The future of computer-driven cars and deliverbots
There's another video presentation by me that I did while visiting Big Think in NYC.
This one is on The NSA, Snowden and the "tradeoff" of Privacy and Security.
Earlier, I did a 10 minute piece on Robocars for Big Think that won't be news to regular readers here but was reasonably popular.
I've been musing more on the future of the city under the robocar, and many visions suggest we'll have more sprawl. Earlier I have written visions of Robocar Oriented Development and outlined all the factors urban planners should look at.
In the essay linked below, I introduce the concept of a medium density urban neighbourhood that acts like a higher density space thanks to robocars functioning like the elevators in the high-rises of high density development.
A whole raft of recent robocar news.
The UK announced that robocar testing will be legalized in January, similar to actions by many US states, but the first major country to do so. Of particular interest is the promise that fully autonomous vehicles, like Google's no-steering-wheel vehicle, will have regulations governing their testing. Because the US states that wrote regulations did so before seeing Google's vehicle, their laws still have open questions about how to test faster versions of it.
Combined with this are large research grant programs, on top of the £10M prize project to be awarded to a city for a testing project, and the planned project in Milton Keynes.
The leader in doing automated driver assist using cameras is Jerusalem's MobilEye. This week they're going public, to a valuation near $5B and raising over $600 million. MobilEye makes custom ASICs full of machine vision processing tools, and uses those to make camera systems to recognize things on the road. They have announced and demonstrated their own basic supervised self-driving car with this. Their camera, which is cheaper than the radar used in most fancy ADAS systems (but also works with radar for better results) is found in many high-end vehicles. They are a supplier to Tesla, and it is suggested that MobilEye will play a serious role in Tesla's own self-driving plans.
As I have written, I don't believe cameras are even close to sufficient for a fully autonomous vehicle which can run unmanned, though they can be a good complement to radar and especially LIDAR. LIDAR prices will soon drop to the low $thousands, and people taking the risk of deploying the first robocars would be unwise to not use LIDAR to improve their safety just to save a few thousand for early adopters.
Baidu is the big boy in Chinese search -- sadly a big beneficiary of Google's wise and moral decision not to be collaborators on massive internet censorship in China -- and now it's emulating Google in a big way by opening its own self-driving car project.
Various stories suggest a vehicle which involves regular handoff between a driver and the car's systems, something Google decided was too risky. Not many other details are known.
Also rumoured is a project with bicycles. Unknown if that's something like the "bikebot" concept I wrote about 6 years ago, where a small robot would clamp to a bike and use its wheels to deliver the bicycle on demand.
Why another search engine company? Well, one reason Google was able to work quickly is that it is the world's #1 mapping company, and mapping plays a large role in the design of robocars. Baidu says it is their expertise in big data and AI that's driving them to do this.
The Velodyne 64 plane LIDAR, which is seen spinning on top of Google's cars and most of the other serious research cars, is made in small volumes and costs a great deal of money -- $75,000. David Hall, who runs Velodyne, has regularly said that in volume it would cost well under $1,000, but we're not there yet. He has released a new LIDAR with just 16 planes. The price, while not finalized, will be much higher than $1K but much lower than $75K (or even the $30K for the 32 plane version found on Ford's test vehicle and some others.)
As a disclaimer, I should note I have joined the advisory board of Quanergy, which is making 8 plane LIDARs at a much lower price than these units.
Conflicting reports have come from Nissan on their dates for deployment. At first, it seemed they had predicted fairly autonomous cars by 2020. A later announcement by CEO Carlos Ghosn suggested it might be even earlier. But new reports suggest the product will be less far along, and need more human supervision to operate.
Many years ago, I wrote about the danger that autonomous robots could be loaded with explosives and sent to an address to wreak havoc. That is a concern, but what I wrote was that the greater danger could be the fear of that phenomenon. After all, car accidents kill more people every month in the USA than died at the World Trade Center 13 years ago, and far surpass war and terrorism as forms of violent death and injury in most nations for most of modern history. Nonetheless, an internal FBI document, released through a leak, has them pushing this idea along with the more bizarre idea that such cars would let criminals multitask more and not have to drive their own getaway cars.
I have many more comments pending on my observations from the recent AUVSI/TRB Automated Vehicles Symposium, but for today I would like to put forward an observation I made about two broad schools of thought on the path of the technology and the timeline for adoption. I will call these the aggressive and conservative schools. The aggressive school is represented by Google, Induct (and its successors) and many academic teams, the conservative school involves car companies, most urban planners and various others.
It's a big week for Robocar conferences.
In Berkeley, yesterday I attended and spoke at the "Robotics: Science and Systems" conference which had a workshop on autonomous vehicles. That runs to Wednesday, but overlapping and near SF Airport is the Automated Vehicles Symposium -- a merger of the TRB (Transportation Research Board) and AUVSI conferences on the same topic. 500 are expected to attend.
Yesterday's workshop was pretty good, with even a bit of controversy.
Yesterday saw:
Some recent press and talks:
Earlier in June I sat down with "Big Think" for an interview they have titled "Robocars 101" explaining some of the issues around the cars.
So far it's been big players like Google and car companies with plans in the self-driving space. Today, a small San Francisco start-up named Cruise, founded by Kyle Vogt (a founder of the web video site Justin.tv) announces their plans to make a retrofit kit that will adapt existing cars to do basic highway cruise, which is to say, staying in a lane and keeping pace behind other cars while under a driver's supervision.
On my recent wanderings in Europe, I became quite enamoured by Google's latest revision of transit directions. Google has had transit directions for some time, but they have recently improved them, and linked them in more cities to live data about where transit vehicles actually are.
I'm in the home stretch of a long international trip -- photos to follow -- but I speak tomorrow at Lincoln Center on how computers (and robocars) will change the worlds of finance. In the meantime, Google's announcement last month has driven a lot of news in the Robocar space worthy of reporting.
It's not too surprising that the release of images of Google's prototype robocar have gotten comments like this:
Revolutionary Tech in a Remarkably Lame Package from Wired
A Joy Ride in Google's Clown Car says Re/Code
In what is the biggest announcement since Google first revealed their car project, it has announced that they are building their own car, a small low-speed urban vehicle for two with no steering wheel, throttle or brakes. It will act as a true robocar, delivering itself and taking people where they want to go with a simple interface. The car is currently limited to 25mph, and has special pedestrian protection features to make it even safer. (I should note that as a consultant to that team, I helped push the project in this direction.)
News from Google's project is rare, but today on the Google blog they described new achievements in urban driving and reported a number of 700,000 miles. The car has been undergoing extensive testing in urban situations, and Google let an Atlantic reporter get a demo of the urban driving which is worth a read.
Many states and jurisdictions are rushing to write laws and regulations governing the testing and deployment of robocars. California is working on its new regulations right now. The first focus is on testing, which makes sense.
Unfortunately the California proposed regulations and many similar regulations contain a serious flaw:
I read a lot of feeds, and there are now scores of stories about robocars every week. Almost every day a new publication gives a summary of things. Here, I want to focus on things that are truly new, rather than being comprehensive.
One sign of how interest is building is the large reaction to some recent concept prototypes for robocars, two of which were shown in physical form at the Geneva auto show.
Tuesday, the California DMV held a workshop on how they will write regulations for the operation of robocars in California. They already have done meetings on testing, but the real meat of things will be in the operation. It was in Sacramento, so I decided to just watch the video feed. (Sadly, remote participants got almost no opportunity to provide feedback to the workshop, so it looks like it's 5 hours of driving if you want to really be heard, at least in this context.)
The event was led by Brian Soublet, assistant chief counsel, and next to him was Bernard Soriano, the deputy director. I think Mr. Soublet did a very good job of understanding many of the issues and leading the discussion. I am also impressed at the efforts Mr. Soriano has made to engage the online community to participate. Because Sacramento is a trek for most interested parties, it means the room will be dominated by those paid to go, and online engagement is a good way to broaden the input received.
As I wrote in my article on advice to governments I believe the best course is to have a light hand today while the technology is still in flux. While it isn't easy to write regulations, it's harder to undo them. There are many problems to be solved, but we really should see first whether the engineers who are working day-in and day-out to solve them can do that job before asking policymakers to force a solution. It's not the role of the government to forbid theoretical risks in advance, but rather to correct demonstrated harms and demonstrated unacceptable risks once it's clear they can't be solved on the ground.
With that in mind, here's some commentary on matters that came up during the session.
Well, the law already requires that vehicles pull over when told to by police, as well as pull to the right when any emergency vehicle is passing. With no further action, all car developers will work out ways to notice this -- microphones which know the sound of the sirens, cameras which can see the flashing lights.
Developers might ask for a way to make this problem easier. Perhaps a special sound the police car could make (by holding a smartphone up to their PA microphone for example.) Perhaps the police just reading the licence plate to dispatch and dispatch using an interface provided by the car vendor. Perhaps a radio protocol that can be loaded into an officer's phone. Or something else -- this is not yet the time to solve it.
It should be noted that this should be an extremely unlikely event. The officer is not going to pull over the car to have a chat. Rather, they would only want the car to stop because it is driving in an unsafe manner and putting people at risk. This is not impossible, but teams will work so hard on testing their cars that the probability that a police officer would be the first to discover a bug which makes the car drive illegally is very, very low. In fact, not to diminish the police or represent the developers as perfect, but the odds are much greater that the officer is in error. Still, the ability should be there.
I often see the suggestion that as Robocars get better, eventually humans will be forbidden from driving, or strongly discouraged through taxes or high insurance charges. Many people think that might happen fairly soon.
It's easy to see why, as human drivers kill 1.2 million people around the world every year, and injure many millions more. If we get a technology that does much better, would we not want to forbid the crazy risk of driving? It is one of the most dangerous things we commonly do, perhaps only second to smoking.
In my recent travels, I have often been asked what various government entities can and should do related to the regulation of robocars. Some of them want to consider how to protect public safety. Most of them, however, want to know what they can do to prepare their region for the arrival of these cars, and ideally to become one of the leading centres in the development of the vehicles. The car industry is about to be disrupted, and most of the old players may not make it through to the new world.
It was revealed earlier this month that NHTSA wishes to mandate vehicle to vehicle radios in all cars. I have written extensively on the issues around this and regular readers will know I am a skeptic of this plan. This is not to say that I don't think that V2V would not be useful for robocars and regular cars. Rather, I believe that its benefits are marginal when it comes to the real problems, and for the amount of money that must be spent, there are better ways to spend it. In addition, I think that similar technology can and will evolve organically, without a government mandate, or with a very minimal one. Indeed, I think that technology produced without a mandate or pre-set standards will actually be superior, cheaper and be deployed far more quickly than the proposed approach.
The new radio protocol, known as DSRC, is a point-to-point wifi style radio protocol for cars and roadside equipment. There are many applications. Some are "V2V" which means cars report what they are doing to other cars. This includes reporting one's position tracklog and speed, as well as events like hitting the brakes or flashing a turn signal. Cars can use this to track where other cars are, and warn of potential collisions, even with cars you can't see directly. Infrastructure can use it to measure traffic.
The second class of applications are "V2I" which means a car talks to the road. This can be used to know traffic light states and timings, get warnings of construction zones and hazards, implement tolling and congestion charging, and measure traffic.
This will be accomplished by installing a V2V module in every new car which includes the radio, a connection to car information and GPS data. This needs to be tamper-proof, sealed equipment and must have digital certificates to prove to other cars it is authentic and generated only by authorized equipment.
Robocars will of course use it. Any extra data is good, and the cost of integrating this into a robocar is comparatively small. The questions revolve around its use in ordinary cars. Robocars, however, can never rely on it. They must be be fully safe enough based on just their sensors, since you can't expect every car, child or deer to have a transponder, ever.
One issue of concern is the timeline for this technology, which will look something like this:
Because of the quadratic network effect, in 2030 when half of cars have the technology, only 25% of car interactions will be make use of it, since both cars must have it. (The number is, to be fair, somewhat higher as new cars drive more than old cars.)