that it dominated most of the award categories. Some categories are entirely the slate, only one was not affected. It's important to understand the nominating and voting on the Hugos is done by members of the World SF Society, which is to say people who attend the World SF Convention (Worldcon) or who purchase special "supporting" memberships which don't let you go but give you voting rights. This is a self-selected group, but in spite of that, it has mostly manged to run a reasonably independent vote to select the greatest works of the year. The group is not large, and in many categories, it can take only a score or two of nominations to make the ballot, and victory margins are often small. As such, it's always been possible, and not even particularly hard, to subvert the process with any concerted effort. It's even possible to do it with money, because you can just buy memberships which can nominate or vote, so long as a real unique person is behind each ballot.

The nominating group is self-selected, but it's mostly a group that joins because they care about SF and its fandom, and as such, this keeps the award voting more independent than you would expect for a self-selected group. But this has changed.

The reasoning behind the Sad Puppy effort is complex and there is much contentious debate you can find on the web, and I'm about to get into some inside baseball, so if you don't care about the Hugos, or the social dynamics of awards and conventions, you may want to skip this post.

Most of the robocar press this week has been about the Delphi drive from San Francisco to New York, which completed yesterday. Congratulations to the team. Few teams have tried to do such a long course and so many different roads. (While Google has over a million miles logged in their testing by now, it's not been reported that they have done 3,500 distinct roads; most testing is done around Google HQ.)

I often speak about deliverbots -- the potential for ground based delivery robots. There is also excitement about drone (UAV/quadcopter) based delivery. We've seen many proposed projects, including Amazon prime Air and much debate.

I've been on the road, and there has been a ton of news in the last 4 weeks. In fact, below is just a small subset of the now constant stream of news items and articles that appear about robocars.

Delphi has made waves by undertaking a road trip from San Francisco to New York in their test car, which is equipped with an impressive array of sensors. The trip is now underway, and on their page you can see lots of videos of the vehicle along the trek.

The Delphi vehicle is one of the most sensor-laden vehicles out there, and that's good. In spite of all those who make the rather odd claim that they want to build robocars with fewer sensors, Moore's Law and other principles teach us that the right procedure is to throw everything you can at the problem today, because those sensors will be cheap when it comes time to actually ship. Particularly for those who say they won't ship for a decade.

At the same time, the Delphi test is mostly of highway driving, with very minimal urban street driving according to Kristen Kinley at Delphi. They are attempting off-map driving, which is possible on highways due to their much simpler environment. Like all testing projects these days, there are safety drivers in the cars ready to intervene at the first sign of a problem.

Delphi is doing a small amount of DSRC vehicle to infrastructure testing as well, though this is only done in Mountain View where they used some specially installed roadside radio infrastructure equipment.

Delphi is doing the right thing here -- getting lots of miles and different roads under their belt. This is Google's giant advantage today. Based on Google's announcements, they have more than a million miles of testing in the can, and that makes a big difference.

Hype and reality of Tesla's autopilot announcement

Telsa has announced they will do an over the air upgrade of car software in a few months to add autopilot functionality to existing models that have sufficient sensors. This autopilot is the "supervised" class of self driving that I warned may end up viewed as boring. The press have treated this as something immense, but as far as I can tell, this is similar to products built by Mercedes, BMW, Audi and several other companies and even sold in the market (at least for traffic jams) for a couple of years now.

The other products have shied away from doing full highway speed in commercial products, though rumours exist of it being available in commercial cars in Europe. What is special about Tesla's offering is that it will be the first car sold in the US to do this at highway speed, and they may offer supervised lane change as well. It's also interesting that since they have been planning this for a while, it will come as a software upgrade to people who bought their technology package earlier.

UK project budget rises to £100 million

What started with a £10 million pound prize has grown in the UK has become over 100m in grants in the latest UK budget. While government research labs will not provide us with the final solutions, this money will probably create some very useful tools and results for the private players to exploit.

MobilEye releases their EyeQ4 chip

MobilEye from Jerusalem is probably the leader in automotive machine vision, and their new generation chip has been launched, but won't show up in cars for a few years. It's an ASIC packed with hardware and processor cores aimed at doing easy machine vision. My personal judgement is that this is not sufficient for robocar driving, but MobilEye wants to prove me wrong. (The EQ4 chip does have software to do sensor fusion with LIDAR and Radar, so they don't want to prove me entirely wrong.) Even if not good enough on their own, ME chips offer a good alternate path for redundancy

Chris Urmson gives a TeD talk about the Google Car

Talks by Google's team are rare -- the project is unusual in trying to play down its publicity. I was not at TeD, but reports from there suggest Chris did not reveal a great deal new, other than repeating his goal of having the cars be in practical service before his son turns 16. Of course, humans will be driving for a long time after robocars start becoming common on the roads, but it is true that we will eventually see teens who would have gotten a licence never get around to getting one. (Teems are already waiting longer to get their licences so this is not a hard prediction.)

The war between DSRC and more wifi is heating up.

2 years ago, the FCC warned that since auto makers had not really figured out much good to do with the DSRC spectrum at 5.9ghz, it was time to repurpose it for unlicenced use, like more WiFi.

There is now a bill to force this being proposed.

After 9/11 there was a lot of talk about how to prevent it, and the best method was to fortify the cockpit door and prevent unauthorized access. Every security system, however, sometimes prevents authorized people from getting access, and the tragic results of that are now clear to the world. This is likely a highly unusual event, and we should not go overboard, but it's still interesting to consider.

(I have an extra reason to take special interest here, I was boarding a flight out of Spain on Tuesday just before the Germanwings flight crashed.)

Perhaps by now you are sick of the dress that 3/4 people see as "white and gold" and 1/4 people see as "dark blue and black." If you haven't seen it, it's easy to find. What's amazing is to see how violent the arguments can get between people because the two ways we see it are so hugely different. "How can you see that as white????" people shout. They really shout.

There are a few explanations out there, but let me add my own:

I'm sure you've seen it. Shop for something and pretty quickly, half the ads you see on the web relate to that thing. And you keep seeing those ads, even after you have made your purchase, sometimes for weeks on end.

I was recently considering the price of UberX in Los Angeles. It's gotten disturbingly low:

Flag drop: $0 18 cents/minute 90 cents/mile

This is not a very good deal for the driver. After Uber's 20% cut, that's 72 cents/mile. According to AAA, a typical car costs about 60 cents/mile to operate, not including parking. (Some cars are a bit cheaper, including the Prius favoured by UberX drivers.) In any event, the UberX driver is not making much money on their car.

All over the world, people (and governments) are debating about regulations for robocars. First for testing, and then for operation. It mostly began when Google encouraged the state of Nevada to write regulations, but now it's in full force. The topic is so hot that there is a danger that regulations might be drafted long before the shape of the first commercial deployments of the technology take place.

Everywhere I go, a vast majority of people seem to now have two things in associating with their phone -- a protective case, and a spare USB charging battery. The battery is there because most phones stopped having switchable batteries some time ago. The cases are there partly for decoration, but mostly because anybody who has dropped a phone and cracked the screen (or worse, the digitizer) doesn't want to do it again -- and a lot of people have done it.

Back in 2008, I proposed the idea of a scanner club which would share high-end scanning equipment to rid of houses of the glut of paper. It's a harder problem than it sounds. I bought a high-end Fujitsu office scanner (original price $5K, but I paid a lot less) and it's done some things for me, but it's still way too hard to use on general scanning problems.

There has been lots of buzz over announcements from Tesla that they will sell a battery for home electricity storage manufactured in the "gigafactory" they are building to make electric car batteries. It is suggested that 1/3 of the capacity of the factory might go to grid storage batteries.

This is very interesting because, at present, battery grid storage is not generally economical. The problem is the cost of the batteries. While batteries can be as much as 90% efficient, they wear out the more you use and recharge them. Batteries vary a lot in how many cycles they will deliver, and this varies according to how you use the battery (ie. do you drain it all the way, or use only the middle of the range, etc.) If your battery will deliver 1,000 cycles using 60% of its range (from 20% to 80%) and costs $400/kwh, then you will get 600kwh over the lifetime of a kwh unit, or 66 cents per kwh (presuming no residual value.) That's not an economical cost for energy anywhere, except perhaps off-grid. (You also lose a cent or two from losses in the system.) If you can get down to 9 cents/kwh, plus 1 cent for losses, you get parity with the typical grid. However, this is modified by some important caveats:

• If you have a grid with very different prices during the day, you can charge your batteries at the night price and use them during the daytime peak. You might pay 7 cents at night and avoid 21 cent prices in the day, so a battery cost of 14 cents/kwh is break-even.
• You get a backup power system for times when the grid is off. How valuable that is varies on who you are. For many it's worth several hundred dollars. (But not too many as you can get a generator as backup and most people don't.)
• Because battery prices are dropping fast, a battery pack today will lose value quickly, even before it physically degrades. And yes, in spite of what you might imagine in terms of "who cares, as long as it's working," that matters.

The magic number that is not well understood about batteries is the lifetime watt-hours in the battery per dollar. Lots of analysis will tell you things about the instantaneous capacity in kwh, notably important numbers like energy density (in kwh/kg or kwh/litre) and cost (in dollars/kwh) but for grid storage, the energy density is almost entirely unimportant, the cost for single cycle capacity is much less important and the lifetime watt-hours is the one you want to know. For any battery there will be an "optimal" duty cycle which maximizes the lifetime wh. (For example, taking it down to 20% and then back up to 80% is a popular duty cycle.)

The lifetime watt hour number is:

Number of cycles before replacement * watt-hours in optimum cycle

The $/lifetime-wh is:

(Battery cost + interest on cost over lifetime - battery recycle value) / lifetime-wh

(You must also consider these numbers around the system, because in addition to a battery pack, you need chargers, inverters and grid-tie equipment, though they may last longer than a battery pack.)

I find it odd that this very important number is not widely discussed or published. One reason is that it's not as important for electric cars and consumer electronic goods.

Electric car batteries

In electric cars, it's difficult because you have to run the car to match the driver's demands. Some days the driver only goes 10 miles and barely discharges before plugging in. Other days they want to run the car all the way down to almost empty. Because of this each battery will respond differently. Taxis, especially Robotaxis, can do their driving to match an optimum cycle, and this number is important for them.

A lot of factors affect your choice of electric car battery. For a car, you want everything, and in fact must just do trade-offs.

• Cost per kwh of capacity -- this is your range, and electric car buyers care a great deal about that
• Low weight (high energy density) is essential, extra weight decreases performance and range
• Modest size is important, you don't want to fill your cargo space with batteries
• Ability to use the full capacity from time to time without damaging the battery's life much is important, or you don't really have the range you paid for and you carry its weight for nothing.
• High discharge is important for acceleration
• Fast charge is important as DC fast-charging stations arise. It must be easy to make the cells take charge and not burst.
• Ability to work in all temperatures is a must. Many batteries lose a lot of capacity in the cold.
• Safety if hit by a truck is a factor, or even safety just sitting there.
• Long lifetime, and lifetime-wh affect when you must replace the battery or junk the car

Weight is really important in the electric car because as you add weight, you reduce the efficiency and performance of the car. Double the battery and you don't double the range because you added that weight, and you also make the car slower. After a while, it becomes much less useful to add range, and the heavier your battery is, the sooner that comes.

That's why Tesla makes lithium ion battery based cars. These batteries are light, but more expensive than the heavier batteries. Today they cost around $500/kwh of capacity (all-in) but that cost is forecast to drop, perhaps to $200/kwh by 2020. That initial pack in the Tesla costs $40,000, but they will sell you a replacement for 8 years down the road for just $12,000 because, in part, they plan to pay a lot less in 8 years.

Musings on the economies of cutting the cord.

Over the past 14 years, there has been only one constant in my TV viewing, and that's The Daily Show. I first loved it with Craig Kilborn, and even more under Jon Stewart. I've seen almost all of them, even after going away for a few weeks, because when you drop the interview and commercials, it's a pretty quick play. Jon Stewart's decision to leave got a much stronger reaction from me than any other TV show news, though I think the show will survive.

The government baked robocar projects in the UK are going full steam, with this press release from the UK government to accompany the unveiling of the prototype Lutz pod which should ply the streets of Milton Keynes and Greenwich.

Electric Vehicles are moving up, at least here in California, and it's gotten to the point that EV drivers are finding all the charging stations where they want to go already in use, forcing them to travel well outside their way, or to panic. Sometimes not charging is not an option. Sometimes the car taking the spot is already mostly charged or doesn't need the charge much, but the owner has not come back.

Here in Silicon Valley, there is a problem that the bulk of the EVs have 60 to 80 miles of range -- OK for wandering around the valley, but not quite enough for a trip to San Francisco and back, at least not a comfortable one. And we do like to go to San Francisco. The natives up there don't really need the chargers in a typical day, but the visitors do. In general, unless you are certain you are going to get a charger, you won't want to go in a typical EV. Sure, a Tesla has no problem, but a Tesla has a ridiculous amount of battery in it. You spend $40,000 on the battery pack in the Tesla, but use the second half of its capacity extremely rarely -- it's not cost effective outside the luxury market, at least at today's prices (and also because of the weight.)

Charging stations are somewhat expensive. Even home stations cost from $400 to $800 because they must now include EVSE protocol equipment. This does a digital negotiation between the car and the plug on how much power is available and when to send it. The car must not draw more current than the circuit can handle, and you want the lines to not be live until the connection is solid. For now that's expensive (presumably because of the high current switching gear.) Public charging stations also need a way to doing billing and access control.

Another limit on public charging stations, however, is the size of the electrical service. A typical car wants 30 amps, or up to 50 if you can get it. Put in more than a few of those and you're talking an upgrade to the building's electrical service in many cases.

I propose a public charging pole which has 4 or even 8 cords on it. This pole would be placed at the intersection of 4 parking spots in a parking lot. (That's not very usual, more often they end up placed against a wall, with only 2 parking spots in range, because that's where the power is.) The station, however, may not have enough power to charge all the cables at once.

At CES, there were a couple of "selfie drones." The Nixie is designed to be worn on your wrist, taken off, thrown, and then it returns to you after taking a photo or video. There was also the Zano which is fancier and claims it will follow you around, tracking you as you mountain bike or ski to make a video of you just as you do your cool trick.

In continuation of my series on fixing politics I would like to address the issue of debates. Not just presidential debates, but all levels.