Since getting involved with Google's self-driving-car team, I've had to keep silent about its internals, but for those who are interested in the project, a recent presentation at the intelligent robotics conference in San Francisco is now up on youtube. The talk is by Sebastian Thrun (overall project leader) and Chris Urmson, lead developer. Sebastian led the Stanley and Junior teams in the Darpa Grand Challenge and Chris led CMU teams, including BOSS which won the urban challenge.

The list of robocar teams grows again with a new project from Oxford university, led by Paul Newman. Nissan is also involved, though the base vehicle is a Bowler Wildcat off-road vehicle.

Earlier I wrote about the transportation potential of walking robots-of-burden like BigDog. While these robots are not for the long haul, a whole range of options are opened up by a wheeled vehicle that can get to where the road ends, and then lower legs to walk along rough terrain, up stairs and up hills.

Boston Dynamics has gone even further with their latest model, AlphaDog

Some Robocar updates, since with Burning Man and Singularity U my posting volume has been down:

A report from China Daily details a successful 286km trip by a vehicle from the National University of Defense Technology.

A wrapup of robocar news from the past couple of weeks:

Nevada governor Brian Sandoval rides in Google Car

After Nevada's recent legislation directing their DOT to explore legal operations for robocars in the state, the governor "took the wheel" of a Google car. Very positive impressions from the governor and DMV head.

I often see people say they would like to see solar panels on electric cars, inspired by the solar-electric cars in the challenge races, and by the idea that the solar panel will provide some recharging for the car while it is running and without need to plug it in.

It turns out this isn't a tremendously good idea for a variety of reasons:

The latest JD Power survey on car satisfaction has a very new complaint that has now the second most annoying item to new car owners namely problems with the voice recognition system in their hands-free interface. This is not too surprising, since voice recognition, especially in cars, is often dreadful. It also reveals that most new tech has lots of UI problems -- not every product is the iPod, lauded from the start for its UI.

An update on the backlog of robocar related news caused by my recent travel and projects:

Nevada law

Many people have noticed the new law recently passed in Nevada which directs the Dept. of Transportation to create guidelines for the introduction of self-driving cars on Nevada roads. Here is the text of the law. Because Google, whom I consult for on robocars, helped instigate this law, I will refrain from comment, other than to repeat what I've said before: I predict that most transportation innovation will take place in robocars because they will be built from the ground up and bought by early adopters. The government need merely get out of the way and do very basic facilitation. This is very different from things like PRT and new transit lines, which require the government's active participation and funding.

You'll find lots of commentary on the story in major news media.

Volkswagen announces simple self-driving car

Dodge has released a few interesting commercials for its Charger muscle car, somewhat prematurely pushing it as the antithesis of a robocar.

Here's a few Robocar updates.

First of all, the TED talk given by Sebastian Thrun, leader of the Google self-driving car team (disclaimer: they are a consulting client) is up on the TED web site. This is one of the short TED talks, so he does not get to go into a lot of depth, but notable is one of the first public showings of video of the Google car in action on ordinary city streets. (The first was at PodCarCity, but video was not made available on the web.)

A few recent Robocar updates for you:

Google took its car down to the TED conference in Long Beach and did a few demo drives for people. In this mashable story you can catch some videos, inside and outside, of the car driving around a cone-based course on top of a parking lot near TED.

A release from the National Federation for the Blind reports a blind person driving and avoiding obstacles on the Daytona speedway. They used a car from the TORC team at Virginia Tech, one of the competitors in the Darpa Grand Challenges. In effect, the blind driver replaced the "drive by wire" component of a robocar with a more intelligent and thinking human also able to feel acceleration and make some judgements.

As readers of this blog surely know, for several years I have been designing, writing and forecasting about the technology of self-driving "robocars" in the coming years. I'm pleased to announce that I have recently become a consultant to the robot car team working at Google.

Of course all that work will be done under NDA, and so until such time as Google makes more public announcements, I won't be writing about what they or I are doing. I am very impressed by the team and their accomplishments, and to learn more I will point you to my blog post about their announcement and the article I added to my web site shortly after that announcement. It also means I probably won't blog in any detail about certain areas of technology, in some cases not commenting on the work of other teams because of conflict of interest. However, as much as I enjoy writing and reporting on this technology, I would rather be building it.

My philosophical message about Robocars I have been saying for years, but it should be clear that I am simply consulting on the project, not setting its policies or acting as a spokesman.

My primary interest at Google is robocars, but many of you also know my long history in online civil rights and privacy, an area in which Google is often involved in both positive and negative ways. Indeed, while I was chairman of the EFF I felt there could be a conflict in working for a company which the EFF frequently has to either praise or criticise. I will be recusing myself from any EFF board decisions about Google, naturally.

The "burning" question for electric cars is how to compare them with gasoline. Last month I wrote about how wrong the EPA's 99mpg number for the Nissan Leaf was, and I gave the 37mpg number you get from the Dept. of Energy's methodology. More research shows the question is complex and messy.

So messy that the best solution is for electric cars to publish their efficiency in electric terms, which means a number like "watt-hours/mile." The EPA measured the Leaf as about 330 watt-hours/mile (or .33 kwh/mile if you prefer.) For those who really prefer an mpg type number, so that higher is better, you would do miles/kwh.

Then you would get local power companies to publish local "kwh to gallon of gasoline" figures for the particular mix of power plants in that area. This also is not very easy, but it removes the local variation. The DoE or EPA could also come up with a national average kwh/gallon number, and car vendors could use that if they wanted, but frankly that national number is poor enough that most would not want to use it in the above-average states like California. In addition, the number in other countries is much better than in the USA.

The local mix varies a lot. Nationally it's about 50% coal, 20% gas, 20% nuclear and 10% hydro with a smattering of other renewables. In some places, like Utah, New Mexico and many midwestern areas, it is 90% or more coal (which is bad.) In California, there is almost no coal -- it's mostly natural gas, with some nuclear, particularly in the south, and some hydro. In the Pacific Northwest, there is a dominance by hydro and electricity has far fewer emissions. (In TX, IL and NY, you can choose greener electricity providers which seems an obvious choice for the electric-car buyer.)

Understanding the local mix is a start, but there is more complexity. Let's look at some of the different methods, staring with an executive summary for the 330 wh/mile Nissan Leaf and the national average grid:

• Theoretical perfect conversion (EPA method): 99 mpg-e(perfect)
• Heat energy formula (DoE national average): 37 mpg-e(heat)
• Cost of electricity vs. gasoline (untaxed): 75 mpg-e($)
• Pollution, notably PM2.5 particulates: Hard to calculate, could be very poor. Hydrocarbons and CO: very good.
• Greenhouse Gas emissions, g CO2 equivalent: 60 mpg-e(CO2)

Like just about everybody, I hate the way travel through airports has become. Airports get slower and bigger and more expensive, and for short-haul flights you can easily spend more time on the ground at airports than you do in the air. Security rules are a large part of the cause, but not all of it.

In this completely rewritten essay, I outline the design on a super-cheap airport with very few buildings, based on a fleet of proto-robocars. I call them proto models because these are cars we know how to build today, which navigate on prepared courses on pavement, in controlled situations and without civilian cars to worry about.

In this robocar airport, which I describe first in a narrative and then in detail, there are no terminal buildings or gates. Each plane just parks on the tarmac and robotic stairs and ramps move up and dock to all its doors. (Catering trucks, fuel trucks and luggage robots also arrive.) The passengers arrive in a perfect boarding order in robocars that dock at the ramps/steps to let them get on the plane through every entrance. Luggage is handled by different robots, and is checked and picked up not in carousels and check-in desks, but at curbs, parking lots, rental car centers and airport hotels.

The change is so dramatic that (even with security issues) people could arrive at airports for flights under 20 minutes before take-off, and get out even faster. Checked luggage would add time, but not much. I also believe you could build a high capacity airport for a tiny fraction of the cost of today's modern multi-billion dollar edifices. I believe the overall experience would also be more pleasant and more productive for all.

This essay is a long one, but I am interested in feedback. What will work here, and what won't? Would you love to fly through this airport or hate it? This is an airport designed not to give you a glorious building in which to wait but to get you through it without waiting most of the time.

The airport gets even better when real robocars, that can drive on the streets to the airport, come on the scene.

Give me your feedback on The Robocar Airport.

Key elements of the design include:

I've written frequently about how driving fatalities are the leading cause of death for people from age 5 to 45, and one of the leading overall causes of death. I write this because we hope that safe robocars, with a much lower accident rate, can eliminate much of this death.

I decided to gather together all my thoughts on how robocars will affect urban design. There are many things that might happen, though nobody knows enough urban planning to figure out just what will happen. However, I felt it worthwhile to outline the forces that might be at work so that urban geographers can speculate on what they will mean. It is hard to make firm predictions.

The folks at the SARTRE road train project have issued an update one year into their 3 year project. This is an EU-initiated project to build convoy technology, where a professional lead driver in a truck or bus is followed by a convoy of closely packed cars which automatically follow based on radio communications (and other signals) with the lead. They have released a new video on their progress from Volvo.

Two bits of robocar news from last week. I had been following the progress of the Stanford/VW team that was building a robotic Audi TT to race to the top of Pikes Peak. They accomplished their run in September, but only now made the public announcement of it. You can find photos and videos with the press release or watch a video on youtube.