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
Sunday, January 23, 2011
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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