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Robocar news: UK Legalization, MobilEye IPO, Baidu, new LIDAR and more
A whole raft of recent robocar news.
UK to modify laws for full testing, large grants for R&D
The UK announced that robocar testing will be legalized in January, similar to actions by many US states, but the first major country to do so. Of particular interest is the promise that fully autonomous vehicles, like Google’s no-steering-wheel vehicle, will have regulations governing their testing. Because the US states that wrote regulations did so before seeing Google’s vehicle, their laws still have open questions about how to test faster versions of it.
Combined with this are large research grant programs, on top of the £10M prize project to be awarded to a city for a testing project, and the planned project in Milton Keynes.
Jerusalem’s MobilEye going public in largest Israeli IPO
The leader in doing automated driver assist using cameras is Jerusalem’s MobilEye. This week they’re going public, to a valuation near $5B and raising over $600 million. MobilEye makes custom ASICs full of machine vision processing tools, and uses those to make camera systems to recognize things on the road. They have announced and demonstrated their own basic supervised self-driving car with this. Their camera, which is cheaper than the radar used in most fancy ADAS systems (but also works with radar for better results) is found in many high-end vehicles. They are a supplier to Tesla, and it is suggested that MobilEye will play a serious role in Tesla’s own self-driving plans.
As I have written, I don’t believe cameras are even close to sufficient for a fully autonomous vehicle which can run unmanned, though they can be a good complement to radar and especially LIDAR. LIDAR prices will soon drop to the low $thousands, and people taking the risk of deploying the first robocars would be unwise to not use LIDAR to improve their safety just to save a few thousand for early adopters.
Chinese search engine Baidu has robocar (and bicycle) project
Baidu is the big boy in Chinese search — sadly a big beneficiary of Google’s wise and moral decision not to be collaborators on massive internet censorship in China — and now it’s emulating Google in a big way by opening its own self-driving car project.
Various stories suggest a vehicle which involves regular handoff between a driver and the car’s systems, something Google decided was too risky. Not many other details are known.
Also rumoured is a project with bicycles. Unknown if that’s something like the “bikebot” concept I wrote about 6 years ago, where a small robot would clamp to a bike and use its wheels to deliver the bicycle on demand.
Why another search engine company? Well, one reason Google was able to work quickly is that it is the world’s #1 mapping company, and mapping plays a large role in the design of robocars. Baidu says it is their expertise in big data and AI that’s driving them to do this.
Velodyne has a new LIDAR
The Velodyne 64 plane LIDAR, which is seen spinning on top of Google’s cars and most of the other serious research cars, is made in small volumes and costs a great deal of money — $75,000. David Hall, who runs Velodyne, has regularly said that in volume it would cost well under $1,000, but we’re not there yet. He has released a new LIDAR with just 16 planes. The price, while not finalized, will be much higher than $1K but much lower than $75K (or even the $30K for the 32 plane version found on Ford’s test vehicle and some others.)
As a disclaimer, I should note I have joined the advisory board of Quanergy, which is making 8 plane LIDARs at a much lower price than these units.
Nissan goes back and forth on dates
Conflicting reports have come from Nissan on their dates for deployment. At first, it seemed they had predicted fairly autonomous cars by 2020. A later announcement by CEO Carlos Ghosn suggested it might be even earlier. But new reports suggest the product will be less far along, and need more human supervision to operate.
FBI gets all scaremongering
Many years ago, I wrote about the danger that autonomous robots could be loaded with explosives and sent to an address to wreak havoc. That is a concern, but what I wrote was that the greater danger could be the fear of that phenomenon. After all, car accidents kill more people every month in the USA than died at the World Trade Center 13 years ago, and far surpass war and terrorism as forms of violent death and injury in most nations for most of modern history. Nonetheless, an internal FBI document, released through a leak, has them pushing this idea along with the more bizarre idea that such cars would let criminals multitask more and not have to drive their own getaway cars.
This post originally appeared on Robocars.
tags: Automotive
