Google develops driverless car

[Wolfgang]

What will the future bring?

In 2005 computers were roughly 1000 times faster per dollar than those of Dickmanns' era, and the next decade will bring another factor of 1000 or so. Such hardware advances are the main reason for progress in robot control - software advances seem less crucial as the basic algorithms for pattern recognition and probabilistic reasoning have not changed fundamentally in the past decade, except for epsilon improvements here and there. Somewhat surprisingly, however, many representatives of leading car companies such as BMW and DaimlerChrysler (the company with the world's largest private research budget: $6.7 billion as of 2005) are not all too enthusiastic about self-driving vehicles. Why not? Because they feel that completely autonomous cars do not necessarily fit the self-image of their customer base. Hence their present research focuses on more modest topics such as driver assistance.

http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/robotcars.html

 

[Wolfgang]

Google's self driving cars will hit the street this summer

 

[Wolfgang]

Autonomous new world: results of a scientific 360-degree view.

After two years of intensive research, the Daimler and Benz Foundation has published its white paper on autonomous driving.

An interdisciplinary question.

Car ethics, questions of liability, testing permit: these are the hotly discussed buzzwords related to autonomous driving to date – but they are now no longer the only ones. After two years of intensive research, the Daimler and Benz Foundation has published its white paper on autonomous driving. Twenty-eight scientists from more than 20 different fields have investigated the unanswered questions posed by autonomous driving on the basis of specific application cases. Three future use-case scenarios seem particularly likely: the driverless vehicle as a “highway pilot”, as an autonomous personal replacement for valet parking and as an autonomous vehicle-on-demand. The scientists analysed the opportunities and risks associated with autonomous driving based on these scenarios and came up with many answers – but also with just as many new questions.

Mercedes-Benz

 

[Wolfgang]

The Google X presentation in Leipzig the other day.

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[Marc-1]

To the magazine auto motor und sport Matthias Müller (new CEO VW, former Porsche) said in advance of the IAA: "The autonomous driving represents for me a hype that is worth nothing can justify". Critically he sees above all that, how the car operates in the critical case:
"I always wonder, how a programmer can decide with his work is whether an autonomously moving car in doubt right shoots in the truck or to the left in a small car."

 

[Wolfgang]

Suspect he may change the tune, now that he's in charge of VW?

The Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) is a part of the global research and development network that supports the Volkswagen Group brands. These brands include Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, and VW. Located in Silicon Valley, we draw upon its innovation spirit to build new concepts and technologies for our future vehicles.

In close collaboration with university and industry partners, we perform research in the field of autonomous driving with the fundamental goal to advance development of self-driving functionality....

http://www.vwerl.com/

 

[Wolfgang]

Professor Gerdes and his students programmed Shelly shown above.

A Stanford professor's quest to fix driverless cars' major flaw
PALO ALTO, Calif. (Bloomberg) -- It’s nothing more than a dune buggy on a cordoned-off street but it’s headed for trouble. A jumble of sawhorses and traffic’ cones simulates a road crew working over a manhole and the driverless car has to make a decision -- obey the law against crossing a double-yellow line or break the law and spare the crew. It splits the difference, veering at the last moment and nearly colliding with the cones.

“I imagine that wasn’t the most comfortable experience for you,” Chris Gerdes, a boyish and bespectacled Stanford engineering professor, calls out to the slightly shaken passenger in the car.

Gerdes is suddenly causing a great deal of discomfort to automakers and tech giants. Raised in North Carolina in the shadow of the Charlotte Motor Speedway, he has been at the enthusiastic forefront of the driverless car movement, monitoring the brains of top racecar drivers in action and programming cars to imitate them. As he notes in his TED talk and other public appearances, he and his students have programmed their Audi race car, Shelly, to flawlessly make the 153 turns on the 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak trail in Colorado -- with no one at the wheel.

But as the autonomous car movement barrels ahead, Gerdes has gone from enthusiast to conscience, if not quite scold. He is raising questions about ethical choices that must inevitably be programmed into the robotic minds expected one day soon to be driving along the nation’s highways. And since Gerdes, who favors bluejeans and straight talk, is no tweedy Luddite railing against the evils of technology, the industry is paying attention.

Top executives are pouring into his lab in Palo Alto.

Robot cars

“Within the autonomous driving industry, Chris is regarded as Switzerland, he’s neutral,” said Patrick Lin, a philosophy professor at Cal Poly who spent a year working with Gerdes in his 7-bay garage filled with robot cars. “He’s asking the hard questions about ethics and how it’s going to work. He’s pointing out that we have to do more than just obey the law.”

On a recent day, Gerdes met separately at his lab with the CEOs of General Motors and Ford Motor Co.

That came about a week after he hosted a workshop on driverless ethics for 90 engineers and researchers, including from electric carmaker Tesla Motors Inc. and tech giant Google Inc., which has pledged to put out a robot car as soon as 2017. This year, Tesla will introduce an auto-pilot feature. GM will debut a 2017 Cadillac that drives hands free. Ford CEO Mark Fields says driverless cars will arrive by 2020.

Gerdes’ message: not so fast.

“People often say the technology is solved, but I don’t quite believe that,” he said in the conference room as his students nearby buried their heads under the hood of an autonomous Ford Fusion nicknamed “Trudy.”

“There’s a lot of context, a lot of subtle, but important things yet to be solved,” he said.

Safe versus legal

Take that double-yellow line problem. It is clear that the car should cross it to avoid the road crew. Less clear is how to go about programming a machine to break the law or to make still more complex ethical calls.

“We need to take a step back and say, ‘Wait a minute, is that what we should be programming the car to think about? Is that even the right question to ask?’” Gerdes said. “We need to think about traffic codes reflecting actual behavior to avoid putting the programmer in a situation of deciding what is safe versus what is legal.”

Gerdes, 46, who is training to be a racecar driver, was initially dismissive of the need to grapple with philosophy. Autonomous cars programmed with robot reflexes and precision were on track to drastically reduce the 33,000 U.S. highway deaths a year. Wasn’t that moral enough?

But then three years ago George Bekey, co-author with Lin of a book entitled “Robot Ethics,” e-mailed Gerdes.

“My first thought was, ‘Ethics? Automated Cars? This seems like a bit of a fringe topic’,” Gerdes said.

Baby stroller

He soon came to see both its significance and its painful complexity. For example, when an accident is unavoidable, should a driverless car be programmed to aim for the smallest object to protect its occupant? What if that object turns out to be a baby stroller? If a car must choose between hitting a group of pedestrians and risking the life of its occupant, what is the moral choice? Does it owe its occupant more than it owes others?

When human drivers face impossible dilemmas, choices are made in the heat of the moment and can be forgiven. But if a machine can be programmed to make the choice, what should it be?

“It’s important to think about not just how these cars will drive themselves, but what’s the experience of being in them and how do they interact,” Gerdes said. “The technology and the human really should be inseparable.”

Gerdes’ lab is a working garage, with shelves full of transmissions donated by Ford and an electric motor in a crate given by Google. Self-driving Audis, Nissans and Fords fill the bays, as his band of graduate students and industry veterans works on research projects for major automakers such as Volkswagen, one of 30 companies that underwrite the lab.

Dale Earnhardt

Gerdes’s racing roots run deep. An uncle who worked for Chrysler once designed a race car for Mario Andretti. At 10, Gerdes spent an afternoon in a shopping mall chatting with Dale Earnhardt Sr., then a rookie driver who couldn’t attract a crowd.

When he wasn’t racing his slot car, Gerdes had his head in Isaac Asimov’s 1950s science fiction novels, which became the rulebook for robots that ethicists still use. Asimov’s first law: An autonomous machine may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human to be harmed.

Once a month, Gerdes takes his crew and cars up to Thunderhill Raceway, four hours north of Stanford, to test the outer limits of autonomy. On pace to earn his racing license this month, Gerdes requires all his students to learn to take hot laps at Thunderhill. He believes that to automate driving, it needs to be understood at its most extreme.

As a result, the best and brightest in Silicon Valley flock to his garage.

DeLorean

“Chris’s mantra on research is: If it’s not cool, we’re not doing it,” said Sarah Thornton, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering who spun out twice while learning to race at Thunderhill.

In a Back-to-the-Future nod, Gerdes will unveil later this month a self-driving DeLorean nicknamed Marty.

It is clear, then, that even as he raises hard questions Gerdes believes in this quest.

“With any new technology, there’s a peak in hype and then there’s a trough of disillusionment," Gerdes said. "We’re somewhere on that hype peak at the moment. The benefits are real, but we may have a valley ahead of us before we see all of the society-transforming benefits of this sort of technology."

Automotive News

 

[MikePhillips81]

I read a story on CNN about the Google Car getting pulled over by a cop buy he couldn't issue the driver a ticket because there was no driver, lol. Just an example of how laws are always chasing technology.

 

[Wolfgang]

Will Calif. drive out the self-driving vehicle?
Developers: Proposed rules may force them elsewhere

SAN FRANCISCO -- California was the cradle of the self-driving car. Yet when such vehicles are offered to the public for the first time, they may be off limits in the state.

Draft regulations from the California Department of Motor Vehicles are drawing stiff resistance from technology developers such as Silicon Valley's own Google. Those rules would require self-driving cars to have a specially licensed driver prepared to take over the controls. If the rules are finalized, the companies say, they will be forced to go elsewhere to introduce the technology.

The reason? Google's self-driving car would never let a human take the wheel. It would have no steering wheel and pedals -- a design that won tacit approval this month from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which concluded that artificial intelligence software of the type that operates Google's cars can be considered a "driver" under existing federal regulations.

Urmson: A ban on Google tech?

"We need to be careful about the assumption that having a person behind the wheel will make the technology more safe," Chris Urmson, the lead engineer on Google's self-driving car program, warned last month during a conference in Sacramento.

"On the basis of DMV's proposed regulations," he told officials, such a technology "will not be available in California."

It would be a heavy blow for California, which has long prided itself on being an early adopter of new transportation technology, from electric vehicles to ride-sharing. And it has prompted soul-searching in the Golden State, which fears losing the economic benefits and prestige of being the first state with self-driving cars.

The rules "may ultimately drive the development of this promising industry to other states," Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor, warned in a statement in December. "We must guard against unreasonably holding back California from doing what it does best: inventing the future."

Other states are stepping up to seize the opportunity, especially now that the U.S. Department of Transportation has signaled that it won't impede the technology.

Proving grounds are being built across the country to challenge California testing centers such as GoMentum Station, a 5,000-acre complex on a former military base about halfway between Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Randy Iwasaki, who manages the center as executive director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority, is closely watching the outcome of the DMV rulemaking -- and is pushing California lawmakers to extend an exemption for his test center once it is no longer a military base.

"It's very difficult to get [regulations] right the first time," Iwasaki said.

Google is exploring its options. After testing its cars for years in its hometown of Mountain View, Calif., Google started testing in Austin, Texas, in 2015. Early this year it expanded to the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, Wash.

Google is also searching for an r&d center in Michigan, as Crain's Detroit Business, an affiliate of Automotive News, reported this month.

At the conference last month in Sacramento, the DMV's chief counsel, Brian Soublet, closed the three-hour session by suggesting the agency isn't trying to create a patchwork of rules that makes California less attractive.

"We hear the comments that "Gee, there should be one system,'" Soublet said. He added that the DMV has been paying close attention to federal policy "so that we can encourage the development of the technology in our state.'"


In line at the DMV
Developers of self-driving cars bristled at rules proposed in December by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Here's what they would require.

• Self-driving cars would need a specially licensed driver behind the wheel.

• Vehicles would be subject to third-party testing before use and monthly safety reports.

• Manufacturers would need 3-year provisional deployment permits.

• Self-driving cars could only be leased, not sold, during the provisional period.

Source: Automotive News