Items tagged with autonomous-vehicles
California Highway Patrol officers pulled alongside a Tesla car cruising down the highway recently and were surprised to see that the man behind the wheel of the car was fast asleep. When they tried to pull the man over, they found he was unresponsive behind the wheel and suspected he was driving while intoxicated. The officers say that the traffic stop to determine if the driver was indeed driving while intoxicated turned into a seven-minute long ordeal since the driver was unresponsive to commands. The man fast asleep behind the wheel was Alexander Samek, a 45-year-old Los Altos planning commissioner....
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Autonomous autos are coming to the masses, eventually, but right now only a handful of states and cities allow the testing of autonomous cars on public roads. To accelerate the rollout of driverless cars, more testing needs to be performed and there are rules and regulations standing in the way of manufacturers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is moving ahead with plans to rewrite rules and remove roadblocks to the autonomous auto future. As it stands now, regulations require certain equipment on any car that drives on the highway. These rules prevent autonomous autos...
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NVIDIA is into a lot more these days than than just gaming video cards and GPUs for professionals. The company announced that it has a new DRIVE AGX DevKit that will be launching on October 1. The kit includes software and hardware needed for complete self-driving auto development. NVIDIA says that DRIVE AGX is designed to allow companies to develop and test customized autonomous driving technology with a streamlined production process. The kit includes the DRIVE AGX Xavier car computer, the vehicle harness to connect the platform to the car, international power supply, camera sensor, and other...
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When you think about autonomous vehicles, your mind might immediately drift to cars and vans from companies like Waymo, which have racked up eight million cumulative miles. What your mind doesn’t go to is an autonomous motorcycle, yet that is exactly what BMW Motorrad engineers have whipped up. This autonomous motorcycle is a BMW Motorrad GS R1200 adventure bike, and its panniers aren't filled with riding gear and clothing; rather they are filled with all sorts of tech allowing this bike to start from a stop, ride around corners and curves, and stop again without a human sitting...
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Siemens really thought that when it brought its sweet looking classic 1965 Mustang to the Goodwood Hill Climb that it would fly up the hill and do autonomous cars proud. It ended up driving up the hill in spectacularly poor fashion. At least the Mustang looked good sitting on the starting line. The autonomous Mustang had very little in the way of autonomous tech compared to the cars we are used to seeing in testing with giant masses of cameras and sensors on the roof and other locations. The Mustang uses GPS and what appears to be a single camera to determine where it was on the road. Whoever thought...
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Fiat Chrysler has announced that it has expanded its partnership with Waymo. The new deal will see Waymo acquiring an additional 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans for its autonomous fleet. Chrysler was mum on just how many of the vans Waymo was getting when the last deal was announced at the beginning of the year. At that time, all Waymo and FCA had said was that the deal was for “thousands” of minivans. FCA has delivered 600 Pacifica Hybrid minivans to Waymo to date. FCA has also confirmed that the two companies are at the beginning of discussions about using Waymo’s...
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Apple and Volkswagen have announced that they have partnered to build autonomous vans for transporting Apple workers. The announcement of the agreement came Wednesday night and the plan is to take the VW T6 Transporter vans and turn them into autonomous shuttles. The vans will be fitted with Apple's own autonomous technology, something Apple was showing off last December. Apple opted to make a deal with VW after attempts to work something out with Mercedes-Benz and BMW failed to materialize. Apple currently boasts the second largest autonomous vehicle fleet in California with 55 vehicles....
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We haven't heard much about Apple's self-driving auto endeavor in recent months, but the company has been working hard behind the scenes. Last December, Apple was in the news when its autonomous vehicle navigation system turned up in a patent filing. That same month, it also showed off its latest self-driving car tech. Apple is big into the autonomous auto game and reports indicate that it now has the second largest autonomous fleet in California. Apple currently has 55 vehicles cruising the roads (along with 83 trained drivers), GM Cruise has the largest fleet at 104 vehicles and the...
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Apple's director of AI, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, was on hand at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, a large AI-focused academic event held recently in California. During the chat, Salakhutdinov talked about Apple's AI projects and several of them were related to autonomous driving pursuits. One of the projects that was talked about had to do with a system trained to recognize pedestrians and other vehicles from 3D-point cloud information. This project had been disclosed by Apple previously, however, a couple of the projects that Salakhutdinov covered were not previously revealed....
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Computer scientists working for Apple have published a research paper that gives us a look at exactly what sort of tech the company is cooking up for the autonomous car realm. Apple had originally been working on an actual autonomous car, but reportedly hit the reset button on those plans to focus on software for self-driving cars. The research paper outlines a new method that could be used to allow self-driving cars to detect pedestrians and cyclists. The paper, which was published November 17 in an online journal called arXiv, and authored by Tin Zhou and Oncel Tuzel, focuses on advances...
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Volvo and Uber have announced a deal that will see Volvo providing 24,000 SUVs over the coming years for Uber's autonomous driving push. Volvo will provide Uber with top of the line XC90 SUVs along with some XC60 mid-size SUVs. Volvo doesn't make self-driving cars at this time and notes that Uber will be adding its own sensors and self-driving hardware to the vehicles. The partnership between the two firms is non-exclusive, meaning that Uber could add additional vehicles from other manufacturers if wanted. Uber already has a deal in place to get some vehicles from Mercedes-Benz. The XC90 is an...
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The future of automobile ownership might look vastly different than it does today. Today we buy or lease a car and that is the car we use for everything. In the future we all might be part of automotive services where rather than owning a car we simply pay a monthly fee to have access to an entire stable of cars. In a future such as this, if you needed a truck to go buy a new TV you would just request it, while if you needed an SUV to haul around your extended family while in for a visit you could request that as well. These future vehicles will likely be fully automated (including delivery to...
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Did you ever wonder what happened to Comma One? George Hotz (a.k.a geohot), the developer of Comma One and the owner of the company Comma.ai, announced on Twitter that his creation is now open-source. It has been renamed “Open Pilot”. Comma One is an autonomous driving aftermarket add-on. It would grant certain vehicles autopilot-like highway driving assistance abilities. Hotz had criticized his competitors for not releasing autonomous-driving features for other vehicles, so he unveiled his solution this past September and promised that the product would be available by the end of 2016. Hotz, however,...
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It may have sounded outlandish when Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the bold visionary claim that some day "human drivers could be outawed," but the latest study out of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture for us modern homo sapiens. Alphabet's Google business unit commissioned a study from the research group and the results show perhaps exactly the trend Musk was referring to. The report focused on minor collisions that Google's 50 vehicle strong self-driving car fleet had logged over the last 6 years. Google's robot AI powered cars racked up just...
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