Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

You're driving down the road. You see another car on the road with you that has a problem. The lights are off and it's dusk. There is something loose that may break off. There's something left on the roof or the trunk is not closed -- any number of things. How do you tell the driver that they need to stop and check? I've tried sometimes and they mostly think you are some sort of crazy, driving to close to them, waving at them, honking or shouting. Perhaps after a few people do it they figure it out.

Today, I was challenged with the question of how well robocars would deal with deer crossing the road. There are 1.5 million collisions with deer in the USA every year, resulting in 200 deaths of people and of course many more deer. Many of the human injuries and crashes have come from trying to swerve to avoid the deer, and skidding instead during the panic.

At present there is no general purpose computer vision system that can just arbitrarily identify things -- which is to say you can't show it a camera view of anything and ask, "what is that?" CV is much better at looking for specific things, and a CV system that can determine if something is a deer is probably something we're close to being able to make. However, I made a list of a number of the techniques that robots might have to do a better job of avoiding collisions with animals, and started investigating thoughts on one more, the "flying bumper" which I will detail below.

Spotting and avoiding the deer

• There are great techniques for spotting animal eyes using infrared light bouncing off the retinas. If you've seen a cheap flash photo with the "red eye" effect you know about this. An IR camera with a flash of IR light turns out to be great at spotting eyes and figuring out if they are looking at you, especially in darkness.
• A large number of deer collisions do take place at dusk or at night, both because deer move at these times and humans see badly during them. LIDAR works superbly in darkness, and can see 100m or more. On dry pavement, a car can come to a full stop from 80mph in 100m, if it reacts instantly. The robocar won't identify a deer on the road instantly but it will do so quickly, and can thus brake to be quite slow by the time it travels 100m.
• Google's full-map technique means the robocar will already have a complete LIDAR map of the road and terrain -- every fencepost, every bush, every tree -- and of course, the road. If there's something big in the LIDAR scan at the side of the road that was not there before, the robocar will know it. If it's moving and more detailed analysis with a zoom camera is done, the mystery object at the side of the road can be identified quickly. (Radar will also be able to tell if it's a parked or disabled vehicle.)
• They are expensive today, but in time deep infrared cameras which show temperature will become cheap and appear in robocars. Useful for spotting pedestrians and tailpipes, they will also do a superb job on animals, even animals hiding behind bushes, particularly in the dark and cool times of deer mating season.
• Having spotted the deer, the robocar will never panic, the way humans often do.
• The robocar will know its physics well, and unlike the human, can probably plot a safe course around the deer that has no risk of skidding. If the ground is slick with leaves or rain, it will already have been going more slowly. The robocar can have a perfect understanding of the timings involved with swerving into the oncoming traffic lane if it is clear. The car can calculate the right speed (possibly even speeding up) where there will be room to safely swerve.
• If the oncoming traffic lane is not clear, but the oncoming car is also a robocar, it might some day in the far future talk to that car both to warn it and to make sure both cars have safe room to swerve into the oncoming lane.
• Areas with major deer problems put up laser sensors along the sides of the road, which detect if an animal crosses the beam and flash lights. A robocar could get data from such sensors to get more advanced warning of animal risks areas.

Getting the deer to move

There might be some options to get the deer to get out of the way. Deer sometimes freeze; a "deer in the headlights." A robocar, however, does not need to have visible headlights! It may have them on for the comfort of the passengers who want to see where they are going and would find it spooky driving in the dark guided by invisible laser light, but those comfort lights can be turned off or dimmed during the deer encounter, something a human driver can't do. This might help the deer to move.

Many people wonder whether robocars will just suffer the curse of regular cars, namely traffic congestion. They are concerned that while robocars might solve many problems of the automobile, in many cities there just isn't room for more roads. Can robocars address the problems of congestion and capacity? What about combined with ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) efforts to make roads smarter for human driven cars?

I think the answer is quite positive, for a number of different reasons. I have added a new Robocar essay:

For many years I have had a popular article on what lenses to buy for a Canon DSLR. I shoot with Canon, but much of the advice is universal, so I am translating the article into Nikon.

If you shoot Nikon and are familiar with a variety of lenses for them, I would appreciate your comments. At the start of the article I indicate the main questions I would like people's opinions on, such as moderately priced wide angle lenses, as well as regular zooms.

I've written before about solutions to "range anxiety" -- the barrier to adoption of electric cars which derives from fear that the car will not have enough range and, once out of power, might take a very long time to recharge. It's hard to compete with gasoline's 3 minute fill-up and 300 mile ranges. Earlier I proposed an ability to quickly switch to a rental gasoline car if running out of range.

There's a problem I have seen at a number of free events, particularly "unconference" events which have a limited capacity. There will be a sign-up list, and once it fills up, people are turned away or get on a waiting list. (Some online ticket services now support the idea of free tickets for this purpose.)

I'm at the Pod Car City conference, taking place today and tomorrow in San Jose for PRT developers and customers. Some news tidbits from the conference:

There's news about the world's two small PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) projects, which are both fairly robocar like, in that they involve self-steered rubber tired vehicles.

The AutoNOMOS team at Freie Universität Berlin led by Raul Rojas has shown a demo of their robocar acting as what I have called a whistlecar. Their latest car, named "Made in Germany" performed an autonomous taxi pickup for the press which you can see played out in this video.

This weekend's announcement that Google had logged 140,000 miles of driving in traffic with their prototype robocars got lots of press, but it's not the only news of teams making progress. A team at TU Braunschweig in Germany has their own model which has been driving on ordinary city streets with human oversight. You can watch a video of the car in action though there is a lot of B-roll in that video, so seek ahead to 1:50 and particularly 3:20 for the inside view of the supervisor's hands hovering just over the self-turning steering wheel. There is some information on Stadtpilot here, but we can see many similarities, including the use of the Velodyne 64 line LIDAR on the roof and a typical array of sensors, and more use of detailed maps.

The team at Vislab in Milan has completed most of their Milan to Shanghai autonomous car journey which I have been following. You can read their blog or watch video (sometimes live) of their trip. A lot of the blog has ended up being not about the autonomous challenges, but just the challenges of taking a fleet of very strange looking vehicles in a convoy across Eastern Europe and Asia. For example, they have trucks which can carry their robocars inside, and once decided it was simpler to cross a border into Hungary this way. However, they left driving the vehicles, and the exit officials got very concerned that there was no record of the robocars coming into the country. I presume it wasn't hard to convince them they were not smuggling Hungarian robocars out.

Just released in a New York Times article and sidebar about highways and video, Google has unveiled an internal robot car project that has attained a remarkable level of robotic driving sooner than I and many others had predicted.

In my "New Democracy" topic I am interested in ideas about how technology can change democracy and governance. In California, a rule was passed (curiously needing only a 50% majority) that any ballot propositions that wanted to raise new taxes for specific projects needed a 2/3rds majority to come into effect. I'm in agreement with that. My libertarian bent knows the dangers of letting 51% of the people decide to spend the money of 100% of the people on the flavour-of-the-month.

In this county, a proposition that needs 66% asks for a $29 levy on all properties to pay for medical programs for children. How could anybody vote against that? (I have not examined this proposition in detail, but generally when you see "motherhood" propositions on the ballot, particularly bonds, they have been put there by politicians who have other projects they know would not be popular. So they arrange a ballot proposition to raise money for something nobody could be against, which normally they would have had to spend general revenue on, and this frees up general revenue so they can spend it with less accountability.)

But I digress. And I'm not trying to comment on this particular issue or wishing to come out against medicine for children. But in looking at this proposal, it was clear to me that if 2/3rds of voters wanted it, then you would get the same amount of money if 2/3rds of voters just paid $43.50 (50% more) out of their pockets! No need for a vote (which probably costs quite a bit of money) or asking those who don't agree to pay. In fact, since property owners are probably just a small fraction of the voting population, it might require less than $29 per eligible voter (though not, alas, per ballot casting voter.) With a small amount like this, is there a different way we could do things?

Imagine a contribution system where some sort of publicly funded project could be proposed, with an amount and time period. Each person could register their agreement to pay any amount, including the suggested one, but also less or more. Agreements by registered voters would count as a vote for the plan in addition to being a pledge to pay. (You will see why later.)

(Update: This was written back when Kickstarter and similar companies had just gotten started, you will see similarities to it, and my earlier proposal for congressional voting from 2006.)

The total amount pledged, and the general distribution of it, would be public. People would see if the measure was close to getting its funding target. If it does not reach the target, nobody has to pay. If it reaches the target by a deadline, everybody has to pay what they committed -- in fact it is just added to their tax bill. (This works only with property tax and income tax, not with sales taxes.)

I have put up a page of panoramas from Burning Man 2010. This page includes my largest yet, a 1.2 billion pixel image of the whole of Black Rock City which you will find first on the page. I am particularly proud of it, I hope you find it as amazing as I do.

There was a bit of a stir when Google last week announced that one of the winners of their 10^100 contest would be Shweeb, a pedal-powered monorail from New Zealand that has elements of PRT. Google will invest $1M in Shweeb to help them build a small system, and if it makes any money on the investment, that will go into transportation related charities.

While I had a preference that Google fund a virtual world for developing and racing robocars I have come to love a number of elements about Shweeb, though it's not robocars and the PRT community seems to not think it's PRT. I think it is PRT, in that it's personal, public and, according to the company, relatively rapid through the use of offline stations and non-stop point to point trips. PRT is an idea from the sixties that makes sense but has tried for almost 50 years to get transit planners to believe in it and build it. A micro-PRT has opened as a Heathrow parking shuttle, but in general transit administrators simply aren't early adopters. They don't innovate.

What impresses me about Shweeb is its tremendous simplicity. While it's unlikely to replace our cars or transit systems, it is simple enough that it can actually be built. Once built, it can serve as a testbed for many of PRT's concepts, and go through incremental improvements.

An Italian team has built a prototype robot they call Dustbot which is aimed (in a backwards way) at the deliverbot vision.

Yesterday we had a meeting using some videoconferencing. In a situation I find fairly common, the setup was a meeting room with many people, and then a small number of people calling in remotely. In spite of this being a fairly common situation, I have had trouble finding conferencing systems that do this particular task very well. I have not been looking in the high-priced end but I believe the more modestly priced tools should be able to focus on this and make it work. Yesterday we used Oovoo, one of the few multi-part conference systems to support PC and Mac, with some good but many bad results.

The common answer, namely a speakerphone on the meeting room table and a conference bridge system, is pretty unsatisfactory, though the technology is stable enough that it is easy to get going. The remote people are never really part of the meeting. It's harder for them to engage in random banter, and the call fidelity is usually low and never better than PSTN phone quality. They usually have trouble hearing some of the people in the meeting room, though fancier systems with remote microphones help a bit with that.

The audio level

The next step up is a higher quality audio call. For this Skype is an excellent and free solution. The additional audio quality offers a closer sense of being in the room, and better hearing in both directions. It comes with a downside in that tools like Skype often pick up ambient noise in the room (mostly with remote callers) including clacking of keyboards, random background noises and bleeps and bloops of software using the speakers of the computer. While Skype has very good echo cancellation for those who wish to use it in speakerphone mode, I still strongly recommend the use of headsets by those calling in remotely, and even the judicious use of muting. There's a lot more Skype and others could do in this department, but a headset is a real winner, and they are cheap.

Most of these notes also apply to video calling which of course includes audio.

Here's an idea that seems a bit wild and scary at first, but it's doable today and has broad benefits: Small aircraft that don't have landing gear, but instead land and take off from robotic "can't miss" platforms pulled by cables on short airfields.

UPDATE: Some updated ideas and a link to a funded research project looking at similar ideas.

For every small aircraft purchaser, a big decision is whether to get retractable landing gear. They are very expensive, and create a risk of failure, but your plane will fly a lot faster and be more fuel efficient if you get them. What if we could leave the landing gear on the ground?

Imagine a wheeled platform on the runway with robotic control and a variety of systems to perfectly track an approaching aircraft. Pulled by cables, it can accelerate at several "g"s forward and back and left and right. As the aircraft approaches it tracks it and the cockpit display indicates positive lock. If the plane veers left, it veers left. If the plane speeds up it speeds up. Pretty much no matter what the pilot or winds do (other than missing the runway entirely) the plane can't miss landing on it. It's spring loaded so even if the landing is a bit hard the shock is cushioned. Done right, it's just like having fancy shock absorbing landing gear.

This story from the Register about a test at the Stanford VAIL Lab reports an interesting result. They created a fake robocar, with a human driver hidden in the back. The test subjects then were told they could push the autopilot button and use the car. And they did, immediately picking up their newspapers to read as they would in a taxi (which is what they really were in.)

Just back from some time on the road, which always prompts me to think of ways to improve travel.

First, and most simply: Every hotel room comes with a small foldable stand on which to put your suitcase. The problem is they all come with exactly one of these. In some rooms there is space on the tables or dresser for another bag, but often there is not. Doing solo business travel I have just one bag, but all couples, and many solo wanderers have more than one, and so you end up putting bags on the floor. It's quite annoying, since these stands can hardly be very expensive -- folding cloth and metal chairs can be had for $10 in most stores. I've only tried once or twice to ask housekeeping for another, and been surprised to learn they don't keep spares. Frankly, I think it would be cheaper to just put 2 in every room than waste staff time delivering extras, but either would work. And the hotel often knows if a room is booked for 2 rather than one in advance. If you have a bellman take up your bags, not only does the bellman see how many bags you have but it's a sure thing you have several. Every bell station should have some extra racks and throw what is needed on the luggage cart.

Next, I think it would be interesting to see car rental companies develop cars just for road trips. They are the largest buyers of cars (and often owned by car companies) so custom cars are not out of the question. SUVs and some minivans contain many of the features of a road trip car, but they are often 3 times as expensive when reserved in advance, and 1.5x to 2x more expensive in gasoline usage. What features might a road trip car have?

There's been a tremendous amount written about the Google-Verizon joint proposal for network neutrality regulation. Our commentary at the EFF offers some legal analysis of the good and bad in this proposal. A lot of commentary has put a big focus on the exemption for wireless networks, since many feel wireless is the real "where it's gonna be," if not the "where it's at" for the internet.

You may recall that earlier I wrote about support for the principles of a neutral network, but fear of FCC regulation and decided that the real issue here is monopoly regulation, not network regulation. My feelings remain the same. In wireless we don't have the broadband duopoly, but it is a space with huge barriers to entry, the biggest one being the need to purchase a monopoly on spectrum from the government. I don't believe anybody should get a monopoly on spectrum (either at auction or as a gift) and each spectrum auction is another monopoly bound to hurt the free network. Most defenders of the exemption for wireless think it's obvious. Bandwidth in wireless is much more limited, so you need to manage it a lot more. Today, that's arguably true. I have certainly been on wireless networks that were saturated, and I would like on those networks to have the big heavy users discouraged so that I can get better service.

As I said, on those networks. Those networks were designed, inherently, with older more expensive technology. But we know that each year technology gets cheaper, and wireless technology is getting cheaper really fast, with spectrum monopolies being the main barrier to innovation. We would be fools to design and regulate our networks based on the assumptions of the year 2000 or even on the rules of 2010. We need to plan a regime for what we expect in 2015, and one which adapts and changes as wireless technology improves and gets cheaper. Planning for linear improvement is sure to be an error, even if nobody can tell you exactly what will be for sale in 2015. I just know it won't be only marginally better or cheaper than what we have now.

The reality is, there is tons of wireless bandwidth -- in fact, it's effectively limitless. Last week I got to have dinner with Marty Cooper, who built the first mobile phone, and he has noticed that the total bandwidth we put into the ether has been on an exponential doubling curve for some time, with no signs of stopping. We were in violent agreement that the FCC's policies are way out of date and really should not exist. (You'll notice that he's holding a Droid X while I have the replica Dyna-Tac. He found it refreshing to not be the one holding the Dyna-Tac.)