Items tagged with autonomous-vehicles
A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report outlines findings in its investigation into a fatal accident with an Uber autonomous vehicle and a pedestrian. As part of its investigation, the NTSB disclosed that Uber's vehicles had been involved in 37 crashes over the prior 18 months. With the investigation complete, the NTSB could use its findings in the Uber AV investigation, which is the first fatal self-driving car accident, to make recommendations that could impact the entire self-driving vehicle industry. A meeting is scheduled for November 19th to determine the probable cause of the March 2018 accident that happened in Tempe, Arizona. That accident resulted in the death of 49-year-old...
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Self-driving vehicles are still a bit of a novelty still, but several companies are beginning to escalate their offerings. Waymo, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, has begun to offer rides in Arizona. The rides are part of an early access program. Author and columnist Ed Niedermeyer hitched a ride with a Waymo self-driving vehicle in Chandler, Arizona. Niedermeyer requested the vehicle through the Waymo app and was greeted by a driverless Chrysler Pacifica minivan. A message in his Waymo app read, “This ride will be different. With no one else in the car, Waymo will do all the driving. Enjoy this free ride on us!” Waymo boasts a fleet of over...
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Every new technology experiences growing pains; there is typically a period of innovation and then a period of standardization. The autonomous vehicle market is no exception. Industry leaders recently agreed to establish a common hardware and software platform for autonomous vehicles. The new Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC) was announced at Arm TechCon 2019. This consortium includes leaders from companies such as Arm, Bosch, Continental, DENSO, GM, NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors, and Toyota. They hope that other automotive and technology companies will join the consortium in the future. Dipti Vachani of Arm remarked, “The future of mobility and the safe, scalable deployment of...
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Is Tesla’s new Autopilot software all it is cracked up to be? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has learned (after many social media posts) that several Teslas with the “Smart Summon” feature have been in accidents. The NHTSA is currently investigating the claims and is in communication with Tesla. Tesla’s latest software update includes the Smart Summon feature. The feature is available to customers who paid an extra $6,000 for the “Full Self Driving” package. Users can “summon” their vehicle with a phone app as long as it is within 200 feet of their location and in their line of site. The vehicles will then navigate to...
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Automakers are taking the first steps to autonomous autos with systems like Tesla Autopilot and Cadillac's Super Cruise. Tesla is always inching closer to full automation with Autopilot recently gaining the ability to change lanes without human input. Cadillac has announced that it is adding a huge number of new miles of Super Cruise compatible highways to its network. The automaker says that an additional 70,000 miles will be available for hands-free driving by Q4 2019. The additional 70,000 miles of highways include new roadways in the U.S. and Canada. Currently, Super Cruise is available on 130,000 miles of limited-access freeways. Caddy says that the expansion builds on Super Cruise's...
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The automotive world is inching towards fully autonomous rides that can take us where we want to go without driver intervention. Tesla seems to be reaching towards full autonomy faster than competing brands; earlier this month the automaker announced that its Autopilot system could change lanes without driver input. Tesla has now announced that its latest self-driving hardware is available and it's called the Full Self-Driving Computer or FSD. The hardware was formerly known as Autopilot Hardware 3.0. Tesla also clarified that the new FSD is already installed in all new Model S and Model X cars that were built starting around March 20th. The new hardware is also inside many Model 3 vehicles that...
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Apple has been working on technology for autonomous automobiles for several years now. Early on, rumors suggested that Apple would launch its own car, but those plans were rumored to have changed in 2016 when it turned its focus to autonomous auto software. A more recent report has claimed that an Apple car would launch by 2023. Whatever Apple is working on, it has a ways to go on its technology as a recent California DMV report listed Apple dead last in autonomous car disengagements. Apple has been very secretive about its work, but filings made with the recent round of layoffs shed some light on what Apple is whipping up. Apple announced that it was laying off 190 employees in its autonomous...
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It looks as though Apple's autonomous vehicle efforts still have a ways to go before they can compare with the best in the industry. The numbers are in, and Apple reported more self-driving vehicle disengagements than any other company. Apple’s 62 vehicles experienced a grand total of 69,510 disengagements. A “disengagement” is when an autonomous vehicle either gives control back to the driver or when a driver interferes. Ideally, the self-driving car should remain “engaged” during the entirety of the drive unless there is an unusual and unavoidable emergency. Apple reported 871.65 disengagements per 1000 miles or a disengagement occurrence every 1.1 miles. Google’s...
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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. The officers had to outsmart the Tesla autopilot system to get the vehicle to pull over. The...
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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 from being rolled out that lack things like steering wheels, pedals, and mirrors. The NHTSA indicated...
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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 accessories needed. DRIVE AGX is part of NVIDIA's AGX platform meant to power autonomous robots, medical...
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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 atop the bike. This BMW project is meant to help the company invent safety technology that will make...
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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 this was going to be a good demonstration probably got a stern talking to after the event. You...
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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 self-driving tech in FCA passenger vehicles for retail customers. The two companies said that would...
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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. The only autonomous fleet larger than Apple's is from automaker GM with 104 vehicles in its own fleet....
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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 third largest fleet is Waymo with 51 vehicles. Only a few months back in March, Apple held 45 vehicle...
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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. One of those projects uses cameras placed on top of the vehicle as a way to classify different objects...
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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 made in the capability of detecting 3D objects. Currently, autonomous cars use LiDAR systems to shine...
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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 expensive SUV with an MSRP starting at around $46,000. "The automotive industry is being disrupted by...
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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 your current location) and Jaguar is showing off a new concept called the Sayer that shows what the...
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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, cancelled the Comma One project this past October and he received a standard letter from the...
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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 17 crashes in that time frame, although the company claims "none were the fault of the car," because...
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