Self-driving cars will be on the roads within five years, says Ford CEO

[nForce]

@Hamartia Antidote That's it!! This is rise of the machines!!

God help us all if they launch those cars in India! hahahaha

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Self-driving car goes 1,500 miles through Mexico without a human taking the wheel - GeekWire

Everyone’s talking Tesla and Google when it comes to self-driving vehicles, but a team led by a German university has quietly driven across Mexico without any human intervention — about 1,500 miles — and set the record for the longest autonomous car journey in that country.
Via Gizmodo, the Freie Universität Berlin released a statement this week about the trip and the project called AutoNOMOS. The car had completed shorter trips in Germany, the United States and Switzerland before this mega road trip. The German university is working on the project with scientists from the University of Nevada in Reno.

Credit: AutoNOMOS, Freie Universität Berlin

The route traveled the Nogales-Guadalajara freeway, and went through “four Mexican states, crossed the semi-arid Sonoran Desert as well as tropical regions in Sinaloa, and then crossed the mountains to Jalisco.”

Of course, Delphi reported earlier this year that it went from San Francisco to New York City in the “longest automated drive in North America.” But this Mexico feat is no less impressive, the infrastructure alone adding obstacles to the mix.

Researchers say that the car had to navigate “numerous construction sites, as well as narrow old roads lacking lane markings and hard shoulders,” along the way. The car has been cruising around Berlin since 2011, but they wanted the challenge and unpredictability of Mexico’s roads to test the car.

They report no near misses or accidents: “The car recognized all of the dangers on the freeways and reacted appropriately,” according to the statement.

They are hoping that the data they’ve mapped out and the test drive will help with advancing autonomous cars on the road — including recognizing obstacles and the “intentions” of other drivers. They will also use it to develop smaller, mini-computers that are not visible and more affordable to make it more universally feasible.

Watch the University of Nevada at Reno video about the journey below:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh I agree 100%. The question is will governments make some standardizations (no doubt 10,000 pages long) on which software they will allow on their roads to drive vehicles. The companies which pull it off first could make a lot of money in royalties. Maybe the government will then require it to pass more and more elaborate road tests each year (as in driving for hours in a perpetually hazardous course) making it prohibitively expensive for a newcomer to jump in. Each year your car is checked to make sure it has the latest updates.

Well I guess I was correct...

Will self-driving cars have to pass road tests? | CIO

People have been taking driving tests for many decades. If (or when) self-driving cars become commonplace, vehicles could also need to pass tests and obtain licenses.

Auto-safety researchers at the University of Michigan proposed this intriguing idea. "Current prototypes of self-driving vehicles are not perfect. For example, some of them occasionally cross the centerline on curves even in good weather conditions," wrote Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the university's Transportation Research Institute, in a just-released white paper.

Coincidentally, that very mishap occurred this week when a partially-autonomous Tesla started to swerve across the road into the path of an oncoming car. Fortunately, the human driver intervened in time to avoid a collision, but the incident highlights the need to thoroughly evaluate self-driving car safety and reliability.

Road hazards, weather present challenges for self-driving vehicles
Sivak and Schoettle don't believe every single self-driving car will need to be tested and licensed, of course. However, as new models of autonomous vehicles are released, they should be required to pass tests that measure their vision, knowledge of traffic laws, and ability to drive in traffic before being allowed on the roads, the men say.

It's easy for computers to learn the rules of the road; they can simply be programmed with the information contained in a driver's handbook. Onboard computers can contain information from all 50 states, and the cars can use GPS to determine location and the state laws that need to be followed.

Vision is a much trickier proposition. It's one thing for a human or a robot to see well on a clear day. Rain, snow, and darkness make it much more difficult to recognize objects or hazards, so, self-driving cars will also need to be tested under a variety of weather conditions, according to the researchers. (Google recently said it won't offer self-driving cars in areas where it snows, at least not initially.)

Different degrees of licenses for different self-driving cars
A potential solution to the weather problem could be a "graduated" license, the researchers say. Self-driving cars could be licensed to drive in good weather, but not in the snow. Similarly, if a car has a problem seeing at night, it could be limited to driving during the day. When new technological advances are integrated into the vehicles, the models could get licenses that let them operate in any weather or at any hour.

Computer's also have difficulty with pattern recognition — a skill that humans excel at. This is why many websites use CAPTCHAs, those random jumbled codes, to prevent computers from automatically accessing websites. The University of Michigan researchers cite two common road conditions that could confuse computers: downed power lines across roadways, and flooded underpasses. Self-driving cars should be tested accordingly for their abilities to recognize difficult patterns, they say.

Although each state has its own set of requirements for drivers' licenses, the federal government has the power to set national standards for vehicles. A licensing requirement for autonomous vehicles could be established at the national level, though it would need to take state laws into account, according to Spivak.

The notion of licenses for cars also raises another intriguing question: If a self-driving car drives too fast or blows through a stop sign, who gets the ticket?

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Tesla autopilot slams on brakes when oncoming car makes sudden turn at rainy night

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Tesla self driving cars: Elon Musk says all cars will be autonomous | BGR

Elon Musk: Not having a self-driving car in 15 years will be like still owning a horse

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk hasn’t been shy about where he thinks the auto industry is headed. In the not too distant future, Musk envisions that every car on the road will be fully autonomous. In fact, during an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year, Musk said that requisite technology to manufacture a fully autonomous car is only about five to six years away.

“They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [at the wheel] in a six-year time frame,” Musk told the WSJ.

Echoing this sentiment with some of his trademark brash, Musk during Tesla’s earnings conference call on Tuesday once again reaffirmed his belief that all cars will eventually be autonomous. Not only that, Musk boasted that Tesla is going to get there before everyone else.

Driving the point home, Musk said that owning a non-autonomous vehicle in 15 years or so will be akin to owning a horse.

“Well, I’m actually on record saying that I think that all cars will go fully autonomous in the long-term,” Musk explained. “I think it will be quite unusual to see cars that don’t have full autonomy, let’s say, in 15-20 years. And for Tesla, it will be a lot sooner than that.”

Musk added that any car in the future that isn’t fully autonomous will have a “negative value.” And taking things home, Musk added that “in 20 years, if you have a car that isn’t autonomous, it will be like owning a horse. You’re really just owning it for sentimental reasons.”

Tesla, of course, practices what it preaches. Just a few weeks ago, the company rolled out new Autopilot features to its fleet of Model S sedans across the globe. And while the Model S isn’t fully autonomous just yet, it’s apparently smart enough to let drivers shave and eat breakfast while zooming down the highway at over 90 mph (though we wouldn’t recommend you try it yourself).

As a final point, it’s worth noting that while Musk believes the technology to support autonomous driving is just a few years away, he also believes that actually seeing such cars on the road will take a little while longer due to regulatory hurdles and overcoming collective fear from the driving public."

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

See London through the eyes of a self-driving car

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Driverless cars will change the face of our cities | Practical Motoring

Architect David Homberg says driverless cars will totally change the urban landscape with roads and parking spaces, and even car ownership all likely to be “disrupted”.

ONE OF THE MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING presentations at the International Driverless Cars Conference in Adelaide (5-6 November) was made by David Homburg, president of the SA Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects and Adelaide-based principal of global design practice HASSELL.

Some of the delegates were initially wondering what an architect had to bring to the discussion about driverless cars but Mr Homburg’s presentation quickly made it clear that driverless cars will mean a radical re-think about how cities are designed and configured.

Mr Homburg made the point that driverless cars or autonomous vehicles will be one of those technologies that bring about major disruption to the way we have always done things – “a game changer in terms of urban form”.

Cities are very much shaped by their transport networks – you only have to look at the spaghetti junctions of freeway on- and off- ramps, roads slashing through neighborhoods and the increasing proliferation of traffic control systems. “The car has dominated everything we do, from strategic planning through to the types of houses we build,” observes Mr Homburg. “So it’s a pretty safe bet that when driverless car technologies are fully developed, our cities will never look the same again. What we don’t know yet is how they will evolve, but we can speculate.”

The first defining factor will be whether people will continue to own their own car, even if it’s a driverless model. In this case, changes will be incremental. However, the more probable alternative of most people choosing not to own cars and instead accessing transport through a pool of autonomous vehicles and this will bring about a more significant change.

Autonomous cars will have the ability to travel closer to each other than cars piloted by accident-prone human beings. That will mean less space is required, and more vehicles will be able to occupy the space on existing roads. In turn, the need to make ongoing heavy investment in road infrastructure may be reduced. Car parks will almost immediately be able to accommodate more vehicles (because autonomous cars are able to park much closer together, and passengers can alight before they park). Ideally, autonomous cars will drop passengers at their destination and then self-transport themselves to their parking point where they will park themselves.

The existing concept of a shopping centre located in a huge parking lot will be relegated to history as car parking can be located at the rear of the centre, with a drop-off zone located conveniently close to entrances and exits.

Ever since the advent of the motor car, homes have been designed and built to make allowances for them. At its worst, street frontages were little more than a couple of garage doors and a front door (and even this door was virtually redundant as people entered via the garage). In the future, autonomous cars will drop off at the front door or some other convenient location and then take themselves off to a parking area away from the house.

Cycling will be more approachable for more people as the autonomous vehicles use sensor technology to make collisions between cycle and vehicle almost unknown. Town planners will be able to design a network of cycle routes without having to take into account the existing car infrastructure or the conflict between cycles and heavier road traffic.

The real changes will come about when people no longer see a need to own their own cars.

Car pools could be established at central locations and called up using an app, in much the same way we now hire a taxi using a smartphone. Suddenly, the private garage is no longer relevant, freeing up space on suburban blocks of land and under apartment buildings and office buildings.

Shopping centres will no longer need to provide parking. Instead, they will provide spaces for autonomous vehicles to drop off and collect shoppers. When you wish to leave, you call a car, or it could even be done automatically as you pass through the checkout. With the need for parking eliminated, the High St shopping strip could undergo a revival.

The current preoccupation with light and heavy rail networks in cities such as Adelaide may become a moot point because far better outcomes could be achieved through a driverless car and bus network.

One upside of driverless cars is that time currently spent driving can be used more productively. Imagine being able to read a newspaper (assuming such things still exist!), watch a DVD, work on a computer. The car can effectively become an extension of the living room, or a mobile office. The corollary to this, however, is that removing the disadvantages of a long commute could encourage even more urban sprawl.

Mr Homburg warns that we need to respond to this new mode of transport by properly investigating the implications before we progress to the “point of no return”. As he warns, it is far too easy to be fascinated by the technology without thinking through the urban implications, as we did when we removed trams and light rail from so many cities.

As he says, we can do this through a combination of design-led visioning and serious computer modelling. “We already have 3D computer models of the urban environment. We already have sophisticated engineering models of traffic flows and movements. And through gaming technologies we can rapidly test and visualise the outcomes in an easily understood manner.”

Mr Homburg is calling for the establishment of a unit within the Office of Design and Architecture SA to properly model and guide the urban implications. “With the new Development Act being debated and legislation in place enabling the technology to be trialled, now is the time to invest,” he says. “It might sound expensive, but it’s a whole lot cheaper than trying to re-establish a tram network.”

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Maybe the government will then require it to pass more and more elaborate road tests each year (as in driving for hours in a perpetually hazardous course) making it prohibitively expensive for a newcomer to jump in. Each year your car is checked to make sure it has the latest updates.

Well probably road test evaluations will be done here:

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Mobileye the tech (camera behind rear view mirrort) used by Tesla and others instead of expensive Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR)

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Japan to rollout Robot Taxi trials in 2016.

 

[ultron]

BS. I'm in the AI field and I can tell you one thing. These guys are here to hoodwink people for money. AI is the biggest failure in the history of mankind.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

BS. I'm in the AI field and I can tell you one thing. These guys are here to hoodwink people for money. AI is the biggest failure in the history of mankind.

It's using about the same amount of AI a terrain following cruise missile uses

 

[ultron]

It's using about the same amount of UI a terrain following cruise missile uses

That's a computer program. You can't computer program a car to auto drive. Too many factors involved. Too many unpredictable situations. What if a child suddenly runs on the road. This is not a joking matter. This involves life and death.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

That's a computer program. You can't computer program a car to auto drive. Too many factors involved. Too many unpredictable situations. What if a child suddenly runs on the road. This is not a joking matter. This involves life and death.

It's just another object in the way. Just like a garage door not closing on your car roof. Even a tumbleweed causes the car to slam the brakes

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

26 year old hacker builds self driving car...thinks you only need $1000 worth of parts to do it.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Drive Themselves in Two Years - Fortune

In Elon Musk’s world, “easy” is used to describe problems many might consider impossible—or at least very difficult to solve. Producing a fully autonomous vehicle that can operate in any condition and on any road, for example, is easy-ish. And Tesla Motors TSLA , the all-electric automaker that Musk heads, is two years away from achieving it.

“I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments—and then we’re done,” Musk told Fortune with assuredness during his commute to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., where he is also CEO. “It’s a much easier problem than people think it is. But it’s not like George Hotz, a one-guy-and-three-months problem. You know, it’s more like, thousands of people for two years.”

A profile of super hacker Hotz recently appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek. In the article, Hotz revealed he built a self-driving car in his garage in about a month and called the vision chip technology developed by Mobileye—and used by Tesla—”absurd.” He also said Musk had proposed giving him a lucrative contract if his technology outshined Mobileye. In a statement issued in response, Tesla said it’s sticking with Mobileye MBLY and rebutted some of Hotz’s challenges about autonomous cars.

Musk doesn’t sound angry as he explains the differences between what Tesla is doing and Hotz’s self-driving car. But there’s a hint of irritation in his voice—perhaps because he’s spending so much time defending Tesla’s product, instead of working on it.

“Demoware is easy; production software is hard,” Musk says. “It’s easy to do a cool demo, it’s hard to put something out. Especially software that’s going to work on millions of different roads all around the world in a wide range of circumstances—in winter, in summer, in rain, in dust—there’s a world of difference there.”

“George is an amazing hacker, but you don’t make production software by hacking. A hack does not work, a hack crashes.”

A Tesla employee initially brought Hotz to Musk as a possible recruit to the company. During the course of their discussions, Hotz told Musk he would come up with a vision solution better than Mobileye’s.

“I expressed some skepticism here, like, look Mobileye has got hundreds of engineers and they’ve been working on this problem for quite awhile and I think they’re pretty smart guys,” Musk says. “He wanted to make a bet, and he said ‘well how much is that worth to you?’ And I said, ‘well I mean if it were true, it would be worth millions of dollars, but I don’t think it’s true.'”

The proposed bet was that a car using Hotz’s solution would be able to stay in lane for the length of Interstate 405 from Los Angeles to San Diego. Musk says he ultimately declined because while he suspected Hotz could make it work for one stretch, he didn’t think the product would work on roads and highways everywhere, all the time.
The Path to Full Autonomy

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration defines vehicle automation as having five levels. At level 0, the driver is completely in control and by level 4, the vehicle takes over all safety-critical functions and monitors roadway conditions for an entire trip.

5 level automation

Most major automakers, including Google, are working on autonomous driving technologies of varying degrees. Google GOOG is testing a fully autonomous prototype that replaces the driver completely. It hopes to commercialize its technology by 2020. Automakers, meanwhile, are moving towards full autonomy in stages. All are at level 1 (see graphic), and many luxury automakers such as Volvo have recently introduced level 2 capabilities. General Motors will offer a level 2 semi-autonomous feature known as Super Cruise on its 2017 models that includes hands-off lane following, braking, and speed control in certain highway conditions.

Tesla’s autopilot service, which rolled out in October via an over-the-air software update, propelled the company past others in the industry. The first generation of autopilot offers computer-assisted parallel parking, steering and lane changing on highways, and an upgraded warning system for side collisions.

The feature also uses radar, ultrasonics, GPS navigation and cameras. Additionally, the autopilot service is constantly learning, thanks to machine learning algorithms, detailed mapping and sensor data, and the car’s wireless connection. Tesla leverages this information from its entire fleet autopilot-enabled cars. Meaning, it operates as a network so when one car learns something, they all learn it.

Musk wouldn’t reveal details about the next generation of autopilot. That, he explains, “would be a major announcement.” But he did tell Fortune where Tesla will end up.

“We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.” That doesn’t mean city streets will be overflowing with driverless Tesla vehicles by 2018 (coincidentally, the company’s Model 3 should be on roads by then). Musk expects regulators will lag behind the technology. He predicts it will take an additional year for regulators to determine that it’s safe and to go through an approval process. In some jurisdictions, it may take five years or more, he says.

Musk adds an important caveat—one that raises the standard of what it means to achieve full autonomy. “When I say level 4, I mean level 4 autonomy with the probability of an accident is less than that of person,” he says.
Google versus Tesla

Draft rules released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles in December support Musk’s slow-paced regulation forecast. The rules place strict limits on self-driving car technology, and prohibits the use of fully autonomous driverless cars that don’t have a steering wheel or a brake pedal—like the prototype that Google has developed.

While Google has criticized the proposed rules, calling it “a ceiling on the potential for fully self-driving cars,” Musk agrees with the DMV’s decision to prohibit fully autonomous cars on public roads—for now.

“The data is not yet there to support a fully autonomous vehicle,” Musk says. He predicts that companies like Tesla will produce cars that are technically capable of full autonomy. The full autonomy feature will operate in “shadow mode,” which will allow automakers to accumulate vast amounts of data on what would have happened had the car been in total control, he says.

“The point at which it becomes statistically clear that an autonomous car is safer, I think, regulators will be comfortable with allowing it,” he says.

Musk has given forecasts before on the prospects of Tesla, as well as the rest of the industry. His timeline has accelerated in recent months. Just 15 months ago, he said technology to make a fully autonomous car would be ready in five or six years.
“Cars Are Like Complicated Elevators”

Each component—sensors, mapping, GPS navigation, cameras—is critical to achieve some level of autonomous driving. Cars need to be able to do more than just detect objects to be fully autonomous. They must also understand what they’re seeing, and learn from that experience— tasks that require a staggering amount of processing power.

Automakers like Tesla are using deep learning, a form of machine learning that uses a set of algorithms to teach computers to think more like humans and to learn how to recognize speech and images.

Musk has warned that AI could threaten humanity. Musk recently donated $10 million to outreach organization The Future of Life, which awarded $7 million of those funds to researchers working to mitigate the risks of AI.

Deep learning, however, is not a threat, Musk explains. Cars are relatively simple—like an appliance or a complicated elevator. And cars don’t require deep intelligence, which is the area of AI Musk has warned about, to solve the autonomous driving problem.

What makes autonomous driving complicated is not the depth of the learning, but the breadth of the perception. In other words, learning to recognize symbols and images—stop signs, pedestrians, bicyclists, light signals—is relatively easy. Anticipating the unpredictable behavior of drivers, roads and conditions is more difficult. It’s these millions of corner cases—problems that happens outside of normal parameters—that Musk isn’t sure Hotz appreciates.

The path of success for Hotz—if he wants to create a competing product to Mobileye—is to build a small company, get funding, increase its size so it can conduct verification and validation testing, Musk advises.

“There’s a ton of hard work and bug fixes, and it’s kind of like painful work, and it’s not fun and after doing that for a few years, if George, is prepared to do that, I think he would have a product that would be competitive with Mobileye,” Musk says in a tone you might hear from a parent or older sibling. “That is the actual path to compete with Mobileye. It is not George hacking by himself for a month. I mean, really.”

“George says he did this with 2,000 lines of code. OK, listen buddy, uh, 2,000 lines of code does not cover the 8 billion corner cases of earth. The world is a complicated and messy place. Two thousand lines of code ain’t gonna cover it.”

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Tesla Model S software update 7.1 includes ‘Summon’ feature and more | BGR

The car will start up, open the garage, pull in, close the garage, and shut off. Then do the reverse.

Tesla Model S software update 7.1 includes ‘Summon’ feature and more | BGR

The car will start up, open the garage, pull in, close the garage, and shut off. Then do the reverse.

hey @Viper0011. that's pretty cool..although most people do tend to use their inner garage door to access their house. I'm sure in the future they can have a timer. Would be kind of a fun thing to have it meet you outside the garage/front door in the morning.