Hello All!
It was bound to happen...Google has finally come out and actually patented its own telematic technology for autonomous guidance of vehicles!
Our minds are lit up with flashing visions about what this could mean for Google as a brand, what kinds of strategies Google plans to employ to either implement this technology on to existing vehicles, or perhaps even market its own brand of vehicles...can you immagine???
Literally, what would a Google branded car or series of cars look like?
It is an interesting question, in a sense...how do you lend a physical image, an aesthetic, to a company that, by its very nature as an omniscient search engine, has all forms and none at the same time? As with all good approaches to the establishment of a style, a sense of physical representation, a form language, it will inevitably be a balance between adventurous experimentation, instinct, and communication of a series of emotions or values, both inside a vehicle, and outside.
One of the side missions of this blog in the coming months will be to create a series of designs for the "Google" car brand, and we hope to receive feedback from a number of you as to how we will be progressing. We think this will be a fun project and we hope to receive constructive criticism and guidance from as many of you as possible on this.
Salutations,
DTR
http://www.autoblog.com/2011/12/15/google-awarded-patent-for-autonomous-car-mode/
Friday, December 16, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Three Cheers for the Vislab Research Team
Hello all!
To those who do not know the Vislab team, please allow us here at DTR to introduce them to you. Vislab is a research laboratory operating out of the University of Parma that has been working since the early nineties in Driverless technolgy and sensory technology research. It has done some truly fantastic work in the field and recently culminated a fantastic feat in having an autonomous vehicle drive from Rome to Shanghai, China, delivering some commercial goods.
Please read more on this fantastic team of researchers and their amazing work on this link to their site;
Google Driverless Tech Project Leader Speaks
This is a video where the head of the Google Self Driving Tech team talks about his motivations behind the research and development of the Google Driving project. I find it to be a very touching video and I think they will succeed in refining both the sensory technology necessary to accomplish not only the feat of making a car drive itself, which they have already done (at least in California) but also to both spread the technology outside of that state and this country, and also to lessen the physical mass of the sensors necessary to screen surroundings.
The logical next step for Google would be to design vehicles with this technology in the forefront of their minds, so as to integrate the placement of sensors and the interior architecture directly into the aesthetic considerations behind the products in question.
http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/31/googles-driverless-car-sebastian-thrun-on-ted-com/
The logical next step for Google would be to design vehicles with this technology in the forefront of their minds, so as to integrate the placement of sensors and the interior architecture directly into the aesthetic considerations behind the products in question.
http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/31/googles-driverless-car-sebastian-thrun-on-ted-com/
Are You Ready to REALLY Use Your Head?
Talk about incredible,
I just ran across this archive youtube link about the most recent developments Honda has made in advancing BMI technologies (Brain Machine Interface). Unless this is a complete hoax, it appears that Honda has succeeded in mapping a change in brainwave activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex associated with differing movements of the body and are using these mapped changes to transmit commands to robots, allowing them to move without any input besides a mere thought.
The man who is the subject of the experiment has a helmet replete with sensors placed on his scalp. This helmet is connected to a sort of transmitting machine charged with interpreting this information and passing it along to the robot, which then moves.
Aside from trying hard not to laugh at the obvious attempts the people in the video are trying to make to not express any kind of proud or excited expression on their faces, my mind began to wander furiously, trying to envision things like what the next equivalent to a driver key would look like to whether we would actually need steering wheels and accellerator pedals on our cars anymore if this tech proved itself reliable enough.
Aside from trying hard not to laugh at the obvious attempts the people in the video are trying to make to not express any kind of proud or excited expression on their faces, my mind began to wander furiously, trying to envision things like what the next equivalent to a driver key would look like to whether we would actually need steering wheels and accellerator pedals on our cars anymore if this tech proved itself reliable enough.
In the end, its just another reason to believe that we will be seeing a large change in our interaction with transportation in the very near future...
Monday, October 10, 2011
Notions of Ownership
Lately,
as one of our main correspondents has been immersing himself in the practice of automotive retail sales, he has been finding out some very interesting things with regard to brand loyalties, financial decision making, and notions of ownership in general.
The act of owning something, as it is commonly understood, seems to involve the sense of power one gains by acqiring a piece of property, an object which will enhance one's ability to live in the world, to make of the world around them what one wants. It involves a certain affinity for the object one is to own, perhaps, a sense that this object is an extension of ones inner being.
Our correspondent has been a bit flummoxed in that he has found there are less and less persons who manifest these thought patterns as they associate to the automobile, but the feeling has not completely died out yet.
Is there any truth to this notion, is there a relevant point to be made about the sense of ownership of a vehicle and whether that will change in the coming years, decades even?
We have found a fantastic blog that features articles that speak of the notions of value, ownership, and the future of developed economies as they relate to the notions of value and ownership that we are traditionally accustomed to.
Here is the link;
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Stanford Autonomous Racing Research http://www.autoblog.com/2011/10/05/stanford-wiring-up-vintage-sports-cars-and-their-drivers-to-help/#continued
Hello Folks,
Its been a while since anything has been posted on this blog so please forgive the long absence, but we are back with a slew of new articles ready to be published over the coming six months. There is a whole lot of ground to cover, as a lot of fresh research has emerged and lots of companies, groups, and universities are increasing their investments in time and resources into looking at the future of driverless technology.
We would like to start off by showing you this article recently published by Autoblog.com which covers the recent research of Stanford University into the behavior of race car drivers when they are driving their vehicles at the limit on a closed race track.
Apparantly, the researchers are trying to create a set of algorithms that will allow a vehicle to drive itself autonomously and behave as if it were trying to post the fastest possible lap times on a track.
We here at the driverless auto tech review are not quite sure whether they will succeed in their endeavors, but we do commend the research team for their motivations, since apparently the goal of all the research is to refine on board traction control systems so that they control the behavior of the vehicle better, allowing a driver to maximze the performance of his vehicle in a high speed condition. But that is the main reason we are perplexed.
We believe that, in normal driving conditions such as everyday highway commuting, and perhaps even normal street driving, the use of a set of systems to control the vehicle fully and or enhance the safety of the commute through active interventions during vehicle movement is an important enhancement of the overall activity of commuting. However, the employment of such systems to maximize the performance potential of a vehicle, either in a closed track context, or in an open road context, goes a long way towards negating two key ideas; The test of the skills of the driver, upon which the concept of racing in general is built, and the refinement of the driver/machine interaction interface (i.e. the responsiveness of the controls to the driver, the button placement, the position of the driver relative to the vehicle and to the ground, etc) to which interference of technology which would assist the driver, would no doubt detract from the progress of such a relationship.
There is not a shadow of a doubt that as our knowledge of the human brain and body increase and we are better able to monitor and understand such behaviors, we are going to learn more and more about ways we can apply that knowledge to autonomous technology, and there is also no doubt that, if we want to, we can acheive the same kind of, if not better performance through autonomy in the future, even in a racing context, but we will eventually come to a point, as a whole society, in which we will have to choose what to apply this tecnology to and what to leave to the perfect imperfection of humanity.
We cannot help but compare the progression of automotive trends to those of the horse and its reletionship to the horse drawn carriage. As technology for internal combustion engines became more and more feasible, so was the horse phased out as a primary source of motive power. Now, the care and racing of horses is focused primarily on the relationship between man and his steed, relegated to the context of a track, and considered pure sport which serves no purpous beyond itself, an art form, if you will.
We consider automotive racing in a similar fashion in relation to the driver, a nostalgic resort of visceral interaction between man and machine, pure in its unneccessary nature, to be studied and mimicked for its driver's display of skill, but not to be tampered with in terms of automation or intervention.
Its been a while since anything has been posted on this blog so please forgive the long absence, but we are back with a slew of new articles ready to be published over the coming six months. There is a whole lot of ground to cover, as a lot of fresh research has emerged and lots of companies, groups, and universities are increasing their investments in time and resources into looking at the future of driverless technology.
We would like to start off by showing you this article recently published by Autoblog.com which covers the recent research of Stanford University into the behavior of race car drivers when they are driving their vehicles at the limit on a closed race track.
Apparantly, the researchers are trying to create a set of algorithms that will allow a vehicle to drive itself autonomously and behave as if it were trying to post the fastest possible lap times on a track.
We here at the driverless auto tech review are not quite sure whether they will succeed in their endeavors, but we do commend the research team for their motivations, since apparently the goal of all the research is to refine on board traction control systems so that they control the behavior of the vehicle better, allowing a driver to maximze the performance of his vehicle in a high speed condition. But that is the main reason we are perplexed.
We believe that, in normal driving conditions such as everyday highway commuting, and perhaps even normal street driving, the use of a set of systems to control the vehicle fully and or enhance the safety of the commute through active interventions during vehicle movement is an important enhancement of the overall activity of commuting. However, the employment of such systems to maximize the performance potential of a vehicle, either in a closed track context, or in an open road context, goes a long way towards negating two key ideas; The test of the skills of the driver, upon which the concept of racing in general is built, and the refinement of the driver/machine interaction interface (i.e. the responsiveness of the controls to the driver, the button placement, the position of the driver relative to the vehicle and to the ground, etc) to which interference of technology which would assist the driver, would no doubt detract from the progress of such a relationship.
There is not a shadow of a doubt that as our knowledge of the human brain and body increase and we are better able to monitor and understand such behaviors, we are going to learn more and more about ways we can apply that knowledge to autonomous technology, and there is also no doubt that, if we want to, we can acheive the same kind of, if not better performance through autonomy in the future, even in a racing context, but we will eventually come to a point, as a whole society, in which we will have to choose what to apply this tecnology to and what to leave to the perfect imperfection of humanity.
We cannot help but compare the progression of automotive trends to those of the horse and its reletionship to the horse drawn carriage. As technology for internal combustion engines became more and more feasible, so was the horse phased out as a primary source of motive power. Now, the care and racing of horses is focused primarily on the relationship between man and his steed, relegated to the context of a track, and considered pure sport which serves no purpous beyond itself, an art form, if you will.
We consider automotive racing in a similar fashion in relation to the driver, a nostalgic resort of visceral interaction between man and machine, pure in its unneccessary nature, to be studied and mimicked for its driver's display of skill, but not to be tampered with in terms of automation or intervention.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
GM's involvement in Driver-Less auto Tech Research
I recently found this article on BREITBART written by Ken Thomas of the AP.
Some things just make me very happy. What does it for me when it comes to this article is GM CEO Larry Burns focus on the societal issues surrounding the Driver-Less vehicle.
As I mentioned in my mission statement, that is THE KEY ISSUE we need to deal with before we can widely implement the technology behind this form of driving, since most EVERYTHING ELSE is already ripe for implementation.
The study of the patterns of haptic feedback that humans today are comfortable with, along with human factors issues, trust in technology, perceptions of technological failure rates and real stat comparisons, and a face to face between drivers and their "love of driving" are the subtopics surrounding this soon to be prominent debate in personal transportation technology.
I think Burns is a visionary and I hope he manages to correctly analyze and steer the pulse of the driving public towards the eventual acceptance of a driver-less world.
For a personal look at the article, please go to the following link:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=d8u0m82o0&show_article=1#email_sub
Some things just make me very happy. What does it for me when it comes to this article is GM CEO Larry Burns focus on the societal issues surrounding the Driver-Less vehicle.
As I mentioned in my mission statement, that is THE KEY ISSUE we need to deal with before we can widely implement the technology behind this form of driving, since most EVERYTHING ELSE is already ripe for implementation.
The study of the patterns of haptic feedback that humans today are comfortable with, along with human factors issues, trust in technology, perceptions of technological failure rates and real stat comparisons, and a face to face between drivers and their "love of driving" are the subtopics surrounding this soon to be prominent debate in personal transportation technology.
I think Burns is a visionary and I hope he manages to correctly analyze and steer the pulse of the driving public towards the eventual acceptance of a driver-less world.
For a personal look at the article, please go to the following link:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=d8u0m82o0&show_article=1#email_sub
Caltech's Role in Driverless Technology
As an institution dedicated to the advancement of Science, Mathematical theory, and technology, Caltech has historically been one of the most notable institutions in the world for research and development of new technology in all science related sectors.
What makes Caltech unique is its location. The Southern California region, while no doubt affected by the throws of the current recession, is still a very vibrant hub for the development of various transportation related technology, be it land related, sea related, or air and space related. Caltech has used Volvo as a reference point for past research projects and continues to conduct studies in the field of ground transportation telematics. (more on the specifics of those projects later)
A recent breakthrough in this institute's research studies relates to the breadth and scope of computer networks in the future. The details are available on the link provided.
http://um1nex.nl/?p=14194
What makes Caltech unique is its location. The Southern California region, while no doubt affected by the throws of the current recession, is still a very vibrant hub for the development of various transportation related technology, be it land related, sea related, or air and space related. Caltech has used Volvo as a reference point for past research projects and continues to conduct studies in the field of ground transportation telematics. (more on the specifics of those projects later)
A recent breakthrough in this institute's research studies relates to the breadth and scope of computer networks in the future. The details are available on the link provided.
http://um1nex.nl/?p=14194
The SARTRE project (Volvo of Sweden)
I came across this article on the website TRANSLOGIC. It was posted on Jan. 17 2011 by Damon Lavrinc. It features a video demonstration of a project Volvo is working on in collaboration with the EU and several other business entities. It is the latest in a long series of experiments featuring self driving vehicle caravans.
What I found interesting about it was that the head of the caravan was a Big Rig tractor trailer with a human driver behind the wheel. As soon as I was done watching the video and the initial excitement of watching a batch of cars drive themselves one behind the other while their "drivers" were busy sipping coffee and reading the daily newspaper had worn off, I began to wonder why in the world they would think it useful to put a human being in a tractor trailer at the head of this caravan of cars.
I believe that the very structure of the project renders it almost pointless. There is validity in refining, studying, and fine tuning the behaviors of the cars behind the big rig, after all, the cars, as pointed out in the video and the article, have to communicate with the sensors in the tractor trailer and mimic them , while also communicating with the car they are behind in order to maintain the proper distance from it. All those factors are extremely useful and are going to add to the knowledge base necessary to make driver-less tech a reality, but the whole reason we are headed in the direction of automation is to eliminate or at least minimize human error.
For those of you who do not follow Translogic, another Blog that gives relatively timely updates on the latest in Automotive gadgets and new technology, it is an excellent site and I definitely recommend checking it out sometime. You can find it as an extension of Autoblog.
http://translogic.aolautos.com/2011/01/17/watch-this-sartre-self-driving-auto-train-hits-the-road/#continued?a_dgi=aolshare_facebook
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Some Starter images...
From the top, The latest testing of truly driver-less vehicles in real world traffic situations seems to be coming from Google, which retrofitted a fleet of Priuses and is running them in the San Franisco bay. The head engineer of the Darpa Challange winning Volkswagen Touareg team was hired by Google to run an autonomous vehicle research department after the competition, a strange looking house on wheels of sorts, a fixed route autonomous cruiser, and an image of an interpretation of an autonomous highway.
Wired Magazine January 2011 Article Review
This month's issue of Wired Magazine has a very thorough article on the current state of Artificial Intelligence in society at large, written by senior writer Steven Levy.
After a lengthy introductory essay which explores and compares the history of what we, in terms of pop cultural expressions, thought A.I. was going to be forty years ago to what it is today, it focuses on two major areas where A.I. is making serious inroads and already affecting our experiences in some profound, though not always obvious, ways; Wall Street Trading and Personal Transportation.
The tone for the analysis of the personal transportation sector can be summed up by the following quote on page 89:
"Even formerly mechanical processes like driving a car have become
collaborations with AI systems. "At first it was the automatic braking
system" Brooks says. "The person's foot was saying, I want to brake
this much, and the intelligent system in the middle figured when to
actually apply the brakes to make it work. Now you're starting to get
automatic parking and lane-changing." Indeed, Google has been
developing and testing cars that drive themselves with only minimal
human involvement; by October, they had already covered 140,000
miles of pavement."
The article is very insightful, not so much because of the detail (or lack thereof) it provides as far as the technology is concerned, but in terms of helping the reader come to terms with some of the implications this technology has already had on our driving habits, and what they will have in the future, in both a practical and cultural sense.
Now, I would like to delve much deeper into both the practical and cultural realms of this issue and I see this article as an excellent launch point for these explorations.
Just now, my mind has been racing to imagine a time when automotive manufacturers will be designing, refining, and marketing bespoke vehicles not in terms of their drive-ability, responsiveness, power, or road holding capabilities, but in terms of, say, the interior space and chair arrangement flexibility, the ability to do yoga in your vehicle, or sleep to and from your commute, or receive an anatomical massage or even cook a meal while on the go. Of course, for all we know, the ever greater feasibility of working from ones home in a growing number of professions begs the question "where would we all be driving to, and do we really need to drive at all?"
Perhaps, in a future filled with vehicles that drive themselves, we will finally be able (GASP!!!) to decouple the "driver experience" from the idea of personal automotive transportation.
The issue of communication also comes up in my mind on a number of fronts; In the last sentence of the article, the author states "this machine man language barrier is something we are really going to have to work on." This is probably one of the mildest understatements I've come across in a long time, though I can understand why he would choose not to lend too much gravity to what he felt was a mild miss-communication issue with the User Interaction experience he had with a Lincoln MKT during a self parking session. I foresee there being a need to streamline, and perhaps even regulate the types, frequencies, and modalities of regulation between man and machine in both voice and button activated automation sequences, along with a mandatory general education sequence in all driver ed courses of the future which would alert all future drivers of driver-less interaction protocols.
I wonder, on a different note, whether communication between automobile and automobile, automobile and road, and road/road will also begin to emerge. One easily can be prompted to contemplate the synchronized movement of a flock of migratory birds heading south for the winter...
After a lengthy introductory essay which explores and compares the history of what we, in terms of pop cultural expressions, thought A.I. was going to be forty years ago to what it is today, it focuses on two major areas where A.I. is making serious inroads and already affecting our experiences in some profound, though not always obvious, ways; Wall Street Trading and Personal Transportation.
The tone for the analysis of the personal transportation sector can be summed up by the following quote on page 89:
"Even formerly mechanical processes like driving a car have become
collaborations with AI systems. "At first it was the automatic braking
system" Brooks says. "The person's foot was saying, I want to brake
this much, and the intelligent system in the middle figured when to
actually apply the brakes to make it work. Now you're starting to get
automatic parking and lane-changing." Indeed, Google has been
developing and testing cars that drive themselves with only minimal
human involvement; by October, they had already covered 140,000
miles of pavement."
The article is very insightful, not so much because of the detail (or lack thereof) it provides as far as the technology is concerned, but in terms of helping the reader come to terms with some of the implications this technology has already had on our driving habits, and what they will have in the future, in both a practical and cultural sense.
Now, I would like to delve much deeper into both the practical and cultural realms of this issue and I see this article as an excellent launch point for these explorations.
Just now, my mind has been racing to imagine a time when automotive manufacturers will be designing, refining, and marketing bespoke vehicles not in terms of their drive-ability, responsiveness, power, or road holding capabilities, but in terms of, say, the interior space and chair arrangement flexibility, the ability to do yoga in your vehicle, or sleep to and from your commute, or receive an anatomical massage or even cook a meal while on the go. Of course, for all we know, the ever greater feasibility of working from ones home in a growing number of professions begs the question "where would we all be driving to, and do we really need to drive at all?"
Perhaps, in a future filled with vehicles that drive themselves, we will finally be able (GASP!!!) to decouple the "driver experience" from the idea of personal automotive transportation.
The issue of communication also comes up in my mind on a number of fronts; In the last sentence of the article, the author states "this machine man language barrier is something we are really going to have to work on." This is probably one of the mildest understatements I've come across in a long time, though I can understand why he would choose not to lend too much gravity to what he felt was a mild miss-communication issue with the User Interaction experience he had with a Lincoln MKT during a self parking session. I foresee there being a need to streamline, and perhaps even regulate the types, frequencies, and modalities of regulation between man and machine in both voice and button activated automation sequences, along with a mandatory general education sequence in all driver ed courses of the future which would alert all future drivers of driver-less interaction protocols.
I wonder, on a different note, whether communication between automobile and automobile, automobile and road, and road/road will also begin to emerge. One easily can be prompted to contemplate the synchronized movement of a flock of migratory birds heading south for the winter...
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